Faith stories
combine history and literature. Though we do not apply the term to our own
faith stories, they are in fact a form of myth. Thus a literal reading
of biblical stories and history deprives them of power and fundamental truth.
Superficially, they are too fantastical as well as too contradictory to be read
for literal meaning. Doing so requires what literary critic Northrup Frye said
was required to read fiction successfully, that is, “a willing suspension of
disbelief.” To believe that Moses literally parted the sea is to believe that
Ramesses II, possibly the pharaoh of Moses’s time (it is open to dispute), was
larger than any of his subjects, for that is the way he is depicted in the
monumental sculptures that honor him.
Faith documents
should not be read as fiction. But they should be viewed, at least in the case
of the Bible, as allegorical history. Events are magnified through hyperbole,
symbolism, metaphor, and other rhetorical devices to convey important ideas and
theological lessons. Ramesses is sculpted in enormous scale not because he was
physically large but because he was hugely important. The parting of the Red
Sea denotes an event of high historical and theological significance—the
freeing of the Jews from captivity, in every sense, through the power of belief
in God—not an actual display of supernatural or magical powers, but a magnified
iteration of human determination.
When Christianists
conflate literalistic faith and modern governance, they apply magical thinking
to governance issues and problems that require rationalism. Deus ex machina must be saved for the
stage. Magical godly intervention will not solve human problems. Human problems
demand human solutions.
Little in biblical
history would pass muster by today’s standards of historical scholarship, which
has been largely, though not entirely, separated from the story aspects
necessary for myth-making. Theological attribution in certain views, however,
has maintained the thread of myth-making to the present day—but exactly in
reverse of the biblical writers of antiquity. Modern literalists flip this
notion of attribution on its head, making storytelling into truth-telling.
For example, we are
admonished by those who persist in the ancient belief in a wrathful God, rather
than the God of love identified by Jesus, that disasters ranging from the AIDS
epidemic to Hurricane Katrina are God’s punishment. This approach to the faith
stories of the Bible constitutes a reconceptualized myth-making constrained by
an ideologically driven, purposeful misreading of Scripture. It is no
coincidence that some literalists’ interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah, the
AIDS epidemic, and Hurricane Katrina all focus on divine punishment for
homosexuality, because literalism finds its greatest resonance among
fundamentalists with strong antigay sentiments. Christianists who use
fundamentalism as a political force would reify this magical thinking in
governance policy.
Situating biblical
truth outside the contemporary culture of the ancient writers of the Bible is
problematic because reading the stories through the lens of modern literalism
inevitably leads to misinterpretation. When such magical thinking spills over
into government, it leads to unreasonable governance—literally, governance in
which reason is obscured or subverted by reference to faith interpretation that
is grounded in fundamentally misreading the Bible.
When we approach the
Bible as allegorical, rather than literal, and thus penetrate the maze of
biblical story, what we discover at the center is not a mythological Minotaur
but Truth. That Truth is worth examining by people of good character because at
root it reveals humans throughout recorded history engaging in human endeavors.
Those endeavors and what humankind has learned from them can legitimately guide
our modern endeavors to govern well for the common good.
