The modern era was partly birthed with the larger exploration of the world. New vistas, strange continents and peoples, unimagined cultures and histories, not to mention new diseases, new species, and just mountains of raw data!

Worlds to be explored and conquered seems to have been a guiding theme of the Royal Society. Vespucci, DaGama, and Collumbus with their later counterparts of Livingstone, Stanley and Park were very much the forerunners of Darwin. The olde myths were rapidly replaced by new ones.

Mystery was both created and destroyed by these explorations. In the background was a scattering of old beliefs that now became labeled as myths in a negative sense, the shells of discarded belief systems which had been questioned and came crashing down in quick succession. Worldviews adapted and changed or disappeared forever. The upheavals were massive and one of the institutions worst affected was undoubtedly the church. The response at a deeper level was to bury what was left of the mythology and hide it in layers of protective mystery.

The hangover of the fear of the death of whole systems of belief (and the authorities that these beliefs had supported) brought renewed vigor to the defense of doctrine but to little avail for a surprising feature of the continuing reformation was the rebuttal of the rest of the renaissance. The dichotomies that modernity inherited from the fact that the rebels were after all churchmen are still with us today. We still fear myth or rather the labeling of something as myth not because it is irrational, not because it is unscientific but because it points to the very thin thread on which our doctrine is made to hang. C.S. Lewis is perhaps the only apologist that has taken this bull by the horns and helped to rehabilitate true myth.

I don’t see our present efforts at understanding the creation accounts in Genesis to be that more rigorous exegesis might yield understandings that can soften or even unify the internal conflicts of the first three chapters of Genesis, and perhaps even help us develop a hermeneutic that eases the story’s relationship with other types of thinking. but rather an attempt to see, without overly defensive postures, into what the text meant and the boundaries that have to be explored are our own limitations of language, knowledge and insight.

If only we too could venture into the unknown with the confidence that what we will see will be the truth of discovery, that God has made us a whole world to explore together, sources of great rivers of truth to be found with wonder - and so to know what true myth God has hidden for us to discover behind such mundane physical existences and seemingly simple words.

Live to serve : Serve to live