Relates:

Not so easy to respond to, I admit, because I don’t think I understand where you are going with this, but I’ll have a go.

Remember that my point was not to debate historicity, or the Genesis account. I wanted to celebrate mythic ways of thinking, and more widely, aesthetic ways of acting, as part of our interpretive and expressive role. I’m not doing dogmatics here!

When it comes to understanding stories, especially ancient stories where we don’t have the tools to get at historicity, the nature of the story in its subjective adoption is much more open to us. When I suggested that Genesis 1 is a phenomenological account I mean to emphasize exactly this subjective element. Genesis 1 is a perfect response, in structure and scope, to a man sitting on a hill and staring up at the night sky. (How else could he see the sky but as a great vault above him?) He wonders about the rhythm of day and night, of seasons, of birth and death. He sees the sea in the distance and the forests to the west, he wonders at the distinctions between creatures that fly, creatures that die out of water, that die in water. How can this be?

In other words, I wouldn’t agree with you about myth being static over against history’s dynamism. That seems rather binary. But I would agree that one function of myth is as a stabilizing story in the context of shifting events.

Samicarr’s contribution here was much appreciated. His contention that myth is dead under the weight of modernist scientism is well made. But I would also want to say that in the overwhelming, and rapidly changing world of fantasies and propaganda within which we live, mythic narrative is more appropriate and potentially more potent than ever. Myth is not dead, it is just never allowed to mature, and it can only mature by being lived.

Where you lose me, rather, is in statements like “the Christian standard for history is the historical person, Jesus the Messiah.” I don’t understand what you mean. If you are suggesting that we can exercise critical judgment on texts like Genesis but not on texts about Jesus because ‘Christian’ historicity somehow starts in the New Testament, I wouldn’t agree. Separate Jesus from his Jewish history and Jesus makes no sense. To disconnect Jesus not only from his nation’s history, but from the stories, no matter how mythic, that were formative and normalising in that history, is to make Jesus himself mythic, and our place in his narrative quite imaginary.

Just to be really smart-assed, and with the usual smile, I’d like to agree with your final sentence, but I suspect that what I am really after is for the Kingdom of God to make us a reality!