#4 Christian Myth and Narrative

Show Notes

In this episode, we will discuss the construction of a Metanarrative and the narrative’s relationship to mythology, as well as Christian Mythology and the practice of Christian mythologization.

We have seen an increase in secularization (disenchantment) coming out of the modern period.

Today, we want to look at how the Bible’s macronarrative produces an enchanted metanarrative that is sounder than the demythologized dogma of many traditions of the modern period. I believe that the Bible answers societies' spiritual questions, but the church has largely lost its ability to answer those questions intelligently and biblically.

Music: Once In Paris by Pump Up the Mind

Podcast Transcript

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This light momentary affliction is preparing an eternal weight of glory for us. Beyond all comparison, as we look, not to the things that are seen but to the unseen. Second Corinthians 417 through 18, in a post materialistic world filled with immense spiritual noise.We're here to uncover the ancient near eastern context of the Bible to recover the truly mystical faith of our spiritual forefathers. Welcome to the biblical re enchantment podcast where we b bridge the gap between the Ancient Hebrew story and modern insights.I'm Anthony Delgado, your host for this journey into the often overlooked mystical dimensions of the Bible. This is episode number four titled Christian myth and narrative. In the first part of the episode, we're gonna look at the construction of a meta narrative and the narrative's relationship to mythologies.

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And then in the second part, we're gonna look at what I'm calling Christian mythology and the practice of Christian myth. So why this podcast? Well, we've seen an increase in secularization or disenchantment coming out of the modern period. We've been talking about that and into the postmodern period.

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Today, we want to look at how the Bible's macro narrative produces an enchanted meta narrative that is sounder than the de demythologize dogma of many traditions of the modern period. Lots of big words in there. We're gonna unpack all of those.Uh But my belief is that the Bible answers society's spiritual questions. But the church has largely lost our ability to answer those questions intelligently and biblically.And so we're gonna try to unpack some of these ideas of narrative and mythology, especially within a Christian context to see how the Bible really does speak to society's uh the demand for spiritual answers. All right.So part one, we wanna look here at meta narrative and uh meta narrative um sort of has a cultural use that and a philosophical use that has some overlap but also some differences. So let's let's talk about narrative first, just what it means.A, a narrative is sort of the how of things happening. It's an order of events, think of, think of when you use the word narration, a narration is a recounting of details and, or events. Uh We don't tend to do this too much in education these days.

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But if you receive a classical education, you'll do what are called narrations where you'll do a reading of some kind and then give an oral narration of what it is that you had just read.And it's a way of checking comprehension and that's sort of what a narrative is, is really, I mean, it's almost the word narrative is almost more closely related to how we think of histories because it's a recounting of events, although a narrative doesn't have to be historical.

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Um it can just be a recounting of any kind of events or details of a story or an, an event of any kind. When we use the word meta narrative, we're attaching uh this word meta and meta means like beyond or alongside.And so a merit, a meta narrative is really what it is. It's a reconstruction of a grand narrative from the details of other events. Uh that, that also could be a definition of what we would call macro narrative.That if you take law lots of different stories and you try to put them together, you might call that a macro narrative.Um as you like system ties different stories together, an example of that would be like um Jrr Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, you take all the different books even, you know, and, and, and you start to piece them together and to create one large overarching narrative that is larger than all the other other books.

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And you can also do that with um CS Lewis's series and the Chronicles of Narnia and all of those books as well.So you start to see the story from within a larger world or even a larger world view, a meta narrative diff it differs from a macro narrative and that meta narrative is the story that stands alongside the grand narrative.It's not the actual story itself, but the, it's the implicit realities or the world view that is projected by the, by, by the larger narrative. OK.So in biblical studies, narrative, meta narrative, um it does refer to sort of the grand narrative most of the time, uh what we might call the macro narrative.But, but it stands above all of the individual narratives of scripture to be a guiding uh a like a guiding light for how those narratives operate within the biblical world. The macro narrative is really just the grand story itself.

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But the me and, and, and the macro narrative is informed by all of the micro narratives, all the small narratives come together um in order to create the macro narrative, the meta narrative becomes the way that you think about the world because of how the macro narrative has come.

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So Macro narrative comes up from the, the, the micro narratives, meta narrative stands alongside to cast light down onto all of the individual narratives.Now, I do want to revisit an idea that we had in the last podcast because if you're reading the Bible and saying, OK, how are we gonna construct the macro narrative so that we can also see the meta narrative from the scriptures, you might notice that a lot of the Bible actually isn't narrative, it isn't the recounting of events and details.

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Um or you might just say basically, it's not story. And in our last last podcast, what we talked about was that, that every text has an occasion and that ocasion reveals the plot of the story.So even if you're reading, uh you know, Ephesians one, and you're reading about, you know, some of the sort of dogmatic statements about the doctrine of adoption and doctrine, of doctrines, of pre predestination and things of that sort that are discussed there in Ephesians One he might think.

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Well, these are just theological dog muds. Well, no, actually, the Apostle Paul wrote those within a context. Within an occasion.There's a reason he, he wrote the them something that he was responding to and we can't always get to the occasion, but we can try to think and, and imagine the occasion for, for the writing of a text.And so then that occasion becomes the plot that feeds the both the macro narrative and the meta narrative. Now, narrative sort of in its uh contemporary usage might be a little bit different than how we use it uh in biblical studies.If in biblical studies, it has to do with the recounting of details and events. Um we don't necessarily use it that way in contemporary culture, it doesn't have to be tied to actual historical events or anything that's ever been written or said before.Now, we, we use the, that we sort of have a turn of phrase that is to spin a narrative and that means kind of, to uh to, to, to inform, you know, uh the way that society thinks with a usually a new narrative, you know, trying to spin some sort of new narrative.

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And when we use narrative in that way, what we're really talking about is a meta narrative. You're trying to, you're trying to spin the details of what's happening in a new direction so that people start to think differently about things.We have a lot of what you might call rewriting of narratives.Uh the reconstruct and this reminds me of, you know, books like Brave New World in 1984 where, where, you know, you get a lot of this type of thinking where they want to rewrite history to make the modern societies, these um think a little bit differently about how the world has come about and, and then therefore see the differently.

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And so we have a lot of rewriting of narrative in our culture today. Um Everything that everything that you might call fake news, whether I don't care which, which part of the party lines you fall on or anything like that.I'm just saying that everybody's crying fake news and has been for quite a bit, quite a few years now. And anytime we're talking about fake news, this is what we're talking about, we're talking about an attempt to spin a narrative.Um either to spin it back to what you think is the right narrative or to spin it in a new direction.But when you know, this idea of fake news is very closely tied to this idea of narrative that if we can change the details of how things are are seen in the tactile of the real world, then we can think about the world in sort of a different, with a different construct, with a different worldview.

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And so reconstructing the meta narrative in such a way um can produce nontraditional or non historical perspectives and outcomes.And so that's a lot of what's, what's kind of going on in our society today that if you've got an ideology that you think is superior, then uh then you, you might spin a new narrative.Um and it doesn't matter if the details are traditional or historical um at all because it actually has to do with um making the details of the narrative that you're spinning line up with the, the world view that you're trying to put forth.And so, um you know, for the point of illustration, you know, we've said, you know, you've heard it said that the US is a Christian nation and then argument because on the other side, then people are saying no, the US is not a Christian nation.You know, and if you say if you're one who wants to say that the US is a Christian nation or at least was a Christian nation, then that's a narrative that I think it was actually kind of taken for granted possibly for centuries.

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And in fact, um if we really want to be honest about the history, the founders of the nation were not trying to create a theocratic Christian government or society.Now, at the same time, I don't think that the founders of our nation necessarily saw um the outcome of what freedom of religion could ultimately mean that freedom for religion, for the founders of the country really meant freedom to practice lots of different types of Deo Christian faiths.

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Um It didn't necessarily mean freedom of any kind of religion that anybody could either invent or world religions or anything else.So you can see how, when you look at what the fountain sort of the, the heart behind the founders that you could take that to, to a greater extent that at a time when most people in the United States were professing to be Christians, you can sort of see how this idea that, that the US was founded as a Christian nation.

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Um And we're gonna talk about what it means to attach Christian to things as an adjective just in a moment. But um you can sort of see the way that that narrative has been spun off apart from the details of the actual history.Now, at the same time, those that want to perpetuate this idea that the US is not a Christian nation, they're kind of doing something similar because a modern narrative emphasizes the non theocratic ideals in order in order to argue for a secular state.And I'm not sure that that's true either that, that neither of these ideas of a US uh as, as the US, as a Christian nation or the US as a non-christian nation. Neither of those really match the details of what's happened historically.They're both, they're, they're both spun narratives that suit particular ideologies. And so I do think that's kind of interesting that just that, that, you know, at the end of the day, it's usually the ideology that drives the narrative.So somebody has a, what they think in their mind is a good idea.

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You know, like, um if you're a Christian and you want to see the laws of the land, be more Christian, then it benefits you to sort of believe historical details about the United States that drive this narrative of the, of the US being a Christian nation.Now, if you, if you don't um want to see if you like this idea of broad freedom and, and, and every individual expression that has absolutely no boundaries and things like that.And you like that kind of idea, then it benefits you to lean into this, the the details of, of history that sort of emphasize this non theocratic state.And to argue that the country was always supposed to be a secular state, e even though neither of those are historically accurate, you can use the details to spin, whichever meta narrative, what whichever worldview that you wanna spend and that's kind of how narrative works.

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And, and, and so we've got sort of this contemporary usage of narrative that has to, has to do with however, you know, starting with the meta narrative and then aligning the details to it, we also have a lot of inversion happening.There's an inversion, inversion of meta meta narratives that happens um in, in media now, I don't mean in news media, I mean, broadly um in media that we get like an inversion of narratives.And um sometimes you just think like you see it and you think, oh, this is just a fun twist, like, like uh the, the, the, the, the old 19, I think 1985 Ghostbusters movie watched that with our kids recently and you know, all four of the original Ghostbusters are men.Well, then a few years ago there's a new, a new gossip of Ghostbusters movie that comes out and that you get an inversion where all four of the Ghostbusters are female and, and, and that's great. It's fun.Um I haven't seen the movie but um but I heard that it was that it was still pretty fun and it was, you know, it's good entertainment and all of that. I don't think that it had, you know, a, a real distinct agenda to it.

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Um except that it's an inversion, but those types of inversions can also be used to drive um different, different sort of meta narrative agendas.So if your meta narrative is your worldview, then then you can use those details and you can twist and, and invert things in order to uh in, in order to make things differently. Uh Another illustration of this that I'm gonna use um in a future episode again.Um But I'll mention it here is uh is the, the movie how to train your dragons and all of the, the, you know, the other movies and, and TV shows and stuff that have spun off from that where historically dragons are, um, drag dragons are enemies of humankind.Um, and they're actually there. Um, they serve a really important purpose within sort of the, the sort of the fictitious narrative that they're portrayed in historically or within the mythologies, they portray trade in historically.Dragons are, aren't play a really important role except that, um, dragons are never the friends of humankind. And so maybe never is a gross overstatement there. But the con conceptually the, the role that a dragon plays within a is not usually to be sort of the misunderstood character.

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And yet that's what, that's the inversion that happens in how to, how to change your dragons movies is that they're trying to say, hey, all those things that you think are the, are the, are the evil dragon. Um, no, they're just, they're just very misunderstood.And so it's a way of, of flipping the script so to speak and, you know, inverting the narrative to, to portray different ideals. And so we're gonna talk about that more in an episode on dragons that I'm starting to work on right now.Um Let's talk about the phys philosophical usage of the word narrative. Um uh traditionally, narrative means um uh the way in which we order the world. And so that's the, that's the philosophical usage of the word narrative.It's the, the the dominant narratives that shape our understanding of society, social structures and institutions are, are, are the narratives. Um and critical theory and particularly postmodernism, a me, a meta narrative is a global or to, to total cultural narrative um which orders and explains knowledge and experience.

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So, so that, so that knowledge and experience comes together in order to develop this narrative or met, you know, societal narrative or this uh or this meta narrative or world view.Now, the prefix meta is used to mean about in this case because remember, it can mean about it can mean next to it can mean uh above or overarching. And in this case, sort of when in the critical critical theory M mo mode a narrative is a story.Um And it's a story that is that, that is used in order to drive the meaning of a larger historical story. Now, now, now let me say that a little bit different. So meta is taken to mean about rather than before or above as in traditional usage.And this, this means that a postmodern meta narrative is formed based on the society's ordering rather than traditionally allowing the meta narrative to order society.Um What that so, so traditionally, our meta narrative comes together to explain the way that the world operates, that would be hist the historical way that we've seen meta narrative operate.

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And so when we look at the meta narratives of ancient cultures, um not even ancient cultures, but really throughout all the way up into, into and probably through the modern period, you can actually start to like, you can actually follow the meta narratives development, um societal thinking, the development of societal thinking, you can follow that through the actual historical events that occur because it's sort of the tactile real world that is informing the meta narrative in postmodernism and critical theory.

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What we're actually getting is the opposite where meta narratives are being crafted and they are then speaking down into the tactile, the real world setting. And so it's an, it's, it's an inversion the way that it's used.So you always have this um this uh this formalist versus postmodernist, which would be a literary way of speaking it form, happening within the, with, with, within the philosophical usage of words.So whether you're talking about social philosophy, political philosophy, you're just, or, or you're talking about even theology that there is sort of a, well, so in theology, we would use conservative and liberal so conservative meaning to conserve the historical traditional meaning of a text and liberal literally just meaning that you can take liberties with it.

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And so critical theory being part of how you develop um how you developed progress from the original traditional meetings in order to derive new meanings from it.And so one looks down from the merit at meta narrative in order to inform society that would be the liberal, critical or postmodern, whichever word you want to use there.Um reading of a of a meta narrative and the other sort of the traditional historical looks from what's happening with your feet on the ground and, and looks up to derive the meta narrative. OK, let's talk about again about the macro narrative versus the meta narrative.Macro um means big and it refers to the whole or the big story. So again, if you're reading, um if you're reading the Lord of the Rings books and, and, and, and it's just broadly all throughout all the uh all the different writings that Jrr Tolkien did.Um And you start to like systematize those into one big overarching story where you understand the roles that the elves play and the roles that the dwarves play and the roles that the humans play and, and how the different evil forces work and you start to see them systematically.

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Um and you know, sort of like, gee you know, you see people geek out on these types of things where they, where they, they go, they start to argue.Well, no, Frodo never would have done that within, you know, because in this book, he does this and um you know, things like that and you start, those are people that are thinking macro narratively, they understand the way that the way that the story is told from beginning to end and then they can, they can speculate about how the different characters would act from within.

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That's the macro macro narrative. Just understanding that big story meta for views refers to the story that sits beside and or above the macro narrative. And so it becomes the, it becomes the thinking or the philosophy of that world in a sense.And that's the, that's the meta narrative. And so that's how th those are obviously the macro and the meta narratives are interrelated. Um And yet they are also different.Now, something that we need to understand about narrative, especially as we could look at ancient narrative or even historical narratives is that, is that historical and ancient narratives are mythological in nature.So I wanna talk about this whole word group if you'll bear with me for a few minutes, that is mythology, myth, mythological, mythical, all of these different types of words. So myths are stories about divine beings that are generally arranged in a coherent system.They are revered as true and sacred and endorsed by either either rulers or priests and, and myths, myths. So myths are closely related to spiritual ideas and to religion. And so, um we, we tend to get these more in the ancient world.

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Um But even throughout, even like um me, medieval religions and things of this sort, we see to see, see them all throughout even uh more contemporary history.And so um their interactions between uh the, the physical world and the metaphysical world, the, the the world that exists beside or above the physical world would be the metaphysical or you could just say the spiritual world or to use um the words that Paul uses in Corinthians, the scene and the unseen world.

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So the scene world being the physical world, the unseen world uh being sort of the spiritual world, the the scene world being the physical world that we live in, that the things that you can see and hear and touch and taste and see.And um and then the spiritual world being the unseen, the things that you can only experience uh sort of through metaphysical means. And so that's what myths are. They're intrinsically related to religion because they're dealing with things that are uh intrinsically spiritual.

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And so then if the link between sort of you might say the link between the sacred and the secular, if the link between the physical and the metaphysical is broken, then the myth itself is reduced to the status of like folklore and then whatever ideological dogma lies behind that meta narrative, um uh that can actually either be lost or fundamental.

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And so here's what I mean by that, that if you, that if you read a, a story and I don't care what story it is, you're reading like a herculean myth and Greek mythology or something like that.Um And, and you're just trying to construct some sort of, uh, you're trying to deconstruct the, the, the myth in order to figure out well, what's actually history and what's actually what's actually, you know, something that was just some sort of authorial, you know, hyperbole or whatever, right?

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And you're trying to get the, you're trying to separate the, the physical from the metaphysical, the sacred from the secular. Then what, what you're actually gonna end up with is you're gonna end up with a story that you think is fake, that it's, that it's really just folklore.

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It might have some sort of moral behind it or it might just be a fun story to tell and you're gonna separate that from the dogma, which would be like the, here's what you do, here's how you live, right?And you're gonna end up separating those two things from each other and what you get is usually one or the other is thrown out. So Christians are notorious for throwing out the sacred part.They're, they're gonna, they're gonna read a, a myth of, we're gonna read a myth about giants or something like that. And we're gonna walk with a dogma.Here's the theology, here's what you believe about God, the physical church, here's, here's how, what you believe about how to, how to live in this world and, you know, feed on the ground type of application and we're gonna separate out the myth and reject sort of the folklore part of it.

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Other cultures are gonna, are gonna hold on to the folklore. They're gonna say, oh, this is a fun movie and then you're gonna make a, you're gonna make a Disney World version of the and not that all Disney versions get rid of all of the dogma.Anyway, not all Disney versions are, are secularized, but you're gonna create a version that's purely entertainment, right? That isn't trying to tell a deeper story anymore.And um I shouldn't pick on Disney there because you know, some, some, some Disney storytelling is great and some isn't so great and it all depends on, you know, where that was in Disney. Disney's history.But anyway, so you, you get this kind of like purely entertainment made for TV, movie version if you will. Um And, and all of the dogma, all of the, all of the built in ethos in the story is, is thrown out, all of the sacredness is thrown out.And so that's what myths are. Now, let's talk about the word mythical. Um When we want to say like mythical, we're still talking about things that occur or are characteristic of myths.

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And so something mythical, if you say like a mythical beast, you're talking about a beast that appears in a myth and it's a, it's a, it's a way of identifying in sort of, in contemporary usage.It's a way of identifying, uh that you don't think something's true in a historical sense that like if you say, well, you know, in the story in Genesis six, you've got, you've got these nephele or these giants that appear.Um And these are, these are sort of the, the mythical giants, right? And it's a way that we use it in contemporary um usage.Um um but that's really not actually what the word myth means because again, if we go back to myth and we equate it to the word mythical, um we're actually talking about very interrelated ideas, um that should not actually be separated.Sometimes we'll talk about the mythical nature of a thing, maybe the mythical nature of, of the explanation or the mythical nature of an argument.

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And we attach the word mythical to um ideological things and sometimes that it can be used as a cheap shot to say, well, they're relying on details that are, you know, only ethereal and therefore, aren't objective. They're on, they're subjective.And, and so it's, it's a, it's a, it's a w it's a way of arguing to weaken somebody's argument. Um But yeah, we, we often use mythical in that sort of way as well.Now, the, if myth is the story, then mythology is actually the study of the, the, it's the study or the exposition, if you will of the myths. Now, exposition is one of those biblical words we use.When we talk about understanding a biblical text, we talk about the Expedition of a text that's used in literature as well that when you're reading, um, you're leading, reading some sort of classic fiction or something like that, and you're trying to figure out what the author intended you to walk away from it, then there's ex an expository process to go through in order to sort of investigate and interpret those stories.

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And so that's what an ex, that's what mythology is, is, it's, it's actually the, the process of exposing the myths, meaning.It's, it's taking the, the legend and the lore and, and, and, and the mythic nature of the story and it's, and it's deriving some sort of meaning from it.And so if that's what mythology is, then when we've heard things that are mythological that's actually different than saying that it's mythical.Um because to say that something is mythological, we're actually talking about the logic, you hear that word in there, the logic behind the myth, that sort of sort of something that's mythological is something that we're gonna derive meaning from.And so if, if mythical can be used, especially in contemporary usage to just say something that's not true, but just a fun story.

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Then we never use the word myth to say that it's just a fun story because when we use the word mythological, we're trying to talk about the logic behind it, the understanding behind it though. Why did the ancient cultures create these stories in such a way?Um What did they want us to understand about the world, the world view of the people and about the way the world is ordered and operates. And so mythological has a much, is a much, much deeper meaning of what you're talking about.Now take that word mythological and consider the word mythologize, right? So we're not saying and I don't think this is a word, we're not saying mythicize to mythicize something.If that were even a word would, would be to, to argue that it is not true that it is not historical but to mythologize is to create a mythical logic underneath the story, right?And so this is actually this is actually what's what, what, what's happened um is we have mythologize, mythologizing and dem mythologizing. And what those words mean is to add in the mythical logic and to remove the mythological.

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And so what we've seen a lot in, in um sort of the con uh modern history is an attempt to demythologize a lot of historical uh historical myths.So for, for example, the battle of and the Odyssey, which, you know, if you just pick up the Odyssey, most Westerners are gonna pick up the Odyssey and you think you're just reading fiction, right? Just, it's a fun story. Right.Well, actually this was a, a religious text to the ancient world, right? The Odyssey was, you know, was, was deeply ingrained in the thinking of the ancient Greek world.So you get, you get something like the battle of Troy and, you know, the battle of Troy, you know, um the Greek soldiers, they wanted to take the city of Troy and after a fruitless 10 year siege, um they, they send in this giant wooden horse and all, all, of course, all of the, all of the, you know, Greek soldiers are hiding inside this wooden horse, then they leave it as they say, oh, this is an offering to the goddess Athena, which would have been if you consider cosmic geography, this idea that gods and goddesses sort of had rain over local regions.

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Oh, Athena is the goddess of your city. So we're sending you this offering to Athena and then you know the story, they bring the horse inside the gate and then they pop out and they kill everybody from within the walls. All right.So here's the thing, here's what people wanna know, they wanna know. Did the horse narrative really happen? Right? Um Is that historical? Um And certainly is the Goddess Athena historical and there's lots of other, uh there's lots of other mythical uh to use that word correctly.

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There's lots of other mythical details, there's lots of, there's lots of um ethereal details, lots of spiritual things going on in the story.And so if you're a historian and you're just trying to figure out what actually happened, then uh then, then you're trying to get rid of all of the mythical elements so that you can just understand the dogma, the history.Um And so then you ask the question, like, did the horse narrative really happen, like in a historical sense and dem mythologizer will say no arguing that this detail is a later edition.Well, OK, so this is a, this is a, this is a critical method of, of, you know, it's, it's called redaction criticism. And what you're doing is you're trying to redact details um from the story in order to derive its uh the historical context.Now, I wanna, I wanna pause here, I wanna pause here because I wanna talk about the difference between myth and history and, and, and, and here's what happens and, and why do we write history? Why do we write history?

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We, we write history because we want to preserve the details of things that happen so we can learn from them, right?You, you wanna be able to go back and read history and understand the way the world came to be the way that it is and all of that, right?Well, you may notice if you've been listening to what I've been saying up to this point, you may notice that that is the exact same purpose of myth that if the purpose of myth is to drive the meta narrative of society and the purpose of history is also to drive the meta narrative of a society.

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I'm not arguing against doing history that way now, but I do sort of think that we're losing something when the, the writers of ancient myths were writing stories to explain their societal meta narratives.Um We're losing our understanding of that meta narrative when we ask these questions, like, did that really happen? Is that actual, is that factual history? Right. We're actually deconstructing, you know, the, the ancient world's histories.Um And, and now you're not gonna learn what you're supposed to learn from that myth. And so I don't mind that in contemporary culture, we have sort of different classifications here where we can say over here, we have our myths, our mythical stuff.That's just, you know, it's like, it's like just fables, basically um that we've got that over here. And then we've got our actual histories over here and we sort of have this understanding of difference and we can learn from them in different ways, right?As long as everybody understands that, then it's fine. But when we go back into the ancient cultures and we try to demythologize their myths, we're deconstructing it. We're, we're stripping out either the dogma or the, or the fable or the, the, the fairy tale part of it.

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And we're, we're separating the two, we're saying one parts for entertainment only. And so therefore it's meaningless and the other part is sort of the dogma. It's the, it's the, it's the, what, what we ought to learn from this.And when we do that, we're actually deconstructing the myth and we're not actually getting from it, what was intended by the original author of the myth.So when we, when next time you go to read the Odyssey know that there are probably historical details in the Odyssey that it is teaching you things about cities and in the ancient world and things like that.But then when you're, you know, when you're, you're, they're fighting giant sea monsters and things like that, that's OK. Read that, read that for what it is. Um, read it as part of the story as a whole and don't worry about, um, deconstructing the, the narrative.Now, my fear is that what we've done with the Bible is we've de mythologized much of the Bible for exactly this reason. We're like, well, you know, this doesn't align with what we know from history or science and things like that.

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And you're actually holding history and science over the Bible is a hermeneutic for how to read it. And, um, I'm gonna ask you to just like, don't demythologize the Bible, let it be what it is right. All right. What, what do you do?Um then about potential holes in the, the meta narrative or the macro narrative? So, like, um I want, I wanted, when we try to systemized our mythologies, we try to put them all together and to create this big system out of it, you're gonna end up with holes.Um The Bible wasn't written all in one point in time.Um You may not know this but the, the, the ancient myths of the Greeks, for example, or the North or whatever society you want to talk about, they weren't written in a vacuum, they weren't written all at once.They, the, the authors didn't come together to, to create a large outline for their, their macro narrative that they're gonna and then write out the different parts of it to make sure it all systematizes. Well, it wasn't written in a vacuum.

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So what do you do if you find potential holes? And this is where fractal fractal organization and patterning um can be really helpful, I could say narrative fractal organization and narrative patterning.So I'm gonna introduce a few more terms and try not to be um overwhelmed by them if these are new terms to you. Um So fractal, let's, let's start there. Um I don't know if you know what a fractal is.A fractal is a sort of a mathematical concept. Um That is a never ending pattern um that can fit inside of itself. Or be blown up outside of itself.And so it's, it's sort of derived by adding on to the thing, a half of its whole or subtracting from the thing, a half of its whole.And so it, it's infinite in both, in its growth and in its uh in, in its complexity because it doesn't matter how small of a piece you get, you can always take half of it again.

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And so you have it and you have it and you have it and you have it and it creates this, this sort of, you know, seashell kind of kind of patterning where it gets bigger, it gets bigger as you go in one direction gets smaller as you go in the other direction.And mathematically, it's infinitely complex, it can go on forever. And so fractals are these infinitely complex patterns that are self similar across different scales. So you're always taking half of the hole and in taking half of the hole, the half always looks like the hole.

00:36:00 - 0

But in half scale and then when you take and you double it on the outside to blow it up on the other side, you're taking the, you're taking the half and you're blowing it up into a new hole.And so it's always, it's, it's always self similar and yet on different scales. And so you can always see, you can always see the larger part and the smaller part and you can always see the smaller part and the larger part.And so they're created um by repeating a similar process over and over and over and over and creating an ongoing feedback loop that goes on infinitely in both directions, both in the macro scale and in the micro scale. So now it's driven by what we call recursion.Um fractals are images of these like dynamic systems. So I'm gonna come back to recursion here in a minute but I wanna talk about how fractal organization is patterning.So patterning is um is, is similar to fractal, except that in patterning you're taking and you're putting one thing over the top of another, you're taking one picture and putting it on to another.

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Um Now you could take theoretically uh a pattern for a doll dress, you know, for, let's say a Barbie dress and you could then, you know, scan it into your computer and blow it up and print it back out on a scale that you could make a dress for a full grown woman, right?So you could, you can take and you can pattern on larger and smaller scales much like in the fractal process.But in patterning, what we're talking about is is pieces that can be laid on top of each other so that you can see that when you, when you blow things up into other scales or you shrink things down into other scales that narratives fit on top of each other.And so then we can take from the macro narrative, the big whole narrative and we can actually look down on the micro narrative and we can take and we can shrink the pattern of the macro narrative and we can see it fit precisely on top of the micro narrative.OK. Um The meta narrative sits above or beside the macro narrative and the micro narrative in the same way. So it's, it is a system of thinking or worldview that drives both the micro and the macro narratives.

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And so we've got this patterning that we should be able to see blown up and shrunk down through the small narratives, the individual little stories throughout the, throughout. Um not just the scriptures but throughout the ancient world or whatever.Like if you're reading Greek mythology or, you know, Roman mythology or whatever, you know, um a, you know, mythologies that come out of Asia, it doesn't matter, it works everywhere that you can construct the macro narrative out of the micro narratives and you can see this patterning come in and out of both.

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OK. Why do I bring all of this up? Why all of this data about fractal organization and patterning? OK. It's because it's because I want you to see the way that the narratives of the ancient world work together.I want you, I want you to see that, that the, that these aren't just cute stories that when we read the myths of all different ancient cultures that they're not just cute stories, they're actually intentionally crafted and they're actually governed by metaphysical forces in order to drive the world views of different societies.

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And so we're obviously gonna, as Christians wanna go look at now, the Bible and the, you know, the Ancient Jews, the ancient Christians, the Israelites and the patriarchs and the church fathers and all of that, we're gonna wanna be able to look in and see how the, the ancient world thought about these things from a Christian perspective.

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But we need to understand the way that, that, that it patterns on all things throughout all time. Simply because patterning fractal mythologies have always been the way that the world operates.And I actually believe based on this spiritual thirst and the spiritual hunger that the world has today, that mythology fractal and patterning are the ways that the world will always think. So we'll pause there. All right. Part two, we're gonna talk about Christian myth. All right.

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So let's talk about the individual narratives within the Bible. So we've already kind of addressed this a little bit. But if you look at like the various stories throughout the scriptures, you should see these as pieces of the macro narrative.Now, narrative means how things happen or the order of events as we talked about before. A narration is the recounting of details and or events. And so a biblical narrative is a recounting of those biblical events.Now, if you think about like the inspiration of scripture, um that's gonna make you think that about like what God wants to recount to us, right?So the biblical narratives that are there and the way that they're written, um I is, is exactly in the form of the needs to be in order for God to account to us recount to us. That is what it is that He wants us to know.And so probably already right there, you should start seeing a hint that um we should not be dem mythologizing the Bible.

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We shouldn't, we should be looking to be comfortable with supernatural things happening through the scriptures, even if the, if they're are the types of things that deal with, you know, giants and dragons and demons and, and, and all kinds of crazy stuff like that, that, that maybe we don't have a category for within our sort of cultural Christianity.

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Um If they're there, we want, we wanna let those, let those be there because they're a necessary part of the story for God to recount to us what it is that He wants us to know. Ok. So how do biblical doctrines inform narrative?Uh You've got, you've got doctrines outlined in the scriptures. And we mentioned this briefly in the first part, but like for example, like Ephesians 28, you are saved by grace through faith and this is not from yourselves.It is God's gift and you have to ask yourself, like, why did Paul say that? Like what you know, why, why would Paul actually lay out this scripture for us?What was happening in the church in Ephesus that caused him to want to say this and occasional teachings um reveal the meta narrative in a certain way, in, in, in another way than stories do.Um because stories, stories are more naturally part of sort of the the macro narrative And um the occasion of these different teachings that, you know, the the Apostle Paul, for example, is so notorious for Jesus, many teachings, you know, um these teaching passages they fit in, in a different way.

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If you're reading the Psalms, you have to ask yourself what's happening in the Psalmist life, either in David's life or the Sons of Choral, like what's happening there or what potentially could be happening that informs the macro narrative so that we can understand the the meta narrative, this big overarching idea of how our Christian worldview is formed.

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And sometimes we know the occasion. Sometimes we don't, sometimes we have to speculate the occasion based on what we know from history or what we know from dero canonical books or from apocryphal books or things like that.Like we've got to go to, to other ancient literature, maybe even ancient literature of other cultures to try to see how the world was thinking and the way that the different pieces work together. Sometimes we have to speculate a little bit in order to construct these.Now, when I say, speculate, I don't mean speculate um and then treat your speculations as fact.I'm just, I'm just trying to get you to think imagination, to use your imagination to think imaginatively, to be able to say, um Here's how these might fit together so that we can start to form our macro narrative and get a truly um supernatural and biblical uh worldview.And sometimes it's best not to speculate the occasion. Um But sometimes we need to do that in these um texts that are truly occasional um biblical macro narrative.

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When we talk about the biblical Mac macro narrative, we're thinking about the whole story of the Bible from beginning to the to the end. Now, as much as we can fit fit together, piece together from what's in the biblical text.Then this is kind of a theoretical concept that we know there is a macro narrative that is everything that has ever occurred in biblical history um from beginning to end and will occur right from beginning to end since we have prophetic passages that look forward.Um You know, so it's a theoretical concept. Some of it hasn't happened again. As we mentioned, there are holes in our narrative just like we talked about holes in, in, in, in the macro narrative.In the last part, there's gonna be holes in the biblical macro narrative um that, you know, we can only theorize as to how, how those, how those holes are filled. Um but it's a theoretical concept think about um John 2125.Um here says that John said, and this is the conclusion to the book of John.

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By the way, after John has told all the stories about Jesus that he wants to tell, he says there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if every one of them were written down, I suppose not even the wor world itself could contain all the books that would be written.

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And so this idea that like if we, if we really tried to recount everything about um God and, and human and divine history and human history and everything that Jesus even did on the earth that um we, we probably could not even fathom the breadth of it.And so the biblical macro macro narrative um is sort of a theoretical concept.And yet we have as much as we can get in the Bible and, and, and, and we believe as Christians that we, at least, you know, as an evangelical, I believe that in the sufficiency of, of the scripture that has been preserved, the 66 books of the Bible.And so, um I, I believe that we have everything we need. Um even though we on only have parts of this larger theoretical macro narrative. And so there's lots of details that we're never gonna know, or at least from this side of eternity that we're never gonna know.Um And the macro narrative then, but the macro narrative that we have, it's gonna help us to see things from now a cosmic perspective.

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Here's what I mean by that, that, that, that when we look at a text of scripture, any single individual text of scripture, we should be looking at it through the lens of what we know of the macro narrative, um looking at it from, you know, the 1000 ft view where we can see all the different parts and their interrelation instead of um really just holding that one little piece of text in a vacuum and what we might call reading out of context.

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So then like reading Genesis one, for example, you might be left with questions about God's purpose for humankind, reading the narrative from the ends, Genesis and revelation, that'll actually reveal the worldwide glorified kingdom of God and the tell us the, the end, the end product of human existence.

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And that's the purpose of human creation.So when we, when we try to look first from the macro narrative, um reading the end from the beginning in the beginning, from the end with obviously, with all of its inner working parts in between, um then we're gonna, we're gonna see better uh what it is that we're supposed to derive from the individual text.

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And I'm notoriously critical of, of interpretations of Genesis one because what I actually think more often than not what I've heard. And preaching on Genesis, one is demyelization uh de mythili dem mythos. Oh my gosh. That is such an awful word. Don't try to say it.So we see the dem mythologizing in most of the preaching that I've heard in Genesis. One where people are trying to figure out how it fits a historical context rather than actually reading it for what God would have us to derive from it to just hold intention.This idea, the this idea of the supernatural six day creation and stop trying to make it match science and history. And to just say everything contained within this Christian myth is exactly what God wants us to see and to hear and to learn from.So that we don't have to, to, to parse what's historical and what's not, we don't have to parse it that way. Like we don't have to answer the question of um did God create the world in six days?Because that's actually not the question of the text when we read it as a whole. Um We're actually gonna see what the product of the six day creation is within the broader meta narrative of the scriptures.

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Um That's gonna inform sort of a supernatural um context for Genesis one, a supernatural existence for humankind that is also simultaneously phys physical, that finds its fruition and in the book of end of the Book of Revelation. OK.So those are things that we'll, we'll have to unpack more in, in future times. But that just is an example of things that we can really start to take out of context if we're not reading from a cosmic perspective now.So that's a, that's reading from the macro narrative, looking at, looking at how the whole whole story fits together. And then let's talk about biblical meta narrative, biblical meta narrative is the thinking behind the whole story of the Bible.It's, it's meta, it's beyond, it's beyond the story, it's what exists beyond the story. And so as we talked about fractal patterning, and we're talking about this never ending pattern that, that that exists.Um And, and I said, I wanted to explain this idea of recursion recursion is the process of devi defining a situation in terms of a simpler version of itself.

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So if you think of fractal patterning and, and, and we talked about how you can explode it that you can take the hole and you can double it to create a larger hole.That is a pattern of the, of the smaller hole, or you can have it to create a pattern of the larger hole that is smaller recursion is the actual process of exploding or imploding the the pattern to, to get a larger version or a smaller version.And so um when we go recursion is when we go to the simpler version of, of, of the larger thing, in order to understand something about the, about the larger version. And it's going to, it's going down to the micro level to understand the macro the cosmic realities.And so here's an example of that um the the scriptures, they describe spiritual beings called sometimes called Watchers, like in the Book of Daniel or Sons of God, in other places in the Old Testament, then the spiritual beings judge nations through or over human kings. OK.So you have like a human king and uh and, and, and then, and then above that human king is sort of a supernatural ruler. Daniel sometimes calls him princess or Watchers.

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Um And then they're generally called, like in Deuteronomy 32 they're called the sons of God in Psalm 82 they're called the sons of the most high um or the, or actually even just referred to generally as the yellow.He there, the gods um of the nations, the like lower g lower G gods um plural. And so you've got these, these, these characters that are supernatural judges over the nations and, and they are informing and driving the ideology of the kingdom through the human king. OK.So that's what they kind of do. Um If you look at X 1215, you're gonna get Peter at the gates of Mary's house. Um And uh and, and so Peter was supposed to be in prison and they're over at Mary's house and this is a hilarious narrative.Actually, they're at Mary's house and they're praying for Peter in prison. Right? They want him to, to, to be released and Peter is released by an angel.And so then Peter comes to Mary's house where they're praying for him to be released and he's knocking at the door of the gates. Right? And the, and, and the girl comes out and, and she's like, oh my gosh, it's Peter. Right?

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And she goes in the house and then she's like, Peter's at the gates. You're not gonna believe it. And, and the response that's given is, oh, it's not Peter, it's just his angel, right? X 1215, it's his angel.And that's hilarious because um because it's actually Peter, but there's this idea that Peter himself has like an angelic version of himself. So in the same way.So in the macro Nar, in the, in the macro narrative, we have this idea that kings have um that, that all kings or all rulers have, have, have a, an angel if you will or a Watcher, Son of God.Um that is that is overseeing them on the metaphysical side, that the king is the physical and then the, the angel is the metaphysical.Then you have this, this duality between the metaphysical angel or the metaphysical spiritual being and the physical king and together they rule over the nation.

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Then you have this smaller version where even Peter is seem seem to have of like, I don't know, like his own, like his own watcher, his own personal guardian angel in a sense. Look, look at, look at Jesus talking to the Children in Matthew 1810.He says, I tell you that in heaven, their angels continually are, uh I'm sorry, their angels continually before the father uh before the face of my father in heaven. I wrote that weird.I tell you that in heaven, their angels are continually before the face of my father in heaven. Who's angels? Jesus is saying that the kids have their own angels that are always petitioning bef uh for them before the, the fa God, the father.And that's kind of these two verses really are probably the primary verses about like guardian angels. But that's kind of what, where this thinking comes from, think modern evangelicals, we tend not to think about guardian angels.We think that's like, oh, that's a Catholic thing or something like that. Um But uh low it comes from the Bible. Um This is where these ideas come from. And so then the personal guardian angel is a recursion of the judicial angels or watchers that watch over nations.

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And so you can th this is an example of how you can explode it and say that that if that, that if we can understand what it might mean for a person, for an individual to have like a guardian angel, then we can understand then what it mean, what it might mean that there's some kind of archangel.

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Ar K means ruler, that there's some kind of archangel, some kind of ruling angel that is a guardian angel of a nation, right?And then even, and then even larger, you might begin to understand what it means that like God is the ultimate Ar K over all things that, that, that everything is under the authority of Christ and that, and, and that all things are held within, within his hands so that they are not torn apart by sin.

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And so you've got this idea of g guardian angel that is driven by recursion. It's the, it's the looking at the simple to understand fract and, and like these dynamic systems or these dynamic images of larger things.And so we can understand more cosmic realities um from the smaller. Now, II, I, if you go around thinking, oh, I've got my own personal guardian angel and that's what you walk away from this, then you're actually kind of missing the point.Um because, you know, there's a sense in which, you know, and I don't wanna talk about necessarily theologically right now. I don't wanna parse this and say, does every single person have a guardian angel and try to deal with it in that sense, maybe not today.But if you can understand what it means that an individual has a guardian angel and then you walk away with, I'm so glad I have my guardian angel right? Then you're actually completely missing the point of this.What you're actually supposed to do and what recursion in storytelling allows us to do is to explode that now to understand what it might mean for you and then to explode that and to, and to see sort of the different levels of that fractal as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger to understanding how, how it is that um that, that the nations of the world are operating.

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And especially as we start to look at some of the narratives of falling angels, to understand the way that interrelationship between nations operates under those divine rulers and then to explode it even bigger.And to understand what it might then mean that God is rule of ruler over all things that Jesus is uh not just God, but he is also called king of kings that he's um recursively the largest extent um or fract the largest extent that we can look at.And so fractal patterns, they, they continue out to the extremes so that, you know, Jesus becomes this infinitely powerful, infinite uh infinitely authoritative being that is the watcher of all things or is the ultimate Son of God over all things. OK?That though there are others that are called Sons of God in the spiritual world. He is the ultimate Son of God. And so to use the previous example, Jesus or, or Yahweh, if we're reading the Old Testament, is that highest divine being in the universe.And this responsible for this ultimate oversight, this infinite oversight of all things and potentially why this is why sort of Christo passages in the Old Testament um identify the physical appearance of God as Yahweh's angel.

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Now that they're, that they're, that they're attaching this idea of the angel of the Lord or, or, or, or the Lord's angel Yahweh's angel and they're using this image um to try to say that that angel that's showing up within this context that that really is the, it is the arche of arc angels.

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It is the ruler of rulers, the king of kings in, in the angelic world. And so then maybe just to quickly recap that we get this idea that we have these biblical narratives, these little stories, these little stories drive the macro narrative.That is the large story, the large story helps us to understand then the meta narrative, which is the thinking that exists beyond or beside the narrative. It's the worldview that flows from the narrative.And so I hope what you're getting from this is that when you're reading the Bible, if you're immediately reading one little text and you just read Genesis one and you immediately start to parse it and try to try to figure out what's the moral, what's the lesson?How do I live because of this?What do I think about because of this, that you're not looking first to the macro narrative and then to the meta narrative so that you can now take the meta narrative back to the back to the Genesis one and say if this is how we think about the Bible, then this is how I read Genesis one.

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And if you're not doing all of that, then you're likely to do what we talked about before, where you're gonna separate, you're gonna demythologize, you're gonna separate the folklore from the dogma.You're gonna walk away with a dogmatic statement and you're gonna assume that everything beautiful that God has written in Genesis Genesis about, about the created order in the world. You're gonna lose all of the beauty of that and losing the beauty of that.You're likely to lose 90% of the meta narrative in it. OK. Um So that's sort of a biblical recap. And what I want you to take from that, we don't need to answer the questions of, is this true in a historical sense?Because the supernatural context and what is portrayed with in the Christian mythology, that is what God wants to inform us by. Remember what I said in part one, the purpose of myth is the exact same purpose as history.And we cannot treat myth like history, but we um I'm sorry, we can treat myth like history without having to believe everything about it is historical.

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And so I think there will be a future podcast where we try to try to parse like some of those questions about how can we read the mythology as a whole? How can we understand it as a whole?Um, and, and then still try to figure out what the history is. We may do a podcast on that.Although I personally might and, and just as I get older and I teach more, I, I personally am finding that just teaching the supernatural context, just teaching the mythology as it is and letting, letting everybody sort of parse the historical side of that, however they feel like, um is actually just a lot easier and it's just a lot and, and it, and it, and it doesn't overcomplicate the situation that I don't need to prove to you what is and isn't historical because that wasn't the point in the text.

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And so we're gonna talk about the dragons, we're gonna talk about the angels, we're gonna talk about the giants, we're gonna do all that stuff because that's what God wrote.It's the myth that he has given to us and it's not about what's historical or scientifically accurate, accurate, that's not really not a even what it's about.It's how, how it's about how the narrative as it is constructed in forms our meta narrative and for forms our world, our overall worldview. And so then biblical text, um the individual b biblical text, they're the recursions that reveal the greater realities, right?Um So I, in the same way that we want to read them in light of the meta narrative, the individual biblical te texts are seen as the lower, the lower levels, the lower levels of fractal organization or recursions that reveal the greater rea realities.And so then if you look through like different parts of the Bible, so let's think about laws like like levitical laws, laws are given to humans in the Bible to reflect ultimate re realities about God. OK.

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So, you know, um you, we often have, we have like all sorts of different theories about how it is that we're supposed to read the levitical laws as Christians. And this is, this is really how I read it, you know.Um I'm, I'm gonna read it in light of what they say about God because God didn't command anything of Israel that didn't reflect God's true character and nature.If we're gonna separate the myth from the, the myth from the dogma, then you're gonna walk away reading lit Vicus, you're gonna walk away with a set of laws and a question. Does God really want me to keep all these weird laws even today?And that's to completely miss the point of the narrative. The laws are all given within an occasion.They're all, they're all, they're all given to Israel within a, in a particular place and time in history with their understanding their Macron or their meta narrative about how the world works um within their particular place and time.

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And so, um if we're not willing to wrestle with the overall, with the over all the cosmic view, the, the macro narrative that and, and think about all of these individual laws from that perspective, then you're not gonna under never gonna understand the laws.And so let's take a law. So my, my, the one I always go to is, and, you know, it appears three times in the Old Testament um in, actually in Torah, um where Moses says, don't boil a goat in its mother's milk. OK. All right.So why don't we wanna boil a goat in its mother's milk? Well, there's a lot of theories about the cultural practice and why this might be happening.What it looks like is happening here is they're taking a newborn goat right after it's born and then they're milking the mother and they're boiling the goat and it's in its mother's milk.It creates like this coagulated mess and then they eat that as a, as some kind of fertility, right to one of the pagan gods. And so why might, so then the question is, you know, from a cosmic perspective, right?

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So from a, from a, from the micro narrative, if you just leave it right there, you might walk away going. OK, easy check mark. I did not boil a goat in its mother's milk. Therefore, I have done what God commands, right?Um You know, you might also read that and go, you know, we don't have dietary laws in the New Testament. So I don't even need to worry about that. But, you know, side note check mark anyway, because I'm still not doing that. Right.So you might even look at it that way. Um, ok, but that's not to look at it cosmically.Um That would be to look at it and be a reductionist one who sees, um, a verse of scripture, a verse that Moses felt was important enough to write it down three different times in the Torah.Um And to redact it and say that this isn't important for Christians anymore. Well, that's a problem for me because I think that all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training, right and righteousness. Why Paul?

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Oh be because so that the man of God might be fully equipped forever, good work. And so I think that that verse is actually kind of important. Um And so then you need to, you need to blow it up into the macro narrative.You need to, you need, need to be able to ask the question, tease out these questions. Like, why doesn't God want the Israelites participating in this act?Oh, because it's an act that is reliant on, on, on pagan gods for fertility or for some kind of provision of some kind, right? Oh Well, why aren't they supposed to go to the pagan gods?Oh, because the pagan gods actually rebelled against God, you start to put it within that macro narrative when you understand that the gods of the nations actually rebel against God and they're teaching, you know, they're, they're leading un, they're ruling unjustly over the nations and they're, they're favoring the wicked and they're oppressing the poor and it's like, and they're doing all of this type of stuff.

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Right. And you go, ok, so now you're gonna go to a rebellious God for something that Yahweh God has promised you, OK. That's a problem.And so whenever we're going to the world for things that God has promised us um were boiling a goat in its mother's milk, so to speak, right? And so you always need to understand the biblical text, the micro narrative as a recursion of a greater reality.And until you can blow that up into the greater reality, you're not gonna understand what that text means within the, within the, the larger meta narrative of the Bible. So biblical texts are also um recursions that reveal micro narrative.So sometimes you're gonna be able to look at a text of the Bible that's on, that's already existing on a macro level and see something smaller. Um And, and so you might look at something a large fractal and see something and then, and then learn something about humankind.And here's an example of that in Genesis 126 we're told that humans were created in God's image. And uh and, and that there's something about being a characteristically godlike that is intrinsic to being human.

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And, and maybe that's not just in the created order who we're supposed to be. But it's also as we look at the Book of Revelation, we, we understand Pauline theology in the New Testament.It's actually the Los or the end result of what a human is, is supposed to be ultimately.And, and so this is why the Christian church throughout history And not everybody likes this term today, but has believed in something called Theos, which is to be the becoming Godly or becoming God like um or even it can be interpreted to mean becoming deity.Um And thesis really just means, it's never really meant becoming an actual God like God is God. All it means is becoming spiritual. That is Adam was the, the life was breathed into Adam in, in the garden.So that so that he became, he became a, a physical and yet also metaphysical.

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He became a human and spiritual being when God breathes life into him, that he was not just um sort of that, that he was the perfect conglomeration if you will of the sacred and the secular, the physical and the metaphysical, the physical and spiritual, right?And so he was both um but then that would, that became deconstructed. Um And he, you know, Paul will use the term spiritually dead for this, right? He, he, he was deconstructed when he sinned and he was exiled from the garden. OK.And so now the process throughout redemptive history is to make human. If Adam is representative of humankind, his, his, his name Adam meaning in Hebrew human.Um If he is the representative of humankind, who, who, who falls, then the process of redemption of history is a calling to godliness or calling to theos or to deification would be another way of, of saying it to becoming who we ultimately, we were supposed to be in a sense deity or in a sense, spiritual beings who are also physical.

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And so this is sort of the way that, that like the larger narrative looking at who God is can then be, can, can then can then become the lens in which we see who humans are supposed to be.What it means to image God is to be in, in not in every sense like in an eternity sense. But, but, and to be in, in most senses like God, um perfect pictures of who God is.And so we can, we can do it both ways we can start from the cosmic and look down to the, to the micro or we can start in the micro and look up to the macro.Now, let's talk about mythology because we've, I I've, I've already mentioned this um idea of Christian mythology a couple of times and that's something that like I'm on, if I'm honest, like, uh I'm not 100% comfortable using the words that way.Um And yet I also like to use words as precisely as possible. And I think Christian mythology is the right way to think about a lot of what is said in the Scriptures, especially in the Old Testament.

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And so, um, so let's tease these ideas out so that you don't hear me saying that I don't believe the Bible is true.Um I would, I would wager to say that anybody who's not comfortable with the term mythology in a being used for the Bible probably doesn't actually know what the word true means. Um But that might be a conversation for another day as well.So let's talk about the word Christian itself. You can obviously, you, you right within the word Christian that is related to Christ, that it has to do with the Messiah. Um the, the anointed one of God who came to become the, the Savior of all Israel.Um spiritually, if I read Paul correctly in Galatians and Romans. And, but then that Ian suffix, the Ian part of it, um It's, it's the forming of adjectives and nouns out of the original term and it, and it means like belonging to or relating to.So when we say Christian, we're saying belonging to Christ or relating to Christ. Now, in a, it can be a noun or an adjective. And so as a noun, it means one who belongs to Christ.

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That's a good definition um but it can also mean one who relates to Christ. Um And I, and I actually see both of these usages. You know, if you, um many polls you can just go Google this.I didn't, I, I don't, I don't really feel like doing the leg work here because it's not that important. But if you go Google, how many, um people in the United States claim to be Christians, you're gonna get all these polls.You can actually go straight to the United States Census Bureau and find out that, you know, depending on when the poll was taken anywhere from 70 to 80% of the United States even today claims to be Christian.Oh, that's really interesting because 70 to 80% of people in the United States do not faithfully go to church and read their Bible, pray to Jesus to God, the God of the Bible on a regular basis that they are, they are what we would call most of that 70 to 80% or what we would call nominal Christians or name only Christians.

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In other words, they, they relate to Christ, but they do not belong to Christ necessarily, right? So they, they're just, it's sort of a poor definition just like when we say that the United States is a Christian nation, right? That's a poor definition of Christian.Just to say that like in some way we relate to Christ. Oh, excuse me, sorry about that.Um So we want to use that no, in, in the non sense, we probably want to favor one who belongs to Christ as the best definition of what it means to be a Christian.And then we look um adjectivally and this is actually the way we're gonna use it when we talk about Christian mythology because we're gonna use the word Christian as an adjective, not a noun. We're not talking about a Christian.We're talking about a mythology that is Christian when we say Christian mythology.

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So as an adjective, now, I think when we use the word related, um because we don't wanna say, I mean, I guess there's a sense in which we could say mythology that belongs to Christ and that would be an acceptable definition of Christian mythology.But I think mythology relating to Christ is probably the best way to think about the, the biblical text. Um If you think about like other ways we use the word Christian, it kind of fits when we say a Christian book, right?We mean a book that we don't mean the Bible per se. I mean, obviously, the Bible is a Christian book in a sense, but like we mean like a book that was written by a Christian author and that discusses themes that are intrinsically Christian, right?That's what we mean by a Christian book. So adjectivally that means a book that relates to Christ in some way when we say a Christian holiday. Right.Most of the Christian holidays, even in like the high church, um, Christian calendars, most of the Christian holidays are relating specifically to Christ, you know, um, you know, to Christ's ascension or to Christ's birth or, you know, to his death, to his resurrection. Right.

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So, most of the ch, the holidays are relating directly to Christ and the ones that aren't relating directly to Christ are actually relating indirectly to Christ. And so, um a Christian holiday is one that relates to Christ in some way.So then when we talk about Christian mythology, we're talking about mythologies that relate to Christ. And where do we get those? Well, first and foremost, we get those out of the Bible itself, right? So Christian myths are gonna come out of the Bible.Um But actually, now if we're using the term related that, now we can actually start to admit that though we believe, um as Protestant Christians, most Protestant Christians believe in, in the inspiration of the 66 books of the Bible.Um We can actually start to discuss other, what we might call extra biblical texts, things that exist in like from the ancient world, like the apocrypha, um maybe certain histories, you know, there's parts of Josephus who wasn't even a Christian himself, he was a Jew, but he, he mentioned Christ in his histories, we can talk about the writings of the Church fathers.

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We can, we can talk about all types of things as being Christian texts. And if they are in nature mythological, then they can be considered Christian mythologies.So, you know, you'll hear me talk about, in fact, I wrote, I wrote a book about um the book of Enoch, specifically the first part of the book of Enoch called the Book of the Watchers.And so, you know, and, and, and I specifically wrote it to an evangelical audience uh because I wanted to say, you know, although this is not scripture, here's what it has in value as myths that are intrinsically Christian myths. So myths are stories about divine beings.I already gave this definition, but myths are stories about divine beings generally arranged in a coherent system. They're revered as sacred and true and endorsed by rulers and priests. Myths are closely related to religion.And so if you take that sort of religious definition of mythologies, which I think is the right thing to do, um then, then you can definitely see how um much of the Bible is Christian mythology.

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A Christian myth is an official story that is revered as true and sacred by Christ followers, by Christians, right? And so you can look at the text of the Bible and, and, and you can read it and you can say, yes, I believe this is true, right?You can see why the Bible then is so important to us. If it is probably the, the most um reliable, not even probably it is the most reliable compendium of Christian myths that has ever existed and ever will exist.And so then if you recall like the link between the sacred and the secular, if that link is broken, then the myth is reduced to the status of folklore and the dogma behind the myth may be lost.And so, you know, and just as an example of that, you know, let's take uh Genesis six where um historically, that text has been taken to talk about the sons of God, the the divine rulers in the cosmos coming down and taking human wives and having Children who were giants.Ok. So there's a number of ways to parse exactly how and answer the question. How exactly did these divine beings, did these angels or whatever? How did they do that? And I think the Bible provides some answers for those.

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And we can, we can definitely think about those within a biblical world view, but a lot of people want to take that and parse it and say, parse it and say, well, we don't really think angels can do that.Therefore, this must be talking about humans in some way. And then there's several, you know, several ideas about how that could be talking about humans that are not in any way, a natural reading of the story.And so what I want you to do is to, to read the supernatural texts and to read them in the way that's most natural. That's, that's the strength of reading mythology is that it's pretty easy to understand what's happening in the story.And if you can understand what's happening in the story, then, then, then you're most likely to be influenced by the ethos of the story, so that you understand the world view or the meta narrative that flows naturally from it.Now, I keep using those ideas, worldview and meta narrative almost interchangeably and they're not completely interchangeable. The meta narrative drives our worldview. The meta narrative is how we think about the macro narrative of the scriptures um as a cohesive whole.

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The worldview is sort of the dogmatics that comes out of it. But, but, but that's what we're ultimately after is understanding uh the biblical world view.And so Protestant Christianity has sometimes intentionally which we call liberalism and sometimes unintentionally varying levels of deconstructionism, demythologize the Bible and with it, the Christian faith.And, and I, and I think it's, I think it's frankly a shame because again, this is, this is the reason that uh so many people seeking spiritual things are not seeking it through the Christian church. This is an evangelistic issue.You guys like, like the like to believe the supernatural context of the scripture as it's been written, um actually reveals surprise, surprise that like God understood things that we didn't understand.And so in our post materialistic world where we're still, we're, we're sort of the, we're sort of the traditionalists now as Christians thinking about the world as a and, and as, as it was thought of in modernity as a material, materialistic world, and that's not what people are into.

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And we need to return to the spiritual world view of the Bible, the the world view that reveals the unseen things that are, that are all around us. Um We favored lists of laws and dogmas over a truly biblical world view for entirely, entirely too, too long.And so we need to re enchant, we need to, we need to bring it back. We need to, to rem mythologize within the Christian world view. What has been demythologize, we need to bring it back now. That's so that's myth, that's Christian myth.That's how we, how we think about the different stories. Let's talk about the word Christian mythology. Um If Christian mythology is sort of the exposition, the investigation and interpretation of the biblical myths, um That's remember, we're, we're talking about the difference between a myth and a mythology.

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Um The myth is just the story. And when we say mythical, we're talking more about things that aren't necessarily real. But when we're saying, saying mythological, we're talking about how we think about and expose the truths that underlie the story.And so Christian mythology is probably like the, the most ground level way of thinking about the scripture theologically. And so it's probably our first step is the exposition of the Christian mythology.It's the first step in the theological process that, that informs how it is that we think systematically about the truths of the Bible. So Christian mythology will never demythologize the text. That's, that's sort of, that's sort of gonna be an axiom. I'm gonna throw out here.

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Christian mythology, never demythologize the text. If you're dem dem mythologizing the text, if you're stripping out, it's uh the supernatural world view, you're stripping out the, the, the things that seem fantastic and mythological, then you're actually stripping out intrinsic and necessary truths.

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And so Christian mythology doesn't ask questions, like are giants real? No, no, no. Christian mythology asks, what are giants? Christian mythology asks why are giants? Christian mythology might ask how are giants? Um But Christian mythology wants to know where are the giants, right?

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We don't, we don't wanna reject the giants, we wanna know where they're at and we wanna know how to think about them. Christian mythology doesn't ask your dragons reel. Christian. My mythology doesn't ask where are the dragons? Uh I'm sorry, it doesn't ask our dragons reel.It does ask where are the dragons? It asks, what are the dragons, where are our dragons today? Where are they lurking? What are they hoarding that human hearts? So desire to their own destruction, right? That's what, that's what Christian mythology wants to ask.It doesn't want, it doesn't want to reject the idea of dragons, it wants to find them Christian mythology does not ask, are demons real? No, it asks what are demons? And where are they possessing and oppressing, where are they demonizing? Where are they doing?What it is that demons do in the scriptures? And where are they doing that today? And that's, that's sort of the Christian mythology perspective is that you don't have to, you, you, you're never gonna find a demon and explain it from a materialistic world view.You're never gonna find a dragon and explain it from a materialistic world view.

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You're never gonna find a giant and explain the giant from a materialistic world view because these, these things and this is just three of countless uh you know, um mythological figures that we could talk about within the scriptures.You want to, you want to elevate them, you wanna hold them, you wanna behold them, you want to, you want to see them for what they are and not just on the sort of the evil side, but on the good side, we wanna know what the angels, the arc angels, the seraph, the Seraphim and the, you know, we wanna know, we wanna know where the Leviathan plays and what the Leviathan is and what the Behemoth is, right?

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We wanna understand these things and not demythologize them to reduce them just to folklore and to strip them out of the text because in some ways, they, they, they're actually the most profound um parts of the Christian faith and they're the things that they're the things that people are really wrestling with that.

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They are wrestling with giants and they're fighting dragons and they're, um, and, and they're oppressed by demons. And these are, these are the spiritual questions that people have.They wanna know, they wanna know how to fight the giant, the fight the dragon, they wanna know how to, they wanna know how to escape the dragon, the giants and they wanna know how to fight the demon, right?To reject the demon, to get rid of the oppression and the possession. And so just as we conclude, then I, I kinda wanna answer this question, like, how does Christian myth relate to the concept of meta, meta narrative?And uh uh so, like, for illustration, like, if you read early Greek myths, um they're, they're kind of scattered. They don't, they don't fit perfectly.Sometimes you get, um you get, you get one myth that describes like a Greek God and or it's just some kind of character in one way and then you get another myth that might describe it in like a characteristically other way that doesn't make sense for be both.

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Um Or it's hard to make it be about both. And so the early Greek myths are kind of scattered.It's not like all the, all the authors of these myths got together and said, you know, like, let's create a big, you know, a big system before we write any of these things down.But then hess um um took all of the ancient Greek myths and I think wrote quite a few more down himself and um and, and kind of wrote them into a compendium where you get the sort of the early pantheons of the gods and things like that.And he, he essentially systematized these myths. He took them all, then he put them into a macro narrative, um Various stories in the scriptures um come together in much the same way to create a cohesive whole, a macro narrative.So then the meta narrative frames our biblical world view. This is, and this is what we call and we talked about biblical theology previously in the, in the last podcast, but this is called Biblical theology.

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When, when we, when we construct the macro narrative in order to derive our thinking on the macro native, which is the meta narrative, it then frames our biblical worldview, which is our, which, which is properly speaking, our, our biblical ethics.But this whole process is what we call biblical theology. It's understanding the ethos behind the Bible itself. And if you reduce the narrative of scripture down to dogma, you strip out all the folk lore, you just reduce it to mere principles.And if that's your goal in reading the scriptures, you're missing out on so much you're playing with the various dogmas to see how they relate and, and, and that can be healthy, that's called systematic theology. But, but how much are you leaving on the table?How much are you cutting out, how much are you losing out of the biblical world view? Um in order to place your theological thinking within the materialistic universe. And that's that I think is just a huge problem. And, and so it's not what we're doing here.This podcast is really about focusing on the narratives of the scriptures, thinking about narrative and the way that the ancient people thought about narrative and the ancient, near eastern mindset. Um And so in effectively, what we're doing on this podcast is biblical theology.

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And, you know, I, I love to read a systematic theology, but biblical theology is not systematic theology. Um It's not the bringing together of ideas and dogmas sort of using philosophical ideas. Um because you, you can't do that without a certain amount of demyelization.Biblical theology is actually the systematizing of the narratives. It's taking the narratives in the raw form that they are and doing kind of what hess did.And, and, you know, keeping the mythology in, in keeping it there, creating this grand narrative or this, this macro narrative that, that sits behind side um the meta narrative and patterns fract onto every level of creation.And really, I think that that's where we're gonna derive a truly spiritual and Christian worldview from not, not through all of the systematic theologies produced through the period of modernity and for whatever value that they had for that place and time and whatever value they continue to have.

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I truly believe that this exploration of biblical theology and, and this understanding of biblical myth is what's really is, what's really gonna preach to the world around us, think of God's relationship to humankind, maybe as like this macro idea and that Adam as humanity receives the breath, he receives the spirit of God.

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It's this beautiful marriage between God and humankind. That's what we see actually there in the Bible as a marriage between God and humanity, right?In the beginning in Genesis, one and two, that becomes pattern on to Yahweh's relationship to Israel where Israel is called the bride of Yahweh in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Apostle Paul specifically.But, but not only Paul patterns us on to Christ's relationship to the New Testament people of God that in English, at least we call the church. And, and so we get this relationship, this bride of Christ concept between Christ and the church.It's pattern on to the priests of the Old Testament relationship to the rest of the, of the Israelites that there's this, that there's this headship in the priesthood between the marriage of the priesthood and the people of God.And it's patterned on to the elders, relationship with the local church. It's, it's all of this fractal. It's patterned on to the relationship between Adam and Eve themselves that the the marriage between Adam and Eve reflects the marriage mac, on a macro level between God and humankind.

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It becomes patterned in the Paul's words in Ephesians five, probably most poignantly onto the husband's relationship with the wife. And within a Christian marriage, there's a picture of Christ in the church, there's a picture of God and all humankind.Um Macro down to micro and then it patterns forward onto the consummation.When Christ receives the eternal kingdom of God, what we call the, the wedding feast of the lamb, the eternal and perfect wedding of God and humankind forever where God exists in this perfect, unadulterated marriage with the people that he created forever.And so this is a way that we kind of, you know, just for example, that we do biblical theology looking across the scriptures to see where these, where these patterns explode and implode in different points of the text.To see this, this, this fractal occurring, this recursion that allows us to understand as we look about God, as, as we look at God and humankind, it allows us to understand things all the way down onto the micro level about a man's relationship with his own wife or a wife's relationship with her own husband.

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And then as as it was, we look at things that we know that are intrinsic and true and scriptural and biblical and commanded about the relationship between a man and his wife. We start to understand larger realities about God.And it's like, you know, you look at the Old Testament, you read the song of songs and one group of people wants to say, well, it's a big allegory about, about God and his people. And then the other group wants to say no, no, no, no, no.This has to do with a man's relationship with his wife. And why not both? Because that's the way that the Bible functions. It's the way that narrative and mythology functions within the b within the Bible's macro narrative.And so we see it explode and, and, and, and implode and, and flux and we see it to apply in different areas and that's the beauty of the Bible.And if you've never seen the Bible in that way, and you know, and we've all heard people that argue like though there's this great cohesion within the narratives of the Bible.

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And if you start to think of it sort of in this symbolic way in this, in this fractal and this patterned way, I think it's gonna blow your mind because the, the connection points in the Bible are far more um than you, I think you ever thought or imagined.And in that you begin to be able to read more texts. And if you can understand the macro narrative, you can read those micro narratives and see them in a whole new light.And I guess that would be my prayer for my listeners is that is that you'll learn to read the Bible as a cohesive whole, to understand the whole story, the macro narrative.So that as you read the micro narratives, you understand how it fits into it and it informs the meta narrative so that we know how to live and how to know how to live biblically, not according to laws and abstracts.But according to the story that's been told, the Christian mythology.