Stories of Our Christian Faith are MYTHS in the Truest Sense
Myths are popularly understood as false. However, myths are powerfully true when understood as functional components of human religion and spirituality.
The terms ‘fable’ and ‘myth’ are sometimes popularly used to convey the notion of a false story, statement, or belief, based on something fictitious or imagined. This is understandable because fables and myths typically contain elements or stories that cannot possibly be real or true in the natural world as we know it. What needs to be stressed here is that fables and myths in terms of their essential function, are properly understood as ways of relating what is morally true, or what is true about individuals or groups of people. In that way, fables and myths are not false, but true.
Like a truck carrying grain to an elevator, or a train carrying coal to energize a factory or plant, a fable or myth is a vehicle that carries valuable truth to the minds of its hearers or readers. It is immaterial whether there ever was a man, or a goose owned by him that laid golden eggs. They, and the story they inhabit form a vehicle. The important thing is the truth conveyed, that wealth plus greed are precursors to losing all that is truly precious. This truth has implications for the well-being of individuals and of whole societies. Whether or not the man, the goose, or the golden eggs ever existed, or the story itself is actually true, has no such implications. The story is the indispensable vehicle without which the truth cannot be conveyed.
The truck bearing grain to the elevator is not stored in the elevator or ground and processed into food. The train bearing coal is not burned to power the factory or plant. They are vehicles. The story bearing truth to the hearts and minds of hearers or readers is not applied to human experience as something itself true and vital. It is a vehicle.
When we hear a story that conveys truth, we should be able to distinguish between the truth being delivered, and the narrative vehicle that delivers it. If one is unwilling or unable to make that distinction, then the whole thing—truth and vehicle together—has to be either true or not true. If truth and vehicle are conflated, and one is unable to believe the narrative vehicle, then one can only see the story as one thing: a false and silly tale. The truth of it becomes unavailable because it is not distinguished from the vehicle. This is the case with people who dismiss the narratives of the Bible as false and silly tales, just because the narratives are not believable to them. The truth within those narratives is lost, remaining undiscerned, because it is not distinguished from the vehicle that carries it.
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Truth Must Include Its Vehicle
The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg is a fable. A fable is a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral. The Bible is no fable.
The only part of the Bible that would remotely qualify as a fable is the story of Balaam, his talking donkey, and the messenger of YHVH in Numbers 22. The Bible is rather a vast panoply of narratives, accounts, lists, songs and poems, aphorisms and sayings, and philosophical reflections. It comprises long epics, short stories, brief incidents, divine or prophetic monologues in poetry and prose, competing versions of events, historical accounts, surrealist dreamscapes, character anecdotes, and personal testimonies.
As an example, there is no disputing that the story of the Exodus falls into the following category: “A traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” That is also the exact definition of a myth. Remember, the stress here is on myth understood as a vehicle of what is true about people and their natures, individually and collectively. The stress is not on the ways myth is false, but on the ways it is true.
A story about something that actually happened can function as a vehicle of truth just as well as a story about something that did not actually happen. Whether or not the story happened in the way it is presented is immaterial to the truth that it conveys. Again, insisting that the narrative vehicles of the Bible all have to be factual in order for the Bible to have truth as its matter represents a failure to engage the maturity of thought necessary to distinguish between truth and the narrative vehicles conveying it—to rightly divide the word of truth.
The Bible does have truth without any mixture of error for its matter because that matter must include the vehicles that deliver the truth for us to have the truth at all. If we are to discern timeless truths about God or our concept of ultimate reality, about humanity, and about the relationships between the two that are contained in scripture, then we are going to have to show ourselves to be skillful workers who can accurately handle and rightly divide that truth from the many, many narratives making up the Bible, factual or not, that serve as vehicles for it.
Facts and Reality
A great blessing of the Enlightenment (it also has its curses) is the idea that we can separate facts from all that is purported through empirical verification. The application of fact-based learning has transformed human experience in a material sense. But with it has also come the one-sided notion that only facts are real. This notion has resulted in spiritual impoverishment and religious irrelevance in modern societies. Ironically, both religious fundamentalists and anti-religious atheists think about scripture according to the same excessive presupposition — that only facts are real.
An anti-religious atheist says, “Only facts are real; as this creation myth cannot be empirically verified as fact, there is nothing true about it.” A creationist (perhaps showing some spiritual sensitivity) says, “Only facts are real; as I know deep down this story of creation conveys truth, it must be factual.” Creationists select limited sets of facts and weave convoluted webs of junk science and logical fallacy to try and empirically verify what is presupposed as factual, while militant atheists try to debunk a narrative conveying powerful truths via metaphor with the mere observation that it cannot be factual.
Both miss the point because they are both literalistic and informed by a one-dimensional grasp of reality that denies the non-factual template of culture; the immaterial web of social relationships; and especially, the intra-subjective world of self-awareness in the human psyche. This is beneath the mature level of cognition needed for the metaphorical thinking that illuminates these other facets of reality.
The scientific theory of evolution describes empirical reality, while the creation stories in ancient Hebrew scripture metaphorically point to the abstract and subjective realities of human self-conscious existence as part of the manifest universe. Both can be honored as vehicles of truth, albeit of different kinds, and both can be integrated into overall reality. Tiresome disputes between religious fundamentalists and atheist fundamentalists are the result of elevating empirical reality above all other modes, and failing to distinguish between stories describing intra-subjective reality, and material evidence and processes supporting empirical reality, abusing both in the process.
The stories in the Bible are myths—NOT in the sense of being widely believed but otherwise false; but rather, in the sense of being ancient but still functioning metaphorical vehicles that have the potential to deliver deep spiritual truth about human beings, both individually and collectively, and the possibility of an inwardly perceived essential connection with the ultimate unity of all being. Our empirically based grasp of material reality—important as it is—cannot teach us about this. By way of spiritual practices that develop our experience of their metaphorical significance, our myths most certainly can teach us about these things. They will remain functional for as long as people use them in this way; they will die from their own irrelevance the more people insist that they are factual.