Sarx

In what seems to be the first of a series, or, perhaps, related to a class, Rabbi Menachem Creditor posts some links (to his work and others) regarding Living a Mythic Life 1: Mythic Time. From that post, he linked to an essay by Rabbi Neil Gillman, professor of Jewish Philosophy at Jewish Theological Seminary. I found the article very enlightening in that it helped me find words for a few more things. Just tonight I was having a phone conversation with Avi and some of these concepts would have fit well with our topic.

The Rabbi starts with a common enough (meaning shared-by-many) starting point. Having learned a good deal about where our text comes from what do we do now? I think these questions apply to Christians and Jews equally - especially as we view the Hebrew Scriptures - but also as we deal with any concept of “revelation” or “What the Holy One wants us to do.”

My Seminary education had successfully subverted any literalist understanding of the central Jewish revelational event as described in Exodus 19-20. I was taught that the Torah was a composite document, edited around the 5th century C.E., borrowing from the literature of the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures. That “critical” approach to the study of the Bible also questioned the historicity of the biblical narratives, including the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai. The evidence for these conclusions struck me as persuasive. In addition, I had begun to question the very possibility of any human attempt to capture God’s nature or activity in literal terms. I could no longer believe that God literally “descends” on Sinai or “speaks” the words of Torah. If God were truly God, then God could not literally “speak.” But then what was Torah? Whence its sanctity? Its authority? More broadly, what was the epistemological status of any theological claim? Finally, as a rabbi, how could I justify teaching and advocating the bulk of Jewish practice which, I continued to believe, remained central to any authentic understanding of Judaism? It was in this context that I reverted to the notion of myth.

Then, pointing out that American understandings of “myth=lie” are not true, he makes a few declarations that sound like younger, GenX/Y postmodernists: “There is no totally objective, human experience of the world. We construct reality from our simple perception of an apple to our most complex scientific theories.” “Myths… are not to be contrasted with facts. Instead, myths are the means by which we identify the significant facts.” “To use another metaphor from our childhood, myths are the lines that connect the dots on the page so that we can see the bunny rabbit, except that now the dots are not pre-numbered. We have to choose the dots that we want to connect (i.e. the “facts”), then assign the numbers, then draw the lines. Sometimes, there are different connections to be made, each of which yields a different pattern (Copernicus vs. Ptolemy, Freud vs. Jung, white vs. black perceptions of American life, or Zionist vs. Palestinian perceptions of Middle East politics).”

I enjoyed the essay most as it neared completion:

Myths can be “living,” “broken,” or “dead” (Tillich’s terms). A living myth is one that works for us, that we embrace as “true,” that makes sense of the world as we perceive it. A broken myth is one that has been exposed as our subjective, human construct. Sometimes broken myths die; the contrary data have become overwhelming. (See Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the life and death of scientific paradigms. Kuhn’s paradigms function as myths.) Many adults experience the death of their personal myths; for many Americans, Vietnam killed the American myth. But broken myths don’t have to die. It is possible to embrace a broken myth as still living. That’s what I try to help my students achieve. The key step is Paul Ricoeur’s felicitous term, “second” or “willed naivete” (in contrast to the pre-critical stage of “primary naivete”). By consciously stepping back into the myth (as, for example, at the Passover seder), we restore its power, even though it is broken. That is by no means an easy step to take, but it is indispensable.

He then enters a discussion of “true”, noting that a what makes a myth “true” is “Clearly not because it corresponds to the facts, simply because we have no independent perception of those facts to compare it with.”

This is, I think, where many Christian theologies stumble and fall - between these two steps.

Many of my friends in the liberal or progressive camps of Christianity (and some very verbal non-friends, I think of Jack Spong) find themselves unwilling or unable to enter into that “second” or “willed naivete” regarding the stories we tell. Our historic and dysfunctional awareness of our complex game of “telephone” - which, at each successive turn adds to the original telling - makes us both wary of any “return” to a primal story and unwilling to give up the layers and meanings we’ve added to that story. We can’t go back, but we refuse to continue.

Both options demand something we do not have, by default, built into our Christian system: an awareness of the community’s debates, evolution and missteps.