One of the biggest controversies within many Evangelical circles today revolves around the interpretation of Genesis 1-11. As I have written about many times, young earth creationists/ultra-Fundamentalists like Ken Ham insist that Genesis 1-11 has to be a modern-scientific account of the origins of the material universe if it is to be true. They accuse anyone who does not think that Genesis 1-11 is a modern historical narrative of “compromising” the authority of Scripture. And if you really want to whip men like Ken Ham up into a frenzy, use the “M” word, myth, and try to say that Genesis 1-11 is in the genre of ancient myth.
Let’s face it, if you have grown up in modern American Evangelicalism, you have been taught to equate “myth” with “falsehood” and “lies.” The statements, “Genesis 1-11 is a myth,” and “Genesis 1-11 is not true” are considered synonymous in modern Evangelicalism. That is quite unfortunate because, all that reveals is the Evangelical tendency to elevate “facts” above creativity. We must remember that God has revealed Himself in the Bible, and the Bible is mostly made up of creative genres of literature; Jesus himself, the Word of God (not solely the “Objective Fact” of God) spoke mostly in the genre of parables.
What do I mean? Simply this: God reveals His truth through creative means, not through cold-hard facts and scientific data. Of course, those things are important, of course the historical events recorded in the Bible really happened, but they remain just facts and data until they are woven together into the bigger story of God’s salvation. Ironically, the “fact” is that God has used various types of genre in the Bible to convey truth about Himself, Mankind, and Creation. To say that Genesis 1-11 is “myth,” therefore, is not to denigrate it or say it’s not true. Rather, it is to say that it is the door that opens to us to experience the reality of God Himself, and it gives us a foothold and basic worldview through which we can make sense of the world and His unfolding redemption in history.
Not only is myth not a threat to the truth of Christianity, but men like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien would argue that it is outright essential to Christianity. It is a glorious positive that helps bring us into the biblical world where we experience reality itself.
I am currently reading a book by Humphrey Carpenter entitled The Inklings—a biography on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. In the book, he talks about how these men understood reality, the Bible, Christianity, etc. Being experts in literature, they full-well knew the importance and profundity of myth. There were a few passages from that book that got me thinking, and hence this post.
Myth, Sub-Creators, and Truth
One of the things that eventually got Lewis to accept Christianity was Tolkien’s argument that myth and story-telling are crucial to the way in which God reveals Himself. Tolkien said that to the ancients, “the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned.’” And since man’s imaginative inventions, just as man’s capacity for abstract thought, find their origin in God, when men made myths, they were acting as “sub-creators” and were “actually fulfilling God’s purpose and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.” Simply put, ancient myths were creative stories about the deeper realities of existence, and they, however imperfectly, had elements of truth in them.
Those seeds of truth could then point the way to recognizing the truth regarding Christ—the story of Christ was essentially, “myth being realized in history.” Therefore, far from blinding us to the truth of Christ, men like Lewis, Tolkien—and even early Christian philosophers like Justin Martyr—argued that they pave the way for truly understanding the truth of Christ. This is true not only for ancient pagan myths, but it also helps us understand the purpose of Genesis 1-11. Those chapters are not trying to give us a modern, scientific account of the material universe—such questions would not even have been asked in the ancient world. They weren’t interested in them. Instead, they were interested in the meaning and purpose of creation, and the nature of both the gods and mankind. Genesis 1-11, in contrast to the other pagan myths of its time, gives a clearer mythical perspective on the nature of God, the nature of mankind, and the meaning and purpose of creation. It sets out the nature of the state of reality and the problems we face—and we then find the answers to those problems in the revelation of Christ.
Myth, the Encounter of Reality, and the Backdrop to the History’s Stage
The other thing to realize about the genre of myth is its purpose. As Carpenter wrote, Lewis believed that a story of a mythical type “gives us an experience of something not as an abstraction but as a concrete reality. We don’t ‘understand the meaning’ when we read a myth, we actually encounter the thing itself. Once we try to grasp it with the discursive reason, it fades.”
Therefore, mythical literature isn’t about “knowing”—it is about “tasting.” As Lewis believed, “What you [are] tasting turns out to be a universal principle. Of course the moment we state the principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstractions. It’s only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience a principle concretely.”
You might right now be thinking, “What the heck does that mean?” Let me try to explain, using Genesis 1-11 as the focus.
What we experience when we read the mythical creation account in Genesis 1 is the reality of the orderly and good creation itself. We experience the reality of the sovereignty and goodness of the Creator God Himself. Genesis 1 reveals that creation itself is good and orderly, and we see that goodness and order every day—we “taste” the truth of Genesis 1 every day, every time we step outside. We “taste” the truth of the creation of Adam in Genesis 2 every time we take a breath. We experience and “taste” the truth of “the fall” of Genesis 3, and experience the reality of “the fall” of Genesis 3, every time we reach out for something we’re not ready for, or blame someone else for our sin, or experience shame for doing something we know we shouldn’t have done.
Simply put, the truth of what is contained in Genesis 1-3 isn’t “objectively proven” through historical/scientific analysis or the scientific method. Rather, it is experienced in our daily lives and tasted in our very experience as human beings. We don’t “know” Genesis 1-3 is true as a means of historical fact; we experience the truth of Genesis 1-3 by virtue of being human. In that sense, on that existential level, we “know” it to be true.
This can be extended to the whole of Genesis 1-11. The purpose of the mythical account of Genesis 1-11 is not to speak to history or science questions that can be proven or disproven. It is lay out the mythical backdrop to the entirety of human experience to which we all relate. If “all the world is a stage,” then Genesis 1-11 is the backdrop against which human history play out. It provides the existential context against which we can understand God’s dealings in the history of Israel, culminating in the historical reality of Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection.
Tolkien’s Simarillion and Lord of the Rings
We see this in literature all the time. J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Simarillion provided the mythical backdrop to the entire world of Middle-Earth, and thus the setting the stories in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The “history” of those fictional stories only could be told once the “myth” of The Simarillion was established.
Yes, it is possible to read and enjoy The Hobbit and LOTR without having read The Simarillion, but your understanding of those stories will be enhanced greatly if you go back and read The Simarillion. If you read The Simarillion, you will drink in and “taste” that highly symbolic and mythical world that is the backdrop to The Hobbit and LOTR. You will find yourself not just reading and understanding the events of Middle-Earth; you will find yourself experiencing them.
That, I submit, is the power and purpose of mythical literature. Far from being “not true” or “lies,” mythical literature opens the door to the heart of reality that we experience. No, there is no “literal ring of power,” that archeologists can dig up to “prove it is true,” but there are many “rings of power” throughout human history—and they are very real, and they wreak havoc in our world: they might be in the form of kingly crowns and scepters, or they might be in the form of deals with lobbyists and lack of term limits. …but the truth of “the ring of power” is not tied to a literal ring that speaks to a Hobbit named Bilbo Baggins.
The Myth of Genesis 1-11, and the History of Christ and the Church
The same dynamic can be seen in the Bible. Genesis 1-11 is the founding myth that provides the true Biblical Worldview, and the true understanding of the reality of creation: a good Creator God, a mankind created in God’s image, but due to people’s foolish choices, a mankind not fully in God’s likeness, and thus lost and in need of redemption…and a creation itself, groaning in labor pains, longing for the revelation of the sons of God (Rom 8:19).
The existential dilemma experienced in the founding myth of Genesis 1-11 is answered and resolved in the historical reality of Christ, and is played out in the ongoing historical story of the Church.
And so, men like Ken Ham are partly correct when the insist that Genesis 1-11 is essential to the truth of Christ. But they are completely wrong to deny that Genesis 1-11 is mythological, and instead insist that Genesis 1-11 has to be historically factual in order to be true. That would be like insisting that the backdrop on the stage has to be torn down and made into actual characters in the play. Without the backdrop, there can’t be a play, and the characters cannot be fully understood.
That is the power and purpose of myth, and we see it at work in the opening chapters of Genesis. God is Creator, and is therefore creative in His revelation. Myth is not the enemy to the Gospel. It is the backdrop to it; it sets the stage for the Gospel to be played out in history.
That is how men like Tolkien and Lewis saw it. That is how I see it. Saying Genesis 1-11 is in the genre of myth, far from debasing the truth of the Bible and the Gospel itself, is to elevate the truth of the Bible, and to open the doors to the much wider reality God’s creation. In reading Genesis 1-11, we experience our reality, and we taste its truth within our very being. And that opens the door to our recognizing the truth of Christ in human history…not only “back then” in the first century, but in the “here and now” within His Church.
good stuff.
Excellent! I often right of or reference CS Lewis in my writings. Not so much Tolkien, yet he shaped my young mind, perhaps, more than any other writer. He did it with his mastery of mythology, and, as you have said here, perhaps that is because it is harder to dissect a living myth than the dead corpse of abstraction. You have got me thinking! (One of my blogs is https://navigatingbyfaith.com/)