REMYTHOLOGY.
GUIDING STORIES.
Danny is lost. I sit with him for four hours over coffee and mostly listen. His frustration, idleness, and anger is not anything unique. I was a student ministy pastor for fifteen years…not my my first rodeo. So no, this is not a new story, but it is his story and it is real. Danny was raised with the Bible as the absolute truth. Along with it came a grab bag of theological underpinnings. Words like “innerrant, infallible, sufficient for life and salvation…” these kinds of things. He was taught never to ask questions about the claims of the Bible…because it is from God. What higher proof could you ever hope to find? And so Danny forms a whole worldview based upon an ancient book.
Danny is in college. College is where kids like Danny start to ask good questions and God questions. They push back on their upbringing. It happens to every young adult. They encounter new ideas and people living out of very different stories…who are not only not being struck by Zeus or Yahweh or some other Iron Age sky-grandpa, but are actually great people. And so kids like Danny slowly reject the manual they were given for navigating the world.
Danny is learning. Danny did nothing wrong and neither did his parents. Actually, they raised a curious child full of wonder. And now Danny is curious and wondering as he learns provable and tested theories about cosmology, physics, and anthropology. Danny learns the world is billions of years old. Danny learns not only how evolution shaped the elegant diversity in the flora and fauna around us, but humans have an evolution too. Danny learns that cultures are vastly different and the same. They express religion, form family, practice sexuality, and mourn death in lots of ways and yet…they are all human.
And so Danny is in tailspin. In the summer of 2000 something, I meet with Danny several times to help him recalibrate. Because something had to give. I said, “Danny, you cannot get in fistfights with Disney mascots at amusement parks and get ahead in life.” (This actually happend I swear). “Danny, you cannot drink that much and make the grades to stay in school.” “Danny, you cannot give everyone from your past the finger and expect them to help you forever.” “Danny, you cannot—“ He cuts me off.
Danny is furious. “I cannot do anything! Not one thing Pastor Mark. That’s the goddamn problem.” We sit in silence. I know where he is, but Danny is smart. He is about to uncover the real problem, I can feel it. “It’s like everything everyone told me turned out to be bullshit. And if none of it is true, what is the point? What is the point of falling in line, making grades, getting a job, any of it?”
Danny is crying. “Seriously, do you wanna know how bad it is? Some nights I don’t want to live I swear to god. I didn’t ask for any of this and I’m not sure I want to live. Why does any of it matter?” Now I speak up. “That’s the problem though, isn’t it? You do want to live. You want to really live. You were given a story that you were loved, mattered, and could change the world for good. And now you think its gone. And now you don’t know what to do.”
Danny is sobbing. “You know what, Danny? You are loved. Your life matters. And you are a world changer. That’s part of your problem— it will never be enough for you to just exist… you want your life to count. You want it all to matter.” He buries his head in his elbows and is visibly shaking…people are staring, and Danny is convulsing. This is the pain most students carry as they transition to adulthood. It usually just gets masked under cynicism and seven layers of irony and sarcasm— it definitely doesn’t come out in public. I grab his shoulder and I tell him softly but with conviction: “You just need to get your guiding story back.”
Danny is becoming none with the universe. Danny is one in a million. Actually one in a couple billion. Seriously, his story is the story of a growing number of young adults who grew up in a guiding story. The fastest growing religion is actually no religion. Seriously— Nat Geo published an article by Gabe Buillard in 2016 entitled, “The World’s Newest Religion: No Religion.” Bullard shows that more and more millenials are rejecting the faith of their youth and opting for no religious expression. “Nones” as they are called, make up 25% of the population, at least as of 2016 when the article was published, and are growing fast. Nones are growing faster than any relgious faith and in North America, they have numerically surpassed Catholics, Prostestants, and all followers of non-Christian traditions.
Danny is becoming a none. The West is secularizing at an unprecedented rate, but that seems to be its only coherent narrative strand. As I write this morning, race riots have gripped the United States in the wake of the George Flynn murder. The exposure of our systemtized racism has made us temporarliy forget a global pandemic called the COVID-19 virus, which made us sideline that the wealth gap between the 1% and the other 99% is ever widening but the 99 have noticed and are set to boil over, which makes it impossible to make headway on consumption rates which would require seven earths and at the very least one which was not environmentally destroyed, which completly moves out of mind the bottom billion lives in the same squalor it did two decades ago; none of the optimism of Jeffrey Sachs seems to have won the day. The world is losing its guiding stories…but it had better get another one pronto. Why? Because the world is sobbing into its elbows at a coffee table. And so it is extremely crucial that we get a better story. Now is the time to remythologize.
This is our world to build together. The Master of the Universe has given us the lower house. As one sage recounts:
When the Holy One created the first man, he took him and led him around all the trees of the Garden of Eden, and said to him: Behold my works— how beautiful and splendid they are! All that I have created, I created for your sake. Now take care that you do not become corrupt and destroy my world. For once you become corrupt, there is no one coming after you to repair it.
Ecclesiastes Raba 7.13.1
Why is all this happening? Why is the House of the modern world on fire? And why are we abandoning the guiding stories which helped people take care of the House, albeit imperfectly, for thousands of years? The modern world is post-modern, skeptical of meta-narratives, and deeply averse to myth. This means the post-modern conviction that my story is only one in a sea of perspectives has called the idea of “true” into question. This means that people have a bullshit radar that goes off anytime someone tries to place a larger story over top of their individual one. This means individuality too often trumps the common sense good. And other times Trump trumps the common sense good. Ha! Seriously though, we want to believe we are rational individuals— and so we proceed by scientifically tested knowledge; not fictitious stories believed by less advanced peoples in less progressed ages. Funny thing is, how many arguments I observe over social media over what the science actually says and actually means. And what is more, how often people think a problem is modern but I know it is ancient and cyclical. You can probably catch my own skeptiscism of this post-modern, meta-narrative in disguise. I believe we need truth. I live in the story that there is a world that belongs to God, and he gave it to us so that we could continue his artistic work together and alongside Godself. And I contend that a lot of times, fiction tells that truth best…but we will take the long way.
HOW OUR STORY WORKS IS ALWAYS IN FLUX.
We should not jettison science or mythology. We need them both. Factual, scientific knowledge has provided humanity with great advances in technology, self-understanding, and power. And yet, science fails to name the mystery and depth of the soul. Many of us find ourselves like Danny— a modern Odysseus, far from home and not sure how to get back again. The worst of it is, Danny doesn’t know the Oddyssey or the Bible for that matter. He cannot map his own life without stories that give timeless truths. Having traded in the stories that once guided our lives, time, affections, and emotional well-being for the scientific program of truth, we have slowly fallen asleep with respect to our interior selves. But we are not okay. The world is falling apart and at best, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desparation.”
I am interwoven with the Bible. I grew up with Jewish and Christian stories, served as a pastor, and eventually pursued a doctoral degree in Bible and Interpretation. Maybe the biggest takeaway I have for studying the Bible 15 professionally for years after college, how we interpret the Bible always changes given enough time. How our story works and even what it means is always in flux.
We can track the movement of interpretation in the study of the Bible through academic heritage. The earliest literary critics, who would influence biblical interpretation, recognized that fantastic elements did not correspond to reality. These critics worked on the Pagan Bible, Homer. The Iliad and the Oddysey were scripture to the Greek world for centuries and the first scholars to ask important questions about myth, truth, and the value of guiding stories were Greek. Scribes and scholars began to “interpret” the stories to fit their experience and epoch. They pulled the story forward their own time and place. This has always been the way humans read ancient texts— we update the meaning of a story to speak to our own social world and historical place. Interpretation of the Bible has evolved alongside the great ages of human thought and reason.
Interpretation for the ancient scribes of the Classical and Late Antique periodmeant allegory. They allegorized the Bible to downplay violence and vice and to promote more appropriate virtue. That is to say, they ignored the literal meaning of the things that bothered them in the text and made it metaphorical or symbolic for…what they wanted it to say.
The Middle Ages developed systems of thought about the nature of God, creation, humanity, redemption, and the age to come. However, considerable interpretive liberties were taken, in order to make the Bible and its authors all say the same things about God and redemption history. This is because the Bible is made up of many books by many authors over a great span of time. The authors simply do not agree all the time or on all that much really. And so Late Antique and Middle Age interpretation of the Bible mirrored both ancient philosophy and the feudal system, and this interpretation has cast a long shadow.
In the Renaissance Period, when the Reformation and Counter-Reformation pushed back on institutional dogmas with doctrines of sola-scriptura— the Bible, as the Word of God, would dictate how we understood these systems of theology over and against church authority and tradition. After all, God had revealed himself in his Word and so we dare not change its message with human intervention. Much of the Protestant and Catholic world continues to this day to carry forward Middle Age views on the Bible using words like “inspired,” “inerrant,” or a host of other labels somehow foundational and slippery all at once. These are the very ideas, after all, that will someday send Danny and billions of others into a theological nose dive. However, the academy moved on in its interpretation of the Bible, creating a couple hundered year gap between scholarship and many faith communities.
The increased scrutiny of the Enlightenment and Industrial Ages influenced not only how people thought about empirical science, reasoning, and philosophy, but also the study of ancient authors and texts such as Homer's Iliad and Moses’ Torah. Advancements in science and philosophy combined with an increased knowledge of the history and archaeology of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world. Rediscovering the ancient Near East and Classical world provided a new lens for understanding the primary texts and culture which composed the Bible. Instead of looking for unifying systems of theology across the Bible, scholars of the Enlightenment sought to understand the great diversity of biblical authors in their discrete contexts.
We started to see that the systems of theology formed in the Middle Ages were untenable and most likely impossible. This does not mean theology is impossible— any time we move past the Bible to speak meaningfully about God, his world, or what it means to be human in light of his goodness…we are doing theology. It means we cannot make all the perspectives of the biblical writers match into a uniform theological system.
I once had a professor tell me that “theology is like a tent, if you loosen one peg and string you have to tighten another one. So if you loosen Jesus’ deity you have to tighten Jesus’ humanity, and so forth.” The problem with this idea is that it assumes the authors are all seeing theologizing or “reasoning about God” the same way. What if for one author of the New Testament Jesus is a torah abservant Jew who is a Messiah in the Jewish sense, and for another Jesus is the logos, a being who serves as a go between for God the perfect father and the soiled earth. And so one author sets out to prove Jesus fulfilled Torah and another sets out to show that Jesus is the full image of the Father personified.
You see we have a problem, because each author is going to have a discrete theology all to their own. Now take either of these books, Matthew and John is what I’m messing around with, and factor in that they are composites. They are composite in that they are drawing in multiple stories, legends, miracle motifs, poems, midrashic interpretations of Scripture and “composing them” or editing them together. They are masterful literary testimonies of Jesus, but trying to match them into one theological system is going to be tough.
Instead, scholars saw in the Modern Age of scholarship that each writer had a time, place, and context and a unique message they wished to get across. At the same time, scholars were interested in how the text formed an overarching story, despite its complexity. This was the epoch of figuring out how smaller parts forming a unified whole, many stories entwining into meta-narrative. Everyone started looking under the hood to see how the engine worked. Biblical scholars did the same and it changed almost everything we know about the Bible, where it came from, and how to read it in context.
Post-Modernism again shifted the interpretation of the Bible. Post-modern culture did not critique the idea that objective, “capital T-truth” or “absolute truth” exists. Rather our ability to perceive it with uniformity was not possible. That is to say, of course the universe and our world has objective modes of being, it is human perception that is going to name the truth in an army of metaphors. Meta-narratives are at best heuristic. Post-moderns questioned an overarching reading of the Bible and discount systematized and unified accounts of God. On the other hand, they recognized there are many different authors naming God in the composite texts collected in the Bible. Truth gets named in a myriad of ways, and so God is the ideal named in a diverse collection of expressionss and encounters within biblical literature.
The dominant interpretive lens parallels cultural milieu. Change in interpreting the Bible is inevitable, noticable, mappable. The Late Antique, Middle Age, Renaissance, Modern, and Post Modern patterns of interpretating the Bible each mirror the cultural zeitgeist of human thought and reason. We interpret the Bible as a child of the enlightenment or as a post-modern because that is our cultural sea. We cannot help it, and yet, what is more helpful than a Bible relevant our own day and age? Maybe a better way of looking at it, is that each generation gets to ask what sacred texts have to say to our time and place.
In any case, the last 200 years of interpretation has come with a deep slumber of the soul. Sometimes it is acknowledged and other times it is a dismissed cognitive dissonance. But the reality is kids like Danny reject the myths they grew up with as no longer guiding because enlightened sensibility says they never could have happened in the first place. This is the dominent attitude I have encountered in the past two-decades of working with students— even if it is masked, or only surfaces as well-aimed questions. When we get to a certain age we either stop believing in a lot of the fantastic elements and literary exageration in the Bible… or we pull an ostrich and don’t look at the evidence—we apply critical thinking to everything but the Bible. An entire generation seems to be either losing faith or falling deep into intellectual sleep.
But we do not have to choose one or the other. We can reclaim story as guiding for our lives and love and follow the God that story is naming. We can love the Bible and recognize its complexity and antiquity. And we can ask anew in a world on edge… what does the Bible mean here and now? What world is possible if we pull these stories, poems, laws, and letters forward? And most important, we can affirm there is a true God who acts in history. Just because there is a gap between what actually happened (historical kernel) and how it explodes into a cloud of literary witnesses (biblical literature), does not mean God is not present, acting in the world, and being named by the authors of the Bible. I believe there is a God, Israel experienced him in a unique covenant relationship, and pagans like me have been invited into that peace with God through the promised Davidic Messiah, Jesus. And I LOVE the way the Bible tells of these events somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, beyond reason and and yet reasonable, and mysterious yet knowable. The indeterminacy makes me love the Bible more, not less.
And all the while, Danny is asleep. Danny is asleep and the House of the World is burining. Danny is asleep and the House of the World is buring and I’ll be damned if I can’t wake him up. Because Danny needs to reclaim guiding story. Danny needs to remythologize his life because he’s sobbing and starting to make a scene.
RECLAIMING THE BIBLE AS A GUIDING STORY.
Our story needs to work again. The thing a lot of us know and few of us have said outright, is that old ways of reading the Bible no longer work. And they never will again. A necessary growth of those claiming the Bible as sacred increasingly requires a fresh interpretation in each age. Literal, wooden readings of the Bible simply do not work today. And that’s okay— flannelgraph was supposed to be for kids, remember? And that’s okay because at least for me, my Sunday School teachers were scary and their glasses didn’t fit and they made me sit in the hall for misbehavior… a lot. Ha! Really though, the literature of the Bible has to be reclaimed as a guiding story about a living God.
The interpretation of ancient stories constantly updates to remain vital. Old modes of reading becoming obsolete is a normal and expected. Fresh interpretation means reading at a higher level of interior evolution, and it is necessary. Interpretive update has to happen within every cultural generation if the Bible remain relevant. That is okay. It’s actually exciting. This is how ancient literature has always worked. If any ancient text is given enough time, some of the actions of characters and the values held by the writers are going to be outdated. Some literary elements and ideas are helpful across time, but a lot of them are going to seem archaic, outdated, and even barbaric without interpretation pulling their meaning forward to new relevance.
And so, the classical writers went to great lengths to reinterpret Homer when it was no longer virtuous to be a hot head like Achilles running around throwing spears into chest cavaties. In the same way the rabbis and the church fathers carefully allegorized away uncouth actions of the biblical heroes. In fact, the writers of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are already rewriting or reinterpreting their own tradition, as we will see. Show me a living faith tradition and I will show you the gift of self-critique. Religions, as Plotinus advised, must always be carving their own statue.
The good news is that we have seen Biblical interpretation is not new. Interpretation has been happening since the Bible was first spoken. Interpretation always rewrites the past to speak to the present. Interpretation upgrades the core stories that matter most to fit the current day. Interpretation is not new— but it is often unexamined. And so re-interpreting the Bible necessarily produces a crisis of faith on the way to growth when we wake up to old modes of interpreting dying out and new ones being born.
I call reclaiming the Bible as a guiding story, “remythology”. Remythology, it is willfully living out a mythology. Remythology is the full acceptance of the Bible as human literature with fantastic elements and the full affirmation that the Bible is naming and reacting to a living God who has acted in history. It’s kinda like living out of having my cake and eating it too. It’s not foreveryone, but I like cake and I have a hunch so does Danny. Remythology is understanding the Bible as a story that can help your story. Remythology is understanding that fiction can be true. And at the same time, it is a rejection of demythology— the 20th century notion of stripping the Bible of everything supernatural or unexplainable and just reading it as ethical storytelling. Instead, to remythologize is to own both the historical reality behind the text and the literary embellishment that makes the Bible great literature.
In practical terms, it means it matters that there was an exodus, an ancient Israel, an exile, and a promised messiah from the line of David. Otherwise, why choose the Bible and the God of the Bible? And on the other hand, the way those events come down to us are literature. They are artfully told, use stock ancient stories and genres, and ancient imagery we might explain differently now. And getting used to not being quite sure where the line is between myth and history, that’s part of it too. Remythology is reading the Bible like an ancient and understanding that their cosmology and conceptions are a foreign land to modernity. But Remythology is also taking the ideas the ancient author wishes to get across and asking what it looks like to live out, here and now.
THE CRISIS OF LITERAL INTERPRETATION.
You see, Danny needs his guiding story back. The result a generation like Danny losing their guiding story is the crisis of faith happening in countless students and young adults. Ours is a moment of existential angst in the face of formidible global problems. The crisis so many people from faith backgrounds are having is that the ways of thinking about the sacred texts they were handed growing up did not prepare them for the age in which we live. The irony is that the Bible could have served them marevelously had it not been taught literally. Were the Bible taught as literature that names the living God, and were learners encouraged to see conceptions of the divine as moving targets, a faith would have taken root which could brook any philosophical koine no matter how different from the biblical world.
But the Bible was not taught as literature, at least not to Danny. The Bible was taught to Danny as literal history. I have watched a generation of young people feel they had to make a choice between faith and reason, the Bible and science, creation or evolution, three tiered universe or physics, and ancient theogany or verifiable natural history. They were taught to read the Bible literally and to just “believe” fantastic and imaginary elements of their sacred texts. But that generation grew into the most scientifically educated class of adults ever to live on our planet. So they have walked away from the faith of their youth. But they have no idea where to go and they are heartbroken. They wonder like Danny, if it would be better to walk into the wine-dark sea with ankle weights.
There is hope. The choice was always a false dichotomy. The choice between faith and reason is a false option because the Bible is an ancient book written with a completely different cosmology, genre constraints, and social contracts. When we uncover the original context of the Bible, we are freed from readings and interpretations of the Bible that no longer work. We can leave behind stories and conceptions that do not help us in the modern world, or reinterpret them towards love of God and neighbor. We can reclaim the ones that lead to virtues of faith, hope, and love. The understanding that can restore the current hope crisis pertains to the original context of the literature of the Bible and how interpretation has evolved over time. What if we could have faith again that God is real and that God is good? What if we could begin again to hope? What if we could re-mythologize our lives in a way that both helps and was intellectually honest?
RE-MYTHOLOGY.
And so remythology… We remythologize our lives by leaning into biblical literature as guiding stories without the expectation their details are literally and scientifically true. Rather we recognize that many times fiction says the truth better. We remythologize by understanding the Bible in its ancient context, formation, and tradition of interpretation.
Context, because understanding the socio-historical world that produced the Bible greately changes its meaning. The Bible simply does not always say what many people assume in the first place. Formation, because understanding the Bible as a composite text compiled over time allows for concepts of God, humanity, and everything else to change over time. There is no fixed idea of God or his world in the Bible, rather its formation allows us to find many namings of God and many of them really help the dillemna of the soul. And interpretation, because we always assume our reading of the Bible is the correct one, until we observe how many times and in how many ways the fundamental lenses throught which we read the Bible have changed across the ribbon of time.
I started TEXT AND ROCK because I observed the countless kids like Danny who no longer have a guiding story. I want kids like him to love the Bible again— but most important, to love God and know they are loved by God again. At least for me, naming God is foundational and formative for hope and life. We need to name and be named by God like oxygen. Augustine wrote that “we find no rest until we find our rest in You.” He meant Danny would continue to be at war in his heart until he knew and was known by his creatore. We actually need myths that help us name God and map our significance in God’s world.
Somewhere between angel and animal is Danny. Danny and you and me— Plato said we were the only political animals, in that we figure out life together in a complex community. Aristotle said we are the only reasoning animals, because we can observe cause and effect and figure out the world around us. The author of Genesis says we are the only animal that statues the living God— God breathed his essence into our bodies like animating a clay pot. And now we are integral beings made of earth but full of divinity. I want the third story for Danny, no matter how he thinks politically and how he reasons about the marvelous world we find ourselve in… I want him to know he is God’s kid and that on his best day, he is starting to look like his dad. That is the best guiding story I know.
Epictetus said it like this:
…but having two things united in our beginning,
a body in common with the brutes,
and reason in common with the gods,
many lean towards to this unhappy and mortal kindred,
and only a few to that which is divine and blessed.
Epictetus, Discourses 1.3
Danny is one of my favorite spiritual animals, and I want him to know that he is divine and blessed.