Remythologizing Theology

Remythologizing Theology

Introduction: What is remythologizing?

At the heart of Christian theology, as an intellectual activity, there lies the continual interpenetration of dramatic and ontological.

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The apostle Peter distinguishes the gospel from “cleverly devised myths” by rooting the former in eyewitness testimony (2 Pet. 1:16). He bases his case for the majesty of Jesus on the “voice borne from heaven” that accompanied Jesus’ transfiguration: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (2 Pet. 1:17). Ear-witness testimony thus figures prominently too: “we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure” (2 Pet. 1:18–19).²

In combining the prophecies of Isaiah 42:1 and Psalm 2:7, the voice from heaven identifies Jesus by referring to his ordination as Suffering Servant and coronation as Son of God. Peter explains this remarkable piece of theologizing that links suffering to sovereignty by noting that “no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21). The passage thus alludes, in a pericope-sized nutshell, to the work of Father, Son, and Spirit in the history of redemption from Israel to Jesus Christ. Yet what stands out is the voice from heaven.³

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Is there a speaking subject up there? If those to whom electrical switches and elective surgery are a matter of course find it hard to believe in miracles, how much more difficult is it for those who have explored space and mapped the human genome to believe in a voice from heaven? Hans Urs von Balthasar identifies the key question: “whether God can enter a drama that takes place in the world, and play a part in it, without becoming mythological.”⁴ In the light of the prevailing twenty-first-century Western plausibility structures, many may be tempted to view the story of Jesus as a poorly designed myth.

Human beings are inveterate producers and consumers of myths. Inasmuch as stories help order and provide meaning to human life, myths – and other forms of the imagination, including narratives and metaphors – are the currency we live by.⁵ Some myths die hard. John Robinson would no doubt view biblical language about a voice from heaven as contributing to the (for him) idolatrous notion that God is “up there” or “out there.” Is theism necessarily mythological?

Paul Tillich contrasted God as a supreme being with the notion of God as Being-itself. To think of God as one being, albeit the highest, among many is to espouse a mythological, supernatural picture of the God–world relation. Both Robinson and Tillich consider the idea that God is a supreme being – like us, only much, much bigger and better – a bogey to scare young theologians. James Morrow’s novel, Towing Jehovah,⁶ illustrates what they fear is the consequence of taking biblical language too literally. The story begins with the angel Gabriel (feathers and all) appearing to a sea captain in 1992, announcing the death of God and the subsequent fall of his two-mile-long corpse into the ocean. The captain receives an angelic commission to tow God to the Arctic, where the frozen body will float at rest inside a hollowed-out iceberg. The captain’s ship, an Ultra Large Crude Carrier chartered by the Vatican, is an apt and ironic choice: it takes a supertanker to tow the supreme being.

The various characters in the book respond differently to the news of God’s demise. Father Ockham, a Jesuit delegated to represent the

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Vatican in the flotilla, initially ponders the cosmological implications: “Was He truly gone, or had His spirit merely vacated some gratuitous husk? … Did heaven still exist? … What of the Son and the Ghost?”⁷ Later he forms a theory as to why God died: “In my gut I feel it was an empathic death. He died from a bad case of the twentieth century.”⁸ Towards the end of the book, however, he formulates a different hypothesis, arguing that God willed himself out of existence out of love for humanity: “He realized our continued belief in Him was constraining us, holding us back” – a theory to which a Cardinal sneeringly responds, “Oh, that old argument.”⁹

A perennial problem: myth, mythos, and metaphysics

To speak well of God one must first let God present himself. To move from faith to understanding, however, one must think through the implications of God’s self-presentation. What must God be like in order to do what the Bible depicts him as doing with words: creating, commanding, promising, consoling?

Myth

The term “myth” typically inspires no more confidence today than it did in New Testament times, not least because it is notoriously difficult to define.¹⁰ The term oscillates uneasily between “foolish delusion” and “vehicle of higher truth.” It often carries pejorative connotations, especially among those who are looking for some form of scientific rationality or historical truth. The Concise OED, for example, lists as its first definition “a traditional narrative usu. involving supernatural or imaginary persons and embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena.” George Caird notes that

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the sense of myth as sheer fiction always lurks in the background of the discussion, and that this is “the only sense the word has in the New Testament.”¹¹

Myths are “sacred stories” or “stories of the gods” that characteristically take place in sacred space-time (i.e., apart from the realm of ordinary history) and typically involve superhuman speech and acts.¹² Early modern anthropologists saw myth as “primitive” – “a prescientific attempt to explain natural phenomena.”¹³ Yet ancient myths, such as Plato’s famous myth of the cave, also serve as vehicles of universal truth. From yet another perspective, Carl Jung argues that myths articulate archetypal patterns that have a social function, expressing the collective unconscious. Myths may therefore have an explanatory function (as stand-in for science), an illustrative function (as stand-in for philosophy), or a communal function (as foundation narrative that shapes a group’s identity).

Rudolf Bultmann distinguishes between three senses of myth in the New Testament’s message concerning the event of Jesus Christ: (1) a cosmological sense that attempts to explain the cosmos in terms of a triple-decker picture, with the heavens “above” and hell “below”; (2) an existential sense that communicates universal truths concerning human being; and (3) a kerygmatic sense that announces an act of God: “Bultmann speaks in turn as a man of science, an existential philosopher, and a hearer of the word.”¹⁴

Bultmann believed that men and women who accept modern science cannot also accept the biblical accounts of God’s acts. The biblical reports of divine action cannot literally mean what they say if the scientific account of nature is true. While some theologians and scientists are currently busy trying to demonstrate the compatibility of science and religion, others agree with Bultmann and sharply

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distinguish between scientific and mythic (religious) thought.¹⁵ Neither option, however, does justice to biblical descriptions of divine action or to the idea that God is not merely a cause but a purposive agent. The kerygma is good news about what God has done, not a poetic way of expressing existential self-understanding. Between the theoretical rationality of science and the existential understanding of myth, then, lies the practical reason of personal agents.¹⁶ The latter is the special province of mythos.

Mythos

It is important to distinguish what Aristotle calls mythos from the aforementioned modern senses of “myth.” Remythologizing pertains first and foremost to mythos, not myth. Mythos is Aristotle’s term for dramatic plot: a unified course of action that includes a beginning, middle, and end. Drama “is essentially an imitation not of persons but of actions and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain activity, not a quality.”¹⁷ Mythos concerns what people do and what happens to them; it is a story that concerns doers (agents) and the done-to (sufferers).

Myth and mythos diverge in at least two important respects, with regard to both content and form. First, as to content, mythos pertains to this-worldly rather than other-worldly events, to ordinary as well as heroic stories and histories. Second, the meaning and truth of mythos are linked to the way the action is rendered. Unlike myths that hide kerygmatic kernels under disposable literary husks, the

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form and content of mythos are integrally linked.¹⁸ It is precisely for this reason that Ricoeur seizes upon mythos as the unique means for depicting or “configuring” personal identity, for who we are as persons (content) is inseparable from what we say and do – from how we realize our potential for communicative agency (form). The following account of mythos builds on several of Ricoeur’s seminal insights that modify Aristotle’s traditional understanding.

In the first place, Ricoeur calls attention to the way in which mythos and mimesis work together in Aristotle to make sense of what persons do in time. In Plato, mimesis (imitation) had a more metaphysical sense whereby things imitate Ideas as works of art imitate things. In Aristotle’s Poetics, however, what gets imitated is a matter not of being but of doing: action. Mythos is a mode of discourse that configures human action so as to create a form of wholeness (i.e., a unified action) out of a multiplicity of incidents. “Poetics” refers to how authors create meaningful wholes (viz., stories) that allow one to make sense of what would otherwise be a chaotic jumble of unrelated events. A dramatic plot or mythos thus “configures” a totality of time out of a succession of events. Indeed, Ricoeur suggests that the mythos of drama is to time what the icon of painting is to space.¹⁹ Whereas Ricoeur focuses on the way in which mythos configures human action, however, the present work deploys the notion in order to understand divine action.²⁰

Second, Ricoeur treats mythos primarily as an operation – emplotment – rather than as a literary genre or structure.²¹ Specifically, he calls attention to mythos as a cognitive instrument. Emplotment is a unique and indispensable means of making sense of a phenomenon – a course of human action; human freedom – before which scientific explanation can only shrug its shoulders. As such, mythos offers an “intelligibility appropriate to the field of praxis, not

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that of theoria.”²² The present work develops Ricoeur’s suggestion in a communicative direction: the mythos of Jesus Christ renders intelligible the field of triune communicative praxis.

Third, and perhaps most controversially, whereas Ricoeur tends to associate mythos with the narrative form only, I shall use the term more broadly to refer to all the ways in which diverse forms of biblical literature represent, and render, the divine drama. Here I take up Martha Nussbaum’s point that the forms – the how of poetic discourse – contribute to the content or what of discourse. What Nussbaum says of novels and philosophy applies to the Bible and theology as well: “The very qualities that make the novels so unlike dogmatic abstract treatises are, for us, the source of their philosophical interest.”²³ Mythos in its broadest sense therefore stands for all those forms of discourse that may be employed in the course of a story or drama to render an agent or patient, a unified action or a unified passion.

Mythos is thus a form of what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls, in the context of aesthetics, a means of “world-projection.”²⁴ In the hands of an author or artist, mythos serves as a cognitive tool to project a sense of the world as an ordered whole. While Ricoeur’s focus is on narrative and Wolterstorff’s on the work of art, the focus of the present work is on the various ways in which the biblical mythos renders human and divine reality by depicting persons in act and at rest, speaking and silent. To speak of the biblical mythos is to indicate that complex dramatic whole that renders not only the action but also reality of God. As such, mythos has theo-ontological significance. God, like being, may be said in many ways.²⁵

The biblical mythos is both one and many. There is one overall plot, namely, the story of God’s self-presentation in the history of Israel and Jesus Christ. Yet God’s unified self-presentation is rendered by many voices speaking in diverse (literary) registers. The many literary forms of the Bible are theologically significant both for what they say (content) and how they say it (discourse). To anticipate: the various voices that make up the canon constitute a dialogue that

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is itself a key ingredient in the triune economy of communicative action. Stated differently: the biblical mythos is the written form of God’s self-presentation. As such, the Bible is the plumb line for right Christian speech about God.

Metaphysics

Can one by doing metaphysics find out God? Not if by metaphysics one means speculation that begins “from below,” with human experience, and seeks through a process of incremental and inferential reasoning to arrive at conclusions about what God “above” must be like. The problem with “totalizing” metaphysics is the underlying assumption that there is one set of categories, accessible to unaided human reason, which applies both to the world and to God, created and uncreated reality. This invariably leads to ontotheology, a unified system of thought that employs concepts such as Supreme Being or Unmoved Mover as conceptual stopgaps to prevent infinite metaphysical regress.²⁶ Call it “bad” metaphysics: bad, because it imposes a system of categories on God without attending to God’s own self-communication.²⁷

Metaphysics, understood as the study of reality beyond mere appearances, has in modern times more the fragrance of logos than of mythos about it; its privileged forms are conceptual, not dramatic. To be sure, some thinkers have broached the “dividing wall of hostility” that for centuries has separated poets (and dramatists) from philosophers.²⁸ Philosophers of science have acknowledged the reality-depicting capacity of metaphors.²⁹ And the recent rediscovery of narrative is one of the signal contributions of late twentieth-century theology. Still, in some quarters (e.g., analytic theism), proper (i.e., metaphysically robust) God-talk remains a metaphor-free zone,

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while other neighborhoods, especially those influenced by postmodern Continental philosophy, routinely prohibit metaphysics. By and large, mythos and logos remain segregated.

Matthew Levering’s Scripture and Metaphysics sets out to overturn the opposition “between scriptural and metaphysical modes of articulating truth,”³⁰ not least because metaphysics is often required if faith is to attain understanding of the implications of biblical texts, particularly when these concern the reality of God. Unfortunately, the opposition between mythos and logos has been exacerbated by recent Trinitarian theologians who see more discontinuity than continuity between the metaphysical attempt to lay bare the ontological and causal joints of reality and the scriptural account of God in dramatic and narrative form.³¹ Some among these theologians have repudiated Greek metaphysics; some have espoused modern forms of metaphysics (e.g., relationality); others have rejected metaphysics altogether; and still others try to reform metaphysics along biblical lines, as does the theodramatic version set forth in these pages.

An interesting case in point of the first tendency is Jack Miles’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, God: A Biography.³² Miles sets out to write the life of God the protagonist – the protos agonistes or “first actor” – of the Hebrew Bible. The result is a “theography.”³³ Miles attends to the development of the mythos, a dramatic plot that includes narrative, speech spoken by God, speeches addressed to and about God, and silence. Though he distinguishes (literary) criticism from (historical) scholarship and proposes to focus on the first, he ends up suggesting that “God” is in fact an amalgam of several divine personas: “The equation is creator (Yahweh/’elohim) + cosmic destroyer (Tiamat) + personal god (god of …) + warrior (Baal) = GOD, the composite protagonist

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of the Tanakh.”³⁴ According to Miles, then, the protagonist of the Hebrew Bible is a God with multiple personalities.

Theology must go further than theography: theology must explore the logos of the graphe or mythos of God. Miles’s biography of God illustrates the formal (i.e., hermeneutical) problem posed by the apparently mythical elements in the biblical narrative (e.g., the divine voice coming from heaven): how to move from the setting forth in speech to the ordering of reason, from the literary rendering to the reality rendered, from “myth” to metaphysics. At its best, the practice of metaphysical questioning is a work of faith seeking understanding and “constitutes a spiritual exercise that purifies from idolatry those who would contemplate the self-revealing God.”³⁵ Be that as it may, given the complex relations between myth, mythos, and metaphysics, the question still stands: how may we think and speak well of God?

Whether we are analyzing the concept of ens perfectissium or narrating the story of Jesus, we must rely on what MacKinnon calls a “system of projection” in order to speak of what transcends space-time human experience.³⁶ Theologians have employed numerous conceptual schemes to speak of God (e.g., Platonism, existentialism); the nagging worry is that such schemes simply foist our categories and interests onto the subject matter, thus revealing more about the cultural-historical conditioning of humanity than about divinity.

MacKinnon wonders whether Christian theology may be “much more than it realizes the victim of the victory won in the person of Plato by the philosophers over the poets, and in particular the tragedians.”³⁷ Yet Christianity is less about philosophies and systems of moralities than it is about how God’s particular words and acts in the history of Israel converged climactically in the history of Jesus Christ. This book conducts a MacKinnon-inspired thought experiment, adopting as its system of projection the biblical mythos, together with the concrete forms of discourse that comprise it, as well as the categories implicit in the theodramatic action to which these forms attest (and in which, as we shall see, they also participate). If God’s activity is best construed in terms of triune communicative agency, then it behooves us to attend to the concrete manner in which God “projects” his own story. Hence my thesis: the mythos of the Bible – the christological content and canonical form – is the written means of God’s triune self-presentation. In a word, the mythos is the medium (and the message).

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