Comments on: We need a story…

By: Mike McNichols

Mike McNichols — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:14:55 +0000

Alan,

I really appreciate what you say about the need to reclaim myth (I prefer the implications of the word saga). I have come to view the Biblical accounts, for example, of creation, the flood and even the giving of the decalogue not so much as stand-alone Hebrew myths that seek to explain the cosmos but rather as a theological reframing of the culturally-accepted sagas (such as the Gilgamesh epic, the spells from the Egyptian book of the Dead which offer, respectively, a flood story and something akin to our Ten Commandments) of the day.

It seems to me that these accounts are given new meaning by framing them in the context of the work and presence of Yahweh. The other myths are not written off but rather reoriented around their true source.

It may be a difficult task for we in the western church to break our insoluble link between truth and facticity. Truth has, for millenia, been embedded in stories. In working so hard to grasp the desired certainty of our theological facts, as you point out, we seem to have lost the deeper truth of the story.

By: sacred vapor

sacred vapor — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:57:12 +0000

yes, I think the modern ideology of scientific truth has in many ways pulled us away from narrative, and towards a propositional paradigm that we deem to be the primary source of what is real and true.

The good news is that postmodernism has shown this to be a farce, and people today view story as reality again. This is much more in-line with how the NT disciples claimed Jesus… note… Stephen , Peter, Paul didn’t try to ‘prove’ Jesus to be the Messiah propositionally, they told the story of Israel.

After all, we as Christians have the greatest story ever told, we just have to learn to tell it again.

vapor

By: Matt Wiebe

Matt Wiebe — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:37:09 +0000

I recall having similar thoughts as I read Pullman’s excellent trilogy. The Authority that he unmasks and deposes is not the God I worship and encounter in the biblical narrative, but sadly is the God that much Christianity preaches.

By: Dave - Zimbabwe

Dave - Zimbabwe — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:29:42 +0000

Why do Christians feel that they need to make God presentable to the world? We don’t need to give the world another take on the story (gospel) or another presentation of the story of God

We need to deliver God…in us. He is attractive, He is beautiful, He is what the world needs. People reject the church and the story because it looks nothing like Christ.

Christ in us…

John 17:21
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. NIV

By: Alan Mann

Alan Mann — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:58:43 +0000

I think part of the problem is that we have lost confidence in the ability and purpose of story, narrative, myth (call it what you will), to yield meaning that is sufficient to transform life.

As Karen Armstrong has said: Myth has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self indulgent.

Yet, as she goes onto to say: myth is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.

How sad then, that the Creation myths of Genesis (for a controversial example) should be hijacked by those who wish them to be placed alongside the science curriculum as ‘truth’.

Far better that they are redeemed as myth and allowed to impose their meaning as such, allowing them to exert an influence which outstrips their reduction to a proposition about the origins of the universe.

As I’ve written elsewhere, we should fear not that the biblical narrative become merely a story, but that it become merely a fact.