I do believe that the existence of one God who created the universe is ‘intuitively obvious’, without recourse to tradition or texts.

When you, Peter, read the Genesis creation narrative, you’re able to recognize its correspondence with what you’ve already intuited as true. There are, of course, others who claim that the proposition “God created the universe” is not intuitively obvious. Is the God intuition granted only to some, or do the others deny or lose this intuition? The New Testament makes a case for both positions. It seems like an honest Christian response to the atheistic materialists: either you haven’t been given eyes to see, or else you’ve become futile in your speculations and so your foolish heart has been darkened.

As someone who by intuition and faith already believes in God, you find no evidence to disprove this belief – just as someone who doesn’t believe in God finds no evidence to disprove his disbelief. Fine.

Now we move beyond the broad assertion of intuited truth – God created the universe in an orderly way – to the details. Genesis 1 asserts that God created the trees before the sun and that He finished creating everything in six days. Do these Biblical details resonate with your intuition about the truth? Or, because you have faith that the Creator-God is responsible for the Biblical text, do you believe that the Biblical details are true even if they seem contrary to reason, to evidence, perhaps even to intuition? Based on your comments you seem to endorse one or both of these two positions. You have no need for True Myth, because you believe it’s possible to read Genesis 1 as a literally true historical narrative describing the origin of the universe.

Unbelievers and religious liberals are more likely to assert that the Genesis 1 details are “mythical” in the usual use of the word: primitive ideas that served a purpose at the time but that just aren’t true. Again, no need for True Myth.

There are some among the emerging post-evangelical community who wish to affirm the general truth of God as creator without having to defend the literal truth of the Genesis details either to unbelievers or to themselves. Decisions must still be made about why the details appear in the story, what they signify, and how to evaluate their truth status. Here’s where the True Myth explanation is often invoked. The purpose behind my post is to explore which versions of the True Myth idea can best achieve the desired ends.

The Reformed tradition of Biblical exegesis has been criticized by the emerging community for overemphasizing timeless propositional truths at the expense of historical narrative truths. The Biblical creation story is written as a historical narrative, and it has traditionally been read that way by exegetes schooled in the Reformed tradition. It seems to me that the True Myth approach to the creation narrative is an attempt to de-historicize the text, transforming it into a set of general propositions (God’s creatorliness, the goodness of the material world, and so on) while ignoring timelines, sequences, and other distinctly narrative features of the text. Frankly, True Myth strikes me as both disingenuous and untenable, but I wanted to give the idea a fair shake. I get the sense that you, Peter, agree. This agreement would return us to the longstanding dichotomous question, the kind of question that perhaps marks us indelibly as ham-handed modernists with no sense of literary subtlety: is the Genesis creation text a true historical narrative, or is it a false one?