Myth is not primitive proto-science. Instead, myth is a “description of the world as it signifies (for action). The mythic universe is a place to act. A myth describes things in terms of their unique or shared affective valence, value, and motivational significance.
– Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning
The Power of Narrative
Stories contain the meaning of the world. Of course, the world is made of things, but stories reveal the meaning of those things, their connections, and their purposes. Our lives are meaningful to the extent that the stories we see ourselves as part of are meaningful.
Some stories, the enduring ones, embody universal patterns. These stories last, enter our consciousness, engrain themselves in and form our culture, support our identities, and become the underlying web of references on which we structure our interactions and our lives.
That is what the Bible is – a web of interconnected stories, from creative origins, through the garden, to the call of Abraham, through the Exodus, through the prophets, and then into the narratives of the gospels and the other Christian writings – a series of stories that weave a cosmic web of logos – of meaning.
To call oneself a Christian is to claim these stories as one’s own – to locate one’s life in some manner in the ongoing narrative(s). To be Western means to have some reference to this set of narratives as well.
Stories from Another World
The worldview of the authors and communities that wrote the various Bible books understood the world much differently than we do today. Their worldview is not that of our own. Let me emphasize that people with different worldviews wrote the scriptures rather than our own.
As such, we must filter our reading of the texts through awareness of these differences. Many of the meanings and wisdom of the scriptures remain relevant to us today. We, too, value kindness, freedom, integrity, and compassion. We can share much of their vision for a better world where the lowly were raised, justice flowed like a mighty river, and healing, peace, and love prevailed.
We can appreciate the meanings of the subplots, seeing ourselves in David’s bravery as a youth but also in his lust. We can understand the challenges that Moses faced leading a people. We can lament with Rachel. We can understand some of Peter's, John's, and Paul's experiences as they try to make sense of their encounters with Jesus.
We can accept many of the truths the ancients conveyed without accepting their worldview and how it led them to explain things. The opening chapters of Genesis are not scientific texts making claims about astrophysics. Miracles and exorcisms were how people interpreted disease and recovery without the benefit of chemistry or biology. We must read these stories with modern eyes. Otherwise, we will render them unable to speak meaningfully to us today, turning them into fairy tales and works of fantasy.
The Nature of the Texts
Evidential theology proceeds from the conviction that the Bible is not inerrant or infallible – it is a collection of stories that mix fact with fiction, poetry and prose, metaphor and symbols.
The writings are a recorded collection of our spiritual ancestors' understandings of the divine, notions of goodness, human nature, and the meaning and purpose of life. To claim these stories as meaningful and culturally significant, we need not claim them as magical.
The texts were not written to serve as historical, scientific, or even moral documents (as we understand these disciplines today). Instead, Scripture combines history remembered with history metaphorized, expressing sacred myths primarily sweeping spiritual statements.
These myths provide context for answers (but not necessarily the answers themselves) to life’s fundamental questions. Literal readings skew the meaning of the texts and render the core myths irrelevant.
Suppose you find yourself standing in front of a statue of Lincoln swinging an ax to break the chains attached to a slave girl’s foot. Is this statue true or false? Hopefully, you’d realize that truth is layered and ask, true in what sense? Historically, we have no record of Lincoln swinging an ax to free a slave child. But the statue still speaks a meaningful truth.
– John Dominic Crossan
Since the writings consist of many viewpoints, sometimes contradictory ones, our reading is always selective. Further, the texts should be read contextually – from the perspective of the historical periods and cultures in which they were written—context matters.
Much of the Bible, including much of the Christian writings, was written by and for Jewish culture – the narratives and wisdom conveyed the basis for the Jewish identity. Later, the Christian community applied the midrashic technique to the texts and explained their movement's meaning within a Jewish context. Another prominent background theme for both sets of writings is overcoming the dehumanizing and oppressive effects of empire – be it that of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, or Rome.
No text is self-interpreting, the Bible included. Any textual engagement is, by necessity, hermeneutical and, therefore, also critical but not necessarily suspicious. Claiming the Bible as one’s mythopoetic source of religious meaning is a process of ongoing interpretation and application – a conversation with the past and present, with the text and our lives.
Every reader has a voice in this conversation and a role in the ongoing reinterpretation. Each individual in each age must apply the texts to current realities – with both the text and current understanding of reality in dialog, neither trumping the other in an ultimate sense. Even when we disregard or reject specific parts of the text, we must still wrestle with what the ancient authors intended and their experiences and concerns that led them to write such.
Finding Meaning in the Texts
Like any text, the scriptures require interpretation, and as such, we will never exhaust their meanings. The narratives are overladen with meaningful metaphors—ideas concerning humanity, freedom, goodness, and the importance of love, justice, and kindness. The actual historical circumstance of these metaphors is often clouded.
The Bible contains revolutionary ideas (for their times), such as the dignity and equality of all humanity and an early sense of the rough equality of men and women. It dictates the love of strangers and calls for caring for the poor and the outcast. These aspects of the text’s vision remain relevant for people who wish to be considered humane.
Yet, in a strict sense, the Bible is not necessary for understanding and living a good life – much of moral understanding is achievable through reason. Yet the priorities and development of moral understanding within the texts are enlightening and point us toward a way of living – a vision that calls us beyond the standard knowledge of morality and what constitutes a good life.
The moral priorities of the text are the poor and the lowly, which are the important ones. The humble and imperfect are favored over the self-righteous and legalistic. Mercy and justice are ultimate concerns. Marginalization is considered beneath human dignity. The violent power of the Empire is supplanted by the new order of love with the gentle power of generosity of self.
Conversely, the Bible also contains many ideas and moral notions that we rightly reject – genocide, patriarchy, sexism, divinely-sanctioned violence, holy war, misogyny, outdated views on divinity, sexuality, and marriage, in part the remnants of an ancient worldview that lacked the benefit of today’s scientific, psychological, and historical knowledge.
Yet, at their core, the sacred writings speak of the importance of the transformative dynamic potential of kenotic love. The vision is integrity through love, and the true meaning of sacrifice and self-emptying becomes rawly visible throughout the stories—regardless of whether the details blend allegory, spiritualized fiction, and fact.
Correctly Reading the Texts
Sadly, many people, perhaps most, misread the texts. Our tendency to view the collection of writings as God’s dictated word to humans or as infallible, magical texts is a relatively new phenomenon, owing much to 20th-century American Evangelicalism.
Even worse, the texts are miscategorized and mistaken in genre. For example, the prophets were not fortune tellers trying to predict the future. Instead, they read the signs of the times and expressed a moral vision of where their people were headed if they kept on their current course. The prophets don’t foretell Jesus of Nazareth, either. Christian writers and thinkers interpreted back in the texts, using midrashic techniques to connect the texts to Jesus and his movement.
Another frequently misread book in the collection is Revelation. The authors of Revelation spoke symbolically about the nature of the church and the place of the Kingdom of God in the broader historical and world order, not about end-of-world visions.
The word apocalypse is Greek for uncovering or finding hidden meanings in events. It does not, first and foremost, speak of the end times or the end of the world. Instead, apocalyptic usually refers to the end of the existing cultural, political, and social order and the uncovering or revealing of a new age.
Despite our misreadings, there’s a good reason why we read the scriptures at Mass or other religious services. We read these texts aloud in a communal setting because they tell our story. Week after week, we hear the stories of our spiritual ancestors and relate their insights, experiences, and wisdom to our own lives.
The scriptures are the Christian myth(s), and every Christian is responsible for finding themselves in the narrative and contributing to it by developing the narrative.
Therefore, the narratives of the scriptures are meant to be entered into and lived. That can only happen if one is familiar with them and reads them. Rote memorization is unnecessary and often a cruel, pointless exercise imposed on children. Rather than memorizing them, we need to be immersed in them so that they become familiar. We need not remember every line or be able to cite chapters and verses, but we know the writings intimately.
The sacred texts need to be encountered as a whole, each text and its subplots and tellings weaving a broader tale of interconnected meanings and wisdom. For this reason, proof-texting or taking phrases or sentences out of the broader context is unwise and should be avoided. This is also an inferior way to do theology. The Bible is not a manual to be rigidly applied, used in rhetorical games of gotcha, or called upon to control others.
This reasoned, evidential, critical approach to scripture resists literal readings of the texts because it recognizes that they often express divergent messages, meanings, and insights. When someone asks what the biblical view on a particular topic is – be it women, sex, violence, war, or some other controversial issue – the answer to such an inquiry is always complex. Complex doesn’t always mean unclear, but pulling select verses out of context to craft the holistic biblical view is risky.
The central, vital, and repeated themes of the scriptures are clear—kenotic love, generosity of self, caring for the poor, ill, and needy, humility, seeking justice and peace, hospitality, and overcoming prejudice, tribalism, and divisions are the predominant themes.
And it’s those themes we hear week in and week out that make reading them aloud communally so important. Hearing the narrative and then living by it reanimates the myth. It keeps the story present and ongoing in the world.
Those in secular culture might not attend church every Sunday to hear the narrative. But hopefully, they’ll encounter it, understand it, and find it interesting, dare we say even appealing enough to consider further, because of how Christians live their lives and embody the narrative.
Learning from the Patristics
The Church Fathers believed the Bible to be a singular narrative despite its diversity and plurality of texts and authors. The narrative key for the fathers was found in the Jewish midrash, which refigured the arc of the narrative under the primary rubric of Jesus as the fulfiller of all the promises and prophecies of the old covenant and as the channel of salvation working through the new covenant people called the Church.
This core, unitive narrative was then to be meditated upon using three reading approaches:
The Strategies of Intensive Reading—close attention to the words and narrative of scripture
The Typological Understanding—discerning patterns and echoes between various events separated by historical time
The Allegorical Understanding—locating connection points between scriptural passages and intellectual, moral, and mystical topics
While insisting on a careful and intensive reading of the texts, the fathers did not recommend a literal reading of the scriptures. They claimed allegorization would extract the most meaningful aspects of the scripture’s meaning and wisdom.
The Nature of Mythopoetic Language
The ancient biblical authors were not under any illusion that they were writing scientific or historical accounts of creation or other events. Science as we know it did not exist in the biblical world, and the understanding of what constituted history was vastly different.
For example, the opening chapters of Genesis do not describe how the world came to be. Instead, they attempt to understand why the world exists and its meaning.
Criticizing the biblical authors by calling them naive, primitive, or superstitious misses the mark and fails to understand what the writers meant to convey.
The ancients wrote their significant texts and told their foundational stories in a language and communication style often misunderstood by modern readers. The ancient authors wrote and conveyed central narratives mythopoetically.
At its core, mythopoesis embodies the innate human inclination towards storytelling and myth-making. It encompasses the imaginative act of world-building, wherein creators fashion mythic realms populated by archetypal characters, fantastical creatures, and symbolic landscapes. Through mythopoesis, individuals transcend the confines of reality, weaving intricate tapestries of meaning that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries.
Mythopoesis operates as a catalyst for cultural transmission, serving as a vehicle for preserving and transmitting collective wisdom, values, and beliefs across generations. It manifests in diverse forms, ranging from ancient cosmogonies to epic poems.
In mythopoesis, symbolism reigns supreme, imbuing every character, object, and event with layers of meaning and significance. Archetypal motifs such as the hero's journey, the quest for immortality, and the battle of light against darkness permeate mythopoeic narratives, echoing the perennial rhythms of human experience. Through symbolism, mythopoesis transcends the boundaries of language and culture, speaking to the deepest recesses of the human soul.
In mythopoetic language, metaphor is a potent tool for conveying symbolic truths and existential insights. Mythic narratives are replete with metaphorical language, wherein abstract concepts such as love, wisdom, and transcendence are rendered tangible through vivid imagery and figurative motifs.
Mythopoeic narratives serve as mirrors that reflect the human condition, illuminating the complexities of existence, the nature of reality, and the eternal struggle between order and chaos.
In many respects, religion can be viewed as a form of mythopoeia—a creative act of world-building that seeks to articulate humanity's relationship with the divine, the cosmos, and each other. Religious communities engage in the continuous myth-making process through sacred texts, rituals, and oral traditions, crafting narratives and symbols that give form to their deepest beliefs and aspirations.
Religious myths serve as foundational narratives that provide meaning and coherence to human existence. They explain the universe's origins, humanity's nature, and life's purpose. These myths often feature divine beings, heroic figures, and cosmogonic events, embodying timeless truths and moral lessons that guide believers' ethical and spiritual lives.
The scriptures of Judaism and Christianity stand as timeless repositories of mythopoetic language, weaving together narratives, symbols, and allegories to convey profound spiritual truths and moral teachings. Embedded within the pages of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament are layers of symbolism and metaphor that invite readers to embark on a journey of interpretation and introspection.
Midrash, derived from the Hebrew word “darash," meaning "to inquire" or "to seek out," encompasses a variety of interpretive methods employed by ancient Jewish sages to elucidate the meaning of biblical texts. Midrashic interpretation goes beyond the literal reading of scripture, engaging with the text on multiple meanings through allegory, symbolism, and narrative elaboration.
Central to Midrashic interpretation is the belief that the Torah, or Hebrew Bible, contains layers of hidden meaning that can be discerned through careful study and reflection. Midrashic sages utilized techniques, including wordplay, comparative analysis, and imaginative storytelling, to uncover these deeper truths and draw out moral, ethical, and theological lessons.
The interpretation of mythopoetic language in Jewish and Christian scriptures requires careful attention to context, genre, and literary conventions. While some symbols and allegories may have clear theological significance, others may be subject to multiple interpretations and layers of meaning.
Scholars employ various interpretive methods, including historical-critical analysis, literary criticism, and theological reflection, to uncover the more profound significance of mythopoetic language in the scriptures. By engaging with the text in its original linguistic and cultural context, interpreters seek to discern the intended meaning of symbols and allegories while remaining open to the diverse ways the text may speak to contemporary readers.
In the modern era, characterized by scientific rationalism and technological advancement, there exists a prevailing deafness to mythopoetic language—a mode of expression deeply rooted in symbolism, allegory, and narrative depth.
The Tools of Biblical Scholarship
The Bible is a complex and multifaceted text. Biblical scholarship delves into understanding its meaning and origins, employing various methods to analyze and interpret its content.
Historical-critical methods in theology are scholarly approaches used to study religious texts, particularly the Bible, within their historical, cultural, and literary contexts.
Historical Criticism—Historical-critical methods seek to situate biblical texts within their historical contexts, including the social, political, and cultural settings in which they were written. This involves examining archaeological evidence, ancient historical records, and comparative studies of other ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman texts to understand the world of the biblical authors better.
Cultural Criticism seeks to contextualize religious texts and traditions within their social contexts, including the historical, geographical, and cultural settings in which they emerged. This involves analyzing the social structures, institutions, and relationships that shape religious beliefs and practices and how religion intersects with other aspects of society.
Textual Criticism - a foundational aspect of historical-critical methods, focusing on analyzing and comparing ancient manuscripts and textual variants of biblical texts. Scholars use textual criticism to reconstruct the original wording of biblical passages, identify scribal errors or textual corruptions, and trace the transmission history of biblical manuscripts.
Source Criticism - involves identifying and analyzing biblical authors' sources when composing their texts. This includes examining parallel passages, repetitions, and inconsistencies within the biblical texts to discern underlying sources or traditions that may have been incorporated into the final compositions.
Form Criticism - focuses on the oral and literary forms or genres of biblical texts, exploring their origins, functions, and social contexts. This involves identifying the original settings and purposes of different biblical genres, such as myths, legends, parables, proverbs, and legal codes, and understanding how ancient Israel's oral traditions, cultural practices, and early Christianity shaped them.
Redaction Criticism examines the editorial and compositional processes that shape biblical texts. Scholars analyze the theological, ideological, and literary interests of biblical editors or redactors and how earlier sources were edited, expanded, or adapted to address the concerns of later communities.
These methods work together to paint a richer picture of the Bible. Higher criticism helps us understand the text's historical development, while form criticism sheds light on its literary forms. Cultural criticism contextualizes the text, and the historical method assesses its accuracy. Finally, hermeneutics guides us in interpreting the text meaningfully for our own time.
By employing these tools, biblical scholarship aims to bridge the gap between the Bible's ancient world and our modern understanding, fostering a more nuanced appreciation of this complex and influential text.
Abusing the Scriptures
The Bible, a cornerstone of Western religion and culture, has profoundly shaped societies and inspired countless individuals. However, its interpretation can be a minefield.
Literal readings, uncritical approaches, and a lack of contextual understanding can distort the Bible's message, leading to misuse and misunderstanding.
Readers often focus on verses confirming their beliefs while neglecting those challenging them. This cherry-picking approach can distort the Bible's message and create personal theologies that deviate from the text's core messages.
Literal interpretations of verses promoting violence or intolerance can be used to justify extremism, and understanding the context and message of peace and love that pervades much of the Bible is crucial in countering these misinterpretations.
Misinterpretations about gender roles, sexuality, or social structures within the Bible can be used to perpetuate discrimination and social injustice. Examining the historical context and evolving interpretations can help us move towards a more inclusive and just understanding of the Bible's message.
By approaching the Bible with intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and respect for its historical and cultural context, we can move beyond simplistic interpretations and discover the richness and depth of its message for our own lives.