Myth Became Fact
Myth Became Fact
It is a holdover from our modernist past that we consider "myth" to be synonymous with false. We also tend to think it means "old." Now in our postmodern maturity we've reached the conclusion that while myth is not true, truth is myth. But there is an important distinction between myths and lies, one that, sadly, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell understand better than we do. The good news is that C.S. Lewis understood it also, and wrote brilliantly on it in a little essay "Myth Made Fact." (The essay, by the way, is one of many fine Lewis essays in the collection "God in the Dock.")
Some have sought to make anti- apologetical hay out of the historical fact that there are all sorts of religions that have as a part of their story, not only a flood myth, but even a dying and rising God. Some argue that therefore the Christian message is necessarily borrowed from these older, and now nearly forgotten religions. Others instead argued that this notion of a dying and rising God, even it is not borrowed, flows out of some Jungian collective unconscious, and therefore cannot be true. Lewis took the tack not that the Christian story is so different that these accusations do not stand, but rather that it is different for this reason, that our story is history, that our myth invaded time, and became reality.
Have you ever wondered why it is that one weak-spined, pagan king made his way into our most universal confession? When we say, in reciting the Apostle's Creed, of Jesus that He, "suffered under Pontius Pilate", did that ever seem strange to you? I believe that statement is there for this very reason. Jesus lived in real space and real time. He suffered under a real man, in a real place. While our faith is indeed ancient, going back to the righteous sacrifice of the first martyr, Abel, it did not grow up in the misty tradition of a pre-historic people. While the Holy Spirit did come and inspire the New Testament, He did not do it 1800 years after the fact through golden plates and magic glasses, behind a curtain.
But Lewis went one step further. He argued not only that these myths were not evidence against the Christian faith, but that they were evidence for it. He reasoned that these myths demonstrated that the message of the cross was built into the very nature of reality. (Please don't get your presuppositional hackles up. He did not argue that the gospel message could be understood and embraced in this common myth.) He saw not only the myths as a sort of universal pre-evangelism, but the humdrum realities from which they came as pre-evangelism as well. That the seed corn must die so that the corn might flourish in the fields not only bespoke that there might be a great Corn King who sacrifices his son for the good of the crop, but that God the Father might send His Son, that His bride might be won. The temporal reality (corn) pointed to a spiritual non-reality, (the Corn King) which in turn pointed to a temporal and spiritual reality, the historical Jesus, who lived, died, and was resurrected.
Such not only serves as another tool in our apologetical arsenal, but it also serves to empower our imagination. I remember watching the movie Excalibur, not for the first time, but for the first time after reading Lewis on myth. (Beware, beware, some scenes are suitable for the fast-forward button.) Excalibur was released in the early 80's as an almost comic retelling of the life of King Arthur. It was not intended to be serious art, but for a young man who had never seen the frolic of Broadway's Camelot, or trudged through Morte d'Arthur, it was a great introduction to this wonderful story. (I am now re-reading The Once and Future King, and anxious to get not comic relief, but relief from the comedy). I watched Arthur ride off to battle Mordrid, he and his remaining knights riding horseback through fields of flowering dogwoods, and remembered the myth of the dogwood, that of such was made cross on which Christ hung. I watched Arthur drive the spear his enemy had put into his side deeper into himself so that he could slay the devil Mordrid, and remembered that Christ sacrificed Himself for us, and crushed the head of the serpent. I watched Arthur being carried off as by angels to Avalon, with the promise that the once king would also be future king, and understood that this same Jesus would return in like manner. From there I moved backward, seeing the Knights of the Round Table as disciples, and Lancelot either as Judas or as Peter.
And from that point I went to the movies in search of Jesus. I did so not because I believed there was a secret conspiracy of Christian screenwriters in Hollywood, but because I believe it is in Him and through Him and to Him that we live, that this is His world, and He is inescapable. (Disney's Tron, a sort of eighties version of The Matrix, not only told the gospel, but told it from a distinctly Reformed perspective. But this was so clear I believe it had to be intentional.) E.T. had so many Christian themes running through it that the rumor is that Spielberg worried out loud that making the film made him untrue to his Jewish heritage.
And there He is in Oz as well. Some have seen in Baum's fantasy story a repudiation of the Christian faith (as well as a host of other subtle intentions. Some say it is a screed against the gold standard.) That great, unsung Sean Connery film, Zardoz, says as much, with the savage warrior discovering that the warrior god he worshipped was not real when he discovered a copy of The Wizard of Oz. The wizard is not real, but a carnival barker, with a powerful combination of technology and show biz. All that we need is within us, and only the silly dream of a place over the rainbow when there's no place like home. While this understanding has much to go for it, we cannot be sure. Such might have been the author's intention, but Jesus seems to have crashed his party. Dorothy comes to Oz from another world. She has left behind all that was familiar to her. She is assaulted by the forces of darkness, heals the sick, and having been locked up as for dead, she escapes and destroys the evil one. (Which, you'll remember, she had to do before she could go home.) Her minions, that is, of the Witch, rejoice to have been set free from the dominion of the devil. And Dorothy ascends back to her home. However reluctantly, the little girl from Kansas reminds us of the Man from Galilee. In fact, this story tells us more about the Bible than The Omega Code.
It takes imagination to see these things, what our friends in Moscow might call "the poetic vision," and what others might call a Hebrew, rather than a Greek mindset. The muse, like machine-shy ectoplasm in ghost stories, doesn't come in a context of high-tech gadgetry, and cold, abstract reasoning. In fact, nothing kills the muse faster. God is not the author of confusion. I am not arguing that we will all reach spiritual maturity if we will but figure out the sound of one hand clapping. But neither is He a mathematician. He is instead, a poet. Such need not send us off into New Age fantasies, but instead can reveal the depth, and the beauty of the gospel.
God's poetry, as Lewis so rightly points out, however, is not restricted either to movies, nor to myths passed around campfires in ancient worlds. He writes in writing, but He also writes in living. There is as much poetry in the gospel as there is gospel in our poetry. But there is still more. For He lives His lines through our lives. The flesh enlivens the poetry as the poetry sings the flesh.
Take the analogy Paul gives us in Ephesians between the work of Christ for His church, and the relationship of a husband and wife. Paul is not merely, for the sake of communication, latching onto some universal experience to explain a spiritual reality. He is not giving us a mere word picture to help us understand more words. Instead this is how God designed marriage. The relationship between the two is not synthetic, but analytic. Or, to put it more poetically, the two images, Christ and the church, husband and wife, are one flesh. Jesus is the Word, the Myth made flesh. And marriage is the Flesh made flesh once more, by design.
But I raise that analogy only by way of analogy. For this is true of all of our lives. When we are caring for the sick, we are Christ to them, just as they are Christ to us. When we are coaxing eggs from chickens, we are having His dominion exercised over us, as we are exercising dominion over the chickens. When we are suffering we are a flesh and blood picture of the Suffering Servant. That is what we are here for, to make visible, enfleshed, the glory of God. That is our reason for being.
And that too is the reason for the Highlands Study Center, and for Every Thought Captive. To too many the Christian life is a myth, in the sense that it is false. We cannot live all out lives to the glory of God. We cannot love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We cannot love our wives as Christ loves the church. And so we grab as reality the ways of the world, and embrace the myth that we will still one day make it over the rainbow. Our desire here at the Highlands Study Center is that we offer not the mere propositions of the faith (though that is vitally important, as it was the Word that was made flesh), but that we would live it, in space and time. We want, given our multitude of warts and sins, to make the myth flesh.
Every Thought Captive is as personal (and as straightforward) as it is not as a stunt, a crass method of standing out in the crowd, but to remind you that there are real people behind these ideas (people who happen to be rather straightforward). I tell our writers over and over again, "Just say it like you were talking to someone, because that's all you are doing." And these people live in real space and real time, where babies are born, where snowmen are built, where teeth are lost, and alas, where chickens die a futile death. What you are reading are the thoughts of two men, and a few of their friends. But our hope is just as these thoughts are born in our lives, just as they are the myths that have come from the flesh, so to will they bear much fruit in your lives. Our prayer is that we will spend still more time together, learning from each other how this myth is to be lived. And in such talking, that we will have gone far in living the myth. Our fear is that you will read this as just another set of interesting propositions, sometimes poetically phrased, and like the men at Mars Hill, move on when something newer and more interesting comes along.
As you read, we hope you'll see Oz in dazzling technicolor. We hope that your eyes will grow wide, and you will exclaim with joy, "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto", and then realize that we never were.