Myth and the Bible – the legacy of Don Cupitt
Added about 3 weeks ago by Graham Turner
GUEST BLOG: Can myths be true? Should Christians be more open about acknowledging the mythic nature of certain biblical stories? Would that strengthen or weaken faith communities? Graham Turner, author of Embarrassed, reflects on the role of myth in religious and scientific discourse.
It rarely goes well if you talk about myth with people in church. Don Cupitt discovered that. Christians easily accuse those who do of undermining the faith.
Our Bible, though, with its network of thoughts, images, and stories, is too incredible for those who do not “do God” to take seriously. They find it unbelievable.
This book I cherish speaks of heaven and paradise, hell and Hades. It assumes we live in a three-decker universe overseen by a surveillance God. My non-church friends point out that God is supposed to have made everything in six days; demons made people sick; Jesus turned water into wine; genocide was okay in the olden days; and polygamy seemed to be fine too.
There’s a problem here, and the problem is myth.
To say something is a myth today is to say it isn’t true; it never happened; it’s factually incorrect. Some we call “urban myths”. In a more kindly way, we say the stories we read to our children (fairy tales, fables, and other sorts of fiction) are myths — innocent fantasies.
Others, though, can be more disturbing as they propagate untruths and dangerous ideas. People deliberately create conspiracy theories to deceive or mislead.
So, to refer to any of our beliefs or religious stories as myths is tantamount to saying the Bible isn’t true, even a lie. This is partly what got Cupitt into such hot water.
Traditionally, myth has a long and worthy history, one most people are unaware of unless they appreciate Greek mythology and the like. In this traditional sense, it means something quite different from today’s popular understanding. Here, myths are imaginative stories, patterns, and symbols that help us understand and make sense of the world. They do not speak about what is untrue, but point to what we believe is true. These may be historically accurate, but they might not be. Their purpose is not to chronicle events or give us an objective view of what happened but to help us figure out the universe and our place in it.
In the account of the Ascension (Acts 1) we see an example of myth. Luke wrote that Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight into heaven. The problem here is this: how literally should we take the details of this passage? Is heaven above the clouds? And also, how am I supposed to talk to my non-religious friends about this incident?
As people who have grown up in a scientifically aware context, we know that heaven is not up in the sky. We have been up there in aeroplanes and spacecraft — it is not there. Also, we no longer accept the idea that the earth is flat (with heaven above us and the place of the dead below). However, it made perfect sense to first-century people who understood the cosmos to be a three-decker universe. Here we have the language of myth.
Those who do not appreciate this will argue one of two ways. They will say that it makes little sense and so cannot be true; or, they will make the case that it is literally true.
But the purpose of the texts in Acts about Jesus’ ascension (and return) is not to talk about the mechanics of what happened. They point to the greater issue of how Jesus relates to God, and then, what his ongoing commitment is to us. To reduce such myths as documenting actual historical events is to rob them of their theological meaning, make a mockery of what we now know scientifically, and leave us talking at cross-purposes with people we claim we want to build bridges with.
We perceive and intuit so much that cannot be spoken about in factual detail or conceptual thought. Most of us think (and theologise) in pictures and images, not abstract concepts. Because of this, we have to use the imaginative language of myth. It is not right to say that myth is old-fashioned and only belongs to a pre-scientific age. Mythological patterns of speech are deeply ingrained in our contemporary lives. Most of us do not realise this.
Contemporary societies are rich in mythological speech. Because there is so much we do not understand about the world and the universe, we have to resort to stories, images, and symbols to help us talk about them and deal with them.
I love it when boffins talk about light, entangled particles, gravity, evolution, Gaia, and other scientific gobbledegook. These words, phrases, and labels are imaginative chatter to help us discuss things we don’t really understand. We can’t fathom the basics of what light and gravity are, so even though we have to speculate, examine, think, and experiment, we still have to make do with inventive words and phrases. By using such language, we attempt to discuss what we don’t understand. This isn’t just okay, it is necessary. The sin is when we speak as though we now fully understand whereas past peoples were just primitive simpletons. We all use mythic language, and so does the Bible.
Many in the scientific community find this hard to swallow; they feel it undermines the authority of their empirical method. Like the god it assumed it had supplanted, science became the model for all reasonable thought. But, it is not all-powerful or all-knowing.
Plenty of non-empirical disciplines and experiences tell us many things about life that empirical science can’t. We would be lost without mathematics, metaphysics, sociology, economics, political theory, ethics, poetry, music, and art. We cannot reduce our imagination, morality, sensuality, creativity, and love to the scientific method.
If scientific people find the whole idea of myth hard to swallow, so do many Christians. But we cannot escape it.
We’re not better than prescientific people; we’re just different.
Maybe we still have some work to do following on from Cupitt.
Embarrassed by Graham Turner, in which he candidly discusses living with a faith that makes no sense to his friends, is available now in paperback and e-book.
Please note: Sacristy Press does not necessarily share or endorse the views of the guest contributors to this blog.