Abstract
Cleverly Devised Myths
For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
So says the author of 2 Peter, who then goes on to argue that the central claims of the early church are not the stuff of fantasy but rather dependable truth claims. The Christian life is about a deeper immersion into reality, rather than a flight away from it.
The word μῦθος can have a neutral meaning, describing a word, saying, story, or narrative, be it true for false. But in some contexts, like that of 2 Peter, it’s used pejoratively to speak of falsehood; a deceptive story that takes us further away from the real and the true.
In our own time, when we accuse someone of peddling myths, we usually mean that they’re speaking in ways that bear no relation to historical or scientific fact. Many of our contemporaries look to events recounted in the Bible, like the delivery of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai or the transfiguration of Jesus, and see myths to be written-off; vestiges of pre-scientific fantasy or delusion. Even within the church, deep anxiety surfaced throughout the last century as to the extent of the Bible’s ‘mythical’ content, and how we should read it today.
The fundamentalist answer is to insist that the Bible stands as a mighty fortress, impervious to all such questions and concerns. There’s no myth in the sacred text, only divine facts that no historian or scientist should dare contradict. The appropriate posture toward the text is meek submission. From this perspective, the Bible is a heavenly utterance: clear, authoritative, and immune from criticism. Clinging to this ideology, fundamentalists cut themselves off from many mainstream conversations about science and history, entering anxiety-laden bunkers of the soul, and engaging in self-referential debates that fly free from reality. The tragedy of fundamentalism, aside from its tendency toward violence, is that it fails to see that truth is a fragile thing that’s quite easy to suffocate with small-mindedness.
The other option might be to embrace something which we might nickname ‘liberalism’. A liberal interpreter of the Bible, usually in reaction to the fundamentalist, tries to cut away all the mythical dimensions of the text, seeking a kernel of moral truth. The ideal is noble, but it might be suspected that, alongside a genuine concern for clear thinking, the unconscious desire of the liberal is to maintain a faith that aligns with the comfortable assumptions of a late-capitalist status quo. This approach fuelled many mainline denominations in the second half of the twentieth century in the West, most of which are now in serious decline. The problem with this approach is that it can lose touch with the Bible’s story of salvation as it draws us in, through our imaginations, to behold God’s blazing glory. It’s tempted to try to contain God’s truth, forgetting that the God of the Bible disrupts and disorientates our accustomed ways of fact-checking. Ultimately, such liberalism can lead us to spend too long weighing the truth and falsity of the Bible, rather than giving space for the bible to ‘read us’; to judge truth and falsity in us, to challenge the idolatrous myths we live by, and to prod us to a deeper and more radical conversion.
Perhaps there is a path in-between the fundamentalist and the liberal alternatives. Perhaps we can learn from the missteps of the past and find a way of compromise. Perhaps there is a middle way that allows us to recognise that the mythical dimensions to the Bible may invite us deeper into the truth of our moral and spiritual condition and God’s mystery. We want a ‘middle’ that acknowledges that truth comes in many forms, and the Bible, with its theological interpretations of Israel’s history, its poems, prophetic judgements, proverbs, gospels, and letters, give us access to truths that are enmeshed in historical experience, but also calls forth free and wild imaginations.
With that in mind we turn to the readings from Exodus and Matthew to consider the mingling of myth and history in truth’s service. In these texts we encounter Moses and Jesus, and a form of truth-telling that might strike us as weird. Matthew isn’t interested in giving a bare account of Jesus’ life. Rather, his priority is conveying the significance of that life as an expression of God’s redemptive and liberating desire. Matthew tells us that to know the truth about Jesus we need to know something about Moses; an anointed leader of old who one day ascended Mount Sinai and forty days later descended to share God’s law with the Israelites.
For Moses on the mountaintop, ‘the appearance of the glory of the
Later in exodus, we also learn that as Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, [he] did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him (Exodus 34:29–30).
Moses and Jesus climb the mountain and a divine presence blazes forth. This fire doesn’t destroy, but it illumines. It banishes the darkness and shows God’s people the path to blessedness.
Like Moses’ companions, Peter is fearful. Peter is disorientated by the vison of Jesus as the blazing flame of God’s presence, and he doesn’t know how best to respond or what to say. His usual strategies for understanding reality around him falter. He suggests building some dwellings to contain the fire in the same way that the Israelites built a tabernacle in the desert, and then a temple in Jerusalem. But Peter learns the old lesson once again: ‘even heaven, the highest heaven, cannot contain the Lord, much less the temple’.
One theologian thinks that Like Peter we desire to secure in place, if not tie down and domesticate, the wild spirit of God’s kingdom. We do not wish to face anew the challenge of God’s presence. We would like to make the success of the past our own without having to have the courage of those who followed Jesus into the unknown.
1
What would we see if we travelled back in time and installed CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology on Mt Sinai and Mt Tabor? Would we see fire? Would we see radiant light? Perhaps we would see a man being crucified. One suspects that there are ways of seeking facts about God’s ways that may lead us to miss faith’s invitation. Sometimes the desire certainty is a way of avoiding the imagination and the emotions; avoiding the invitation to follow Christ into the unknown, there to encounter a truth that converts.
Let us use our imaginations now. Let the mind’s eye see the fire of God’s presence. See it in Jesus enthroned on the cross. See it in the resurrected body. See it in the bread and wine. See it in the person beside you. See it blazing froth in the whole web of life. The fire of love envelops our doubts and fears; a Divine truth beyond measure that beckons us, grounds us and transforms us in ways beyond all imagining.
Footnotes
1
Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2006), 157.