Mythologos

The word myth comes from the Greek word muthos. Muthos originally meant “word” or “speech” and was a near synonym for for logos—a word later used in the Gospel of John to describe Christ… Eventually, both words came to mean “an account” or “a story,” or, more particularly, an account of what was true. The verb muthologeuo, from which we get our word mythologize, meant simply “to relate word-for-word,” that is, to give an accurate or verbatim account of an even or a speech. The distinction that eventually arose between the words was that muthos came to mean an account through story, while logos came to mean an account through reason or proposition.

- Dickerson & O’Hara, From Homer to Harry Potter

I’m tired of the word postmodernism that I’ve been hearing since I was 15 and had no clue what it meant. Maybe because everyone seems to blame everything on postmodernism, or maybe just because I’m from the internet age where if something is more than five minutes old it’s old news. But I have to admit that there is a shift in our culture and worldview. I guess postmodernism gives vocabulary for that, even if it is old.

Church and Truth-Telling

The Church has always carried the role of truth-telling. The Church has certainly failed to carry this out through history, but I’m not here to discuss whether the Church has or hasn’t done this well, but rather how it has done it when it has tried. For quite some time the Church has sought to tell truth through proposition and fact. This probably why over the past 50 years or so the Church transformed into a classroom. We grew up attending “Sunday School” and “Bible Class,” which would seek to teach us the truth. This is also why apologetics and evangelism have all been centered around argumentative rhetoric. Whoever can win an argument can win a convert. Maybe this is a result of the enlightenment and modernism. All that I know is that this is how the Church has gone about telling truth lately.

The thing is: reason, fact, proposition, and argument haven’t always been the only way of telling truth. As you can see above, truth can be told through story. And I would like to suggest that truth has almost always been told through story. Stories have risen up in every culture throughout the world as a way of telling truth and making sense of the world. These are the things we have come to call myth. They are stories that sit at the core of what we believe about the world.

America (and much of the western world) has often rejected and abandoned myth. I guess because our culture emerged during an age of reason after the Enlightenment. Western culture has always been more centered on reason. This can even be seen as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans with their philosophers reasoning through life. The East has always been a culture that centered on story as a primary conveyor of truth. But the faith of the Church actually has it’s roots in the East. The man who the Church puts its faith in was a Jewish Rabbi from the east who, interestingly enough, spoke in stories.

Scripture and Story

If you’re reading this you’re probably a western-thinker and probably even a church-goer. You probably know a little bit about God. I have a question for you. What is God like? Tell me about God. He is love, you might say or perhaps, He is sovereign. Yes, I guess those things are true. But they’re so propositional and abstract. Love and sovereignty are ideas that are far-off and impersonal. You couldn’t picture them in your head or even feel them in your heart if you tried.

Consider how the ancient Hebrew scriptures open in their grand description of God. “In the beginning, God…” He speaks and stuff comes into being. “Let there be…” He says, and it is. And not only does he create things by command, but he does it with such order. On day one he creates light; day two, he separates the waters and the skies;  day three, separates waters and land. Then the following three days he creates in correspondence to the first three days: day four, he creates the sun, moon, and stars to hold the light he had made on the first day; day five, he creates birds and fish for the skies and waters; day six, animals and man for the land. And he does all of this with such orderly precision that he has time to rest on day seven. We might describe God as sovereign, powerful, and orderly, but the Eastern person simply tells the story of Genesis 1.

And what about Genesis 2? We have yet another story about God. Instead of creating with command, God creates with his hand forming man out of clay. Instead of creating certain things on certain days he creates out of relationship with Adam. We might describe God as loving, or personal, or near, but the Eastern person simply tells the story of Genesis 2.

Or how about the Kingdom of God? We might say that it is already but not yet, Jesus simply tells a story about crops that have been planted and grown up, but have not yet been harvested. Maybe we would say that it is larger than you can imagine, but Jesus just told a story of a mustard seed the grew into a tree. Again, we may try to describe its perfection, but Jesus told a story about weeds being torn up and thrown into the fire. Jesus, the man who we claim as our Lord did not tell truth through proposition and reason, but rather through story.

Culture and Story

So, what are we to say about this shift in our culture and the way we see the world? What’s the deal with all this postmodernism stuff? I can’t say for sure. We probably won’t know for sure until hundreds of years have past. But, I think that this shift is the Western world finally beginning to tell stories. Not the kind of stories that we tell for fun, but the kind of stories that we live. The kind of stories we tell to make since of life. You know, myths.

This changes everything about the way that we tell truth and learn truth. This also changes the way that the Church ought to approach apologetics and evangelism. Perhaps the person with the best argument no longer wins. Maybe it’s the person with the best story to tell. After all, people aren’t convinced with reason anymore. The question isn’t How reasonable is the stuff you’re saying? but rather What kind of story are you inviting me into? If we are going to continue being truth tellers, we need to learn how to tell good stories and more importantly how to live good stories.

This blog seeks to explore modern mythology, or, truths we craft in the form of story. This is Mythologos.