An excellent piece. I’d like to address a few of your observations in more detail.

Myth is not primarily for historical veracity… the ‘why’ of myth is arguably as important than the ‘what’ of myth but not in the rather binary way that modernism has us believe. (That if you prove an error in a fact then the myth is, by this act, ‘disproved’.) This is to misunderstand something fundamental about mythology; its veracity is not in some supposed invulnerability to critique from external forms of thought, in fact it does not often fare well against such. Myth is narratively applied belief.

I too understand myth in these terms. The question is whether post-evangelicals are prepared to read portions of the Bible as myth, as narrative expressions of belief without regard for historical veracity. This sort of mythologizing of Biblical stories seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable. At the same time, however, the literal reading of the text also seems hard to sustain in a scientific age, or perhaps even in a pre-scientific one. In the “True Myth” post we explored various options for construing a myth as being “true” without necessarily being factual. For example, a myth can represent truths about God, the world, and mankind in metaphorical or allegorical form. Participants in the ensuing discussion seemed reluctant to recategorize the Genesis 1 creation narrative as mythic, based largely on the structure of the text itself and on the way it has historically been interpreted. As a consequence we began exploring alternative literal exegeses rather than allegorical meanings. I think it would be worthwhile to reopen the mythic possibilities of these texts.

This brings me up against a barrier that I find so often it is becoming tiresome. Our mainstream western education has left us aesthetically illiterate. Talk about aesthetics now and people assume that you are talking about something superficial or even trivial, about style or fashion. The domination of technology, and the industrialised and consumerist forms of modern education lead us to define each other by what we do and what we consume, by our utility. The arts are optional, a form of leisure or something to be enjoyed outside of real life. Personally, I blame Mammon, but it was not always like this.

Western modernity precipitated a burgeoning of artistic expression, though it got off to a slow start in the iconoclastic Protestant countries. The novel is an almost exclusively modern literary form. I surmise that most fiction writers believe that they are telling some kind of truth and also that they are creating art. Still, I don’t believe that writers and readers regard fiction as mythic. A good novel may offer insights into everyday reality, but the writer isn’t consciously attempting to wrap eternal truths or beliefs or gods in stories. I doubt whether even those binary banal scientists or evangelical exegetes have much difficulty recognizing that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a real inspector, or even that the Scotland Yard of the books wasn’t quite the real Scotland Yard. I bet Richard Dawkins could read Genesis 1 as a myth without a lot of special instruction.

The creation story is not and never was a speech against Darwin. It isn’t even a story about six days or seven days as much as it is a defining story for the eighth day.

This opens up an important question: if the creation story is a myth, what is the myth about? In reading the story, does the text itself tell us that it’s really about the eighth day rather than the seventh or the first six? Is it about God’s omnipotence or about man’s similarity to God? Does it tell us that God is one or that God is multiple? How do we ascertain that the text is really a “doxology of resistance”? And what does it mean mythically for the trees to appear before the sun in this story? In short, how do we exegete a myth?Then there’s the more fundamental question: how are we to decide that a Biblical narrative is mythical rather than historical? Does the text itself suggest that it should be read as a myth, or does this discernment depend on a kind of sensus aestheticus in the sensitive reader? By what criteria do we decide that the Creation narrative is mythic, whereas God’s detailed instructions for decorating the tabernacle are historical? Does Genesis 1 automatically get recategorized as mythic because it can’t possibly be true historically? Then there’s the question of mythic truth. If some of these stories are mythic, are they any truer an aesthetic expression of eternal mysteries than, say, the Greek myths, or the Babylonian ones, or the exilic fable you’ve written?

I like a good story as much as the next guy. Why not just call it fiction and be done with it?