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Is the Resurrection a “Broken Myth”?

Is the Resurrection a “Broken Myth”?

Last updated on: February 4, 2016 at 11:51 am by Kyle Roberts

Is the Resurrection a “Broken Myth”? 2016-02-04T11:51:35-05:00 Kyle Roberts

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Yesterday I posted a response to a reader’s rich question about the resurrection: What happens when your emotions and desire to believe something (like the resurrection of Jesus) collides with your critical skeptical faculties?

Edvard Munch, Death in the Sickroom, WikiCommons

I’m teaching a course called “Immortality and Hope” this semester. We had a very interesting discussion the other day on a reading from Neil Gillman’s The Death of Death. In his introductory chapter, he unpacks the notion of “myth” and shows that there are many dimension to the ways that myth functions in religious belief.

The way people commonly use the term “myth” is reductionistic: To say something is a myth is tantamount to dismissing it out of hand as fiction or mere illusion. As such, myth is the opposite of fact or truth.

But this dismissal of myth is problematic, because myth is much more far-reaching and pervasive than the common view of myth as ancient, fictional, stories by primitive people. Rather, they are “structuring or ordering devices,” through which we connect the varied, disparate elements of our experience. Gillman explains,

Myths, then, are not illusions or fictions. Nor are they scientifically, objectively “true.” They cannot be true in this sense because there is no reality “out there” with which we can compare our myths, as we compare our hypothesis with the results of a scientific experiment. More precisely, there is no “out there” because we cannot even begin to see the “out there” without the spectacles provided by the myth. To put it another way, we cannot escape our humanness. We must carry a myth–some myth–with us, if not one myth then another. Without the ordering work of myths, we cannot begin to make sense of our world. The issue is never myth or no myth, but rather which myth, which organizing or structuring device we want to use. (27-28)

So there is a sense of inevitability to myths. As human beings, we will make use of myths. Some are more ancient and inscribed in and passed along through ancient, sacred texts. Others are more contemporary and can be grounded in more empirical or rational procedures. But so long as there is an attempt to piece reality together and draw conclusions about meaning, purpose, origin, direction, etc., we have the makings of myth.

Gillman then goes on to distinguish between three “varieties of mythic expression.” They are:

(1) “Living” myth, or stories that function within religious communities to enable common worship (ritual) and symbolic understanding of reality.

(2) “Dead” myth: When a myth is dead, it has been determined to be fiction, illusion, and “just a myth” (in the sense discussed above). The functional significance of a myth for a community that has determined it to be be dead is basically nil: It retains some sentimental value and will be of interest to historians and scholars of religion or literature.

(3) “Broken” myth: a myth which has been “exposed,” or “no longer considered to be an objective, true photograph of the ultimate nature of reality, nor an objective account of how order came to be.” Once enough people say, “that’s a myth, not a real picture of the way way things really are,” then that myth has been “broken” and its functionality has been rendered precarious.

In contemporary Christianity, a good example of a broken myth is six-day creationism. Many modern believers now recognize the deeply mythological nature of the Genesis creation accounts. When put up alongside modern science, it is apparent that the creation stories do not reflect how the universe came to be. This does not mean there is no truth to the stories (the deeper truths lie outside of the question of creation’s ontological and chronological origins). Thus, the myth may not be “dead,” but its value is found in something other than as a historical or scientific explanation of the origins of the universe. So the myth has been exposed, thrust under the light of contemporary understanding, but still functions positively in many religious communities.

As Gillman points out, once a myth has been “broken” (exposed as being myth), a “precarious” situation arises in which the religious believers are confronted with several options:

(1) Revert to a literalist understanding. They can reject the notion that the belief in question (six-day creation, bodily resurrection, etc.) is mythological and insist that the story is giving us an absolutely “real” picture of the world. They can, as Gillman puts it, “return to the safe haven of literalism.”

(2) Proclaim that the broken myth is a dead myth. This is to reject it altogether, to spurn it as “just a story,” a fable, a fiction, an illusion with no lasting or contemporary value.

(3) Embrace the myth as simultaneously “broken” and as “living.” Here Gillman refers to Paul Ricoeur’s notion, “second naiveté.” Gillman explains:

It is “naive” because through it we recapture the primitive, almost childlike stage of our awareness about how the world works. But it is a “second” naivete because it follows a stage in our development in which our critical faculties tell us that this picture is not objectively true, that God did not literally create the world in the way that Genesis 1 relates, or that God did not literally descend on a mountaintop to reveal the Torah to our ancestors as Exodus 19-23 relates. These stories need no longer be viewed as literally or objectively true–or, for that matter, as literally or objectively false. And it is “willed” because it is embraced through a conscious, deliberate act of the will. (30)

When we move through the critical moment of reflection, analysis, skepticism, into a place of continuing to worship and practice in religious community the rituals and theologies which are largely based on broken myths, we do with with a knowledge that these myths do not tell us exactly and precisely about reality with absolute precision, certitude, or finality. So the brokenness is really felt.

However, the recognition that myth is part and parcel to understanding reality (as finite human beings) means that this kind of felt brokenness is inevitable. And it can be quite beautiful.

Gillman concludes that,

We walk back into the myth, revel in its imaginative playfulness, allow our consciousness to absorb its magic and live in it. Jewish eschatology as a whole and the doctrine of resurrection in particular is both a broken and living myth. (31)

This way of framing myth is exceedingly illuminating. However, I wonder if there might be a fourth category?

Could a myth be not quite broken, but perhaps wounded? That is, it is thrust under the light of critical reflection, it is exposed as vulnerable but not quite as broken. It seems to me that when it comes to eschatological beliefs, especially, which must await ultimate confirmation or falsification, it is too much to declare them as broken.

Might a “literal immortality” be in store for us? Might an embodied resurrection await us, due to the exceeding grace of God? It seems to me that myths which do not purport to explain the past (origins), but which point toward a direction in the future, depend by their very nature on the unseen rather than on tangible evidence. They connect with the human experience of hope, rather than of certainty.

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