{"id":1259,"date":"2017-09-02T10:41:01","date_gmt":"2017-09-02T09:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1259"},"modified":"2020-07-13T10:23:44","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T09:23:44","slug":"myths-metaphors-mysteries-and-making-it-up-theology-meets-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1259","title":{"rendered":"Myths, metaphors, mysteries and making it up: theology meets fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This is another post which first appeared on The Way Station blog).<\/p>\n

There is a saying which I\u2019ve seen variously attributed to African, Amerind and Asian wise men, which goes \u201cI don\u2019t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true\u201d.<\/p>\n

A little while ago, I blogged on the back of a short story by Ursula le Guin called \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d (here\u2019s a link if you\u2019re interested<\/a>), which is most definitely \u201cmade up\u201d. On the other hand, through an entirely fictional place and people, it conveys a really important truth about how I, at least, feel about morality, and in particular the utilitarian concept that the individual should be sacrificed for the greater good. It rests on the concept that the entire happiness of an otherwise idyllic, utopian society is founded on them keeping a vulnerable innocent in appalling conditions, and never even speaking a kind word to the victim \u2013 and, on learning of this truth about their society, some elect to walk away, then or later, despite leaving also all the positives of their society.<\/p>\n

Now, the blogger who reminded me of the story was using it as a metaphor (or, probably strictly speaking, an allegory, which is an extended and often more symbolic metaphor) for the church \u2013 and it made sense and conveyed, I think, a truth about the church. I used it as a metaphor for western society, and in particular the society of the UK in which I live. It doesn\u2019t aspire to the category of myth \u2013 myths are the great stories, the archetypes of human interaction or of the identity of a people. The story within the story of Omelas is, for the society described, a myth (as are our British legends of King Arthur, a foundational myth) \u2013 Ms. leGuin writes science fiction and fantasy, so within the logic of the story, it might<\/em> be true, and in that event it would be a true myth,\u00a0 or it might<\/em> be false, in which case it would still be a myth, but the happiness of Omelas would not actually necessarily depend on their continued cruelty. As it is clearly a foundational myth, though, tinkering with it might well produce unanticipated consequences even if there is no material causal link between the misery of the innocent and the wealth and happiness of the society, which is why I use the caveats \u201cnecessarily\u201d and \u201cmaterial\u201d. One such possibility lies in the works of Rene Girard; the innocent may be functioning as a scapegoat, and thereby actually contributing to the peace of the society through psychological rather than material mechanisms.<\/p>\n

The thing about metaphor, allegory and myth is that ultimately it doesn\u2019t matter whether \u201cit happened this way\u201d, the truth (or falsehood) of one of these literary figures is in how we apply it to situations in the real world \u2013 and it is then true to the extent that we are able to construct such an application. \u00a0A similar example is a joke \u2013 if I say \u201cA rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar\u201d, you are not going to ask me where the bar was, or what an imam was doing in a bar anyway, or when this happened, far less whether it happened. Those are just not the point \u2013 the point is in the punchline (which is \u201cand the barman says \u2018this is a joke, isn\u2019t it?\u2019 \u201c).<\/p>\n

Similarly, when Jesus told parables, they were metaphors or allegories; it wasn\u2019t important whether they happened that way (or at all), the message what in what you took from them. We are quite happy with the idea that Jesus made up these stories on the spot to illustrate a truth (or sometimes several truths) which were outside the stories themselves. Happily, even my most fundamentalist friends realise this.<\/p>\n

However, when we are talking of events in the life of Jesus which are recounted in the gospels, the more conservative among us suddenly become very concerned about whether things happened this way \u2013 where the bar was, in other words \u2013 and it becomes very difficult to get beyond that.<\/p>\n

There is a quite excellent book by John Dominic Crossan called \u201cThe Power of Parable \u2013 How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus\u201d<\/a>, which treats the narrative history of Jesus contained in the gospels as story, not asking whether it happened this way, but what lessons we can draw from those stories today. This just ignores the issue of \u201cwhether it happened like that\u201d and looks at a selection of stories from the gospels purely on the basis of what these stories can tell us about the situations we are in now.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, I suspect that my more conservative friends would really not be able to glean anything from it, because Crossan is taking as read the fact that the gospel writers were adjusting their stories in order to make their own points…<\/p>\n

It rather recalls to me discussions on the old Compuserve Religion Forum, where a wide variety of people were posting, from absolutely fundamentalist Christians through very liberal ones to atheists, agnostics and followers of other religions \u2013 the objective there was to discuss the religion, not to proselytise or fellowship. There were permanent problems actually getting a viable conversation going between these viewpoints, as the fundamentalists permanently homes in on whether the Bible was an inerrant historical (and scientific) account. Where I found an avenue to better discussion was in saying \u201clet\u2019s set on one side whether it happened that way, leaving biblical criticism and theology for later, and discuss application<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 how does this account impact your life at the moment?\u201d<\/p>\n

That way, we could sometimes manage to avoid the issue on which the two sides were never going to agree, and have sensible discussions. Not infrequently, the result was that a biblical inerrantist and a non-supernaturalist materialist could actually agree on the meaning of a passage, and that ultimately it was the application which mattered to them.<\/p>\n

And they \u201cgot the joke\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This is another post which first appeared on The Way Station blog). There is a saying which I\u2019ve seen variously attributed to African, Amerind and Asian wise men, which goes \u201cI don\u2019t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true\u201d. A little while ago, I blogged on the back of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,3,7,15,6,4],"class_list":["post-1259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biblical-history","tag-christianity","tag-historical-jesus","tag-preaching","tag-spirituality","tag-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1259"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1261,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions\/1261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}