Book Review: The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. SPCK. Kindle Edition.

I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. A ‘myth’ is simply a story about a great event or some great figure, that is shared across a culture or civilization. The purpose of the myth is to convey some truth that the culture in question deems important. Ancient Near Eastern myths depict the creation of the world as the result of a struggle between various competing gods (and there are in fact echoes of this view in some of the Bible’s other creation stories, particularly in the Psalms and in Job). Genesis 1 takes the elements of those older myths, and employs the plural word for ‘god’ but with a singular verb, and depicts a single divine voice as prevailing over the pagan gods (the primeval chaos, water, the sea monsters, etc.), while stripping them of their personalities, and indeed of their very names. It is a very powerful - and powerfully subversive - story once it becomes evident what the author was actually doing, especially given that it was probably composed during the Babylonian Exile, a time when many Jews probably came to believe that the Babylonian gods had prevailed over their own. The point it was making was theological, not historical, and both its author and its ancient Jewish audience knew that.

 

Oh come on, we all know what you really mean when you apply the word "myth" to the Genesis creation account: you're saying it didn't happen the way the account states it to have happened. To you, the story of creation is akin to a fairy tale; you might (or might not, hard to tell) believe that God did in fact create the planet, its flora and fauna, and humankind in some manner or other, but the details of the Genesis account are simply a work of fiction meant to create "the moral of the story." How can that be any more "the word of God" to you than one of Aesop's Fables?

At their root, all myths are fictional. (Or can you name a single myth that verifiably took place? Hah!) Calling the Genesis account "myth" is tantamount to labeling it "fiction." You think you can get away with this because we cannot go back in time and verify the accuracy of the account, and part and parcel with this is your doubt that it ever happened the way it says it happened. This is a potential stepping-stone to complete loss of faith in God; once one opens the door to doubting what Genesis says, it is but a small step to doubt what Exodus says, or (for that matter) what John's Gospel says. We cannot go back in time and verify that Jesus said any of the things He's supposed to have said. Why, we cannot verify that He died on the cross, let alone rose from the dead! "The little foxes spoil the vine." One cannot legitimately pick and choose what parts of the Bible he will believe or disbelieve. The road you tread is extremely dangerous from a spiritual standpoint.

I stoutly reject any and all characterization of any portion of the Bible as "myth." The very word is inextricably entwined with the concepts of falsehood and imaginary events. "Myth" should have no place in any discussion of the Bible. The idea that the Genesis account is "simply a story" is way out in left field.

 

It is not my intention to offend you, but Genesis 1 is not ‘history’, and was never intended to be understood that way. 1st century interpreters understood that. You can read them for yourself. I’m afraid you are conflating ‘truth’ with ‘fact’, which is itself a symptom of excessive modernist reductionism. Not all truth need be historical (e.g., mathematics); some of it can indeed be mythical, and have contemporary interest and relevance. It is not the purpose of religion to tell us how the world came to be.

Of course ‘myth’ has a place in discussion of the Bible. Ancient sagas like the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Ugaritic texts predate the Bible by centuries, and there is a clear relation of literary dependence. There is no good reason why mere recognition of those simple facts should be controversial in the year 2022.

Genesis 1 wasn’t written for us; it was written for 6th/5th century BCE Jews living in exile. For them, it had a very powerful message of God’s mastery, with the implication that there was a real basis of hope in their eventual redemption and return. Whatever contemporary relevance it has for us, must be rooted in its original purpose for being written. We risk missing its true meaning altogether if we insist on reading it as The History of the World, Chapter 1.

 

Jesus quoted from the Genesis account and taught it as historical fact. So did Paul. So did Peter, James, Jude, and John. None of them gave any indication in their teachings that they viewed the account as myth. This is an innovation within Christianity and is heterodox at best.

 

Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ He answered, ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning “made them male and female”, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’
Matthew 19:3-6​

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’
Mark 10:2-9​

Clearly, this is a teaching Jesus recorded in both Matthew and Mark, presumably reflecting the common tradition. The teaching specifically echoes Genesis 1: 27 and Genesis 2:24. I don't see any suggestion that Jesus was teaching this as historical fact, though clearly, I see him affirming the truth of the passages. Historical Events are not the only way that truth is recorded. There is a gulf between myth and fiction. Clearly, I respect your right to view the passage as History, however, that is not the only way that Orthodox Christians might read these passages. My problem with mandating this kind of understanding is that you run the risk of trivialising both truth and the Gospel, and that is a place I do not want to go.

 

An innovation, you say? Heterodox?? My goodness, have you read the Church Fathers??? Allegorical interpretations of Genesis abound in their writings, not as a derivative sense but as the intended meaning. Just read St. Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis; he covers the range of interpretive options as well as anyone, and comes to no firm conclusion. Or go back further and read Philo (or the historian Josephus), whose writings had a very great influence, via Origen, on Alexandrian Christians, such as Athanasius, the very champion of orthodoxy if ever there was one.

 

Augustine in his monumental City of God makes a statement concerning hermeneutics that has great relevance to the current discussion, and influenced later medieval (and post-medieval) methods of interpretation, in particular regarding the boundary between religion and science:

This Mediator, having spoken what He judged sufficient first by the prophets, then by His own lips, and afterwards by the apostles, has besides produced the Scripture which is called canonical, which has paramount authority, and to which we yield assent in all matters of which we ought not to be ignorant, and yet cannot know of ourselves. For if we attain the knowledge of present objects by the testimony of our own senses, whether internal or external, then, regarding objects remote from our own senses, we need others to bring their testimony, since we cannot know them by our own, and we credit the persons to whom the objects have been or are sensibly present. Accordingly, as in the case of visible objects which we have not seen, we trust those who have, (and likewise with all sensible objects,) so in the case of things which are perceived by the mind and spirit, i.e., which are remote from our own interior sense, it behooves us to trust those who have seen them set in that incorporeal light, or abidingly contemplate them. (Book 11, ch. 3)
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So, increases in our ability to observe phenomena, and to use those observations to make further determinations about them, reduce our need to rely on external testimony for knowledge of those things, according to the principle Augustine has described. The later Jewish scholar Maimonides said much the same thing in his writings, as did Aquinas. All these men assumed that truth is coherent and self-consistent, and that what is properly ascertained in one field of knowledge cannot contradict what is properly ascertained in another. That is why the work of interpretation has never been a static exercise.