Gospels not history, but sacred dramas

Catholic New Times, June 29, 2003 by Tom Harpur

The worst threat to religion today comes not from secularism, science, or even sheer indifference. It comes from within. It stems from religion itself.

I'm not talking about the ways in which all religions manage to shoot themselves in the vitals through glaring scandals which march steadfastly in the opposite direction to what is preached in pulpits.

The real enemy is cruder and subtler simultaneously. The most devastating blow religion has suffered over past centuries and still endures right now is an ignorant literalism towards its sacred books or Bibles. The different sages who wrote the ancient scriptures never dreamed that the great myths, allegories, legends, dramas, metaphors and parables in which the old wisdom had come to them would ever be taken as literal fact or history.

As the late, renowned scholar, Northrop Frye used to tell his students at Victoria College, the Bible, when it is historically accurate, is so only by sheer accident. Reporting "was not of the slightest interest" to its writers. They had a story that could only be told by myth and metaphor. (See Frye's, The Double Vision, 1991).

It's crystal clear from my own research and that of many other past and present students of religion that all religious language is primarily symbolic and that to take it literally is to end up talking nonsense. Sublime myth, capable of communicating eternal truth about the human condition and destiny, becomes mumbo jumbo once it is reduced to historicity.

That's why a great rift opened between science and religion when literalists insisted that the creation stories in Genesis had to be taken at surface value and interpreted as scientific cosmology, geology and anthropology.

What vast harm was done--and in some circles still continues--by literal beliefs about Adam and Eve, talking serpents, a hideous disobedience, and a "Fall" from divine favour. What a negative, destructive doctrinism resulted from the concept of universal guilt instead of universal blessing. What soul-rending terrors have been inflicted by belief in a literal, fiery hell.

Few educated people now really buy into a plan of salvation based upon a literal rendering of these and other texts. Yet, the literalistic approach is not just the property of those in the far right of the Christian spectrum. It stealthily permeates the thinking of even the most liberal minded churches.

Not many on any given Sunday realize as they recite the creeds that they were called by those who framed them, symbola, or symbols. To insist they are literally true is to suspend all reality as one enters the sanctuary.

The same is true of the entire Jesus Story. Despite all protests to the contrary, it cannot by any modern standard be regarded as historical even though it contains the odd historical reference. Incidentally, the ancient religious myths all used well-known places and characters as pegs upon which the deeper truths were hung.

The Gospels are not history but sacred dramas portraying the central theme celebrated in almost every religion: the incarnation, life, struggle, death, and final resurrection of every individual soul. There are two levels of meaning in the Gospels. One represents a mirror into the heart of the eternal "Christ principle" or God's "stooping" to enter the human arena, with all the "suffering" this involves. At the other, Jesus represents the Christ in each of us. Corporately, the whole of humanity is "the Son of God." One day, when true brotherhood/ sisterhood marks the entire human community and love prevails, the full "Christ" will have come.

One hears repeated calls from assorted sources for more Bible study. If it's simply more of the old, literalistic memorizing of texts, this kind of study can be harmful. It serves to embed the approach that has so badly skewed Christian understanding already.

We should be reminded it was not always so. For the first two and a half centuries of existence, the Christian movement was led by scholars (Paul was one) who took the ancient, allegorical method seriously.

The Alexandrian school, led by Origen and Clement of Alexandria, taught that there were three possible approaches to be taken, the literal, the symbolic or allegorical, and the spiritual. The first, they said, was for babes.

Sadly, the ignorant masses cried out for a ready-made, simplistic, popular faith and eventually--combined with the Roman gift for organization and, when necessary, brute force--this form of "Christianism" won out. Origen, for example, was subsequently declared a heretic, his books were ruled anathema (cursed) and those who read them were excommunicated. Thus they treated one of the most brilliant minds of early Christianity.

If you doubt the relevance of any of this, consider the blind literalism undergirding the stance of George W. Bush. He says Christ is his "favourite philosopher." His simplistic, religiously inspired definition of the "good" and the "evil," however, has rained ungodly destruction upon thousands. He's prepared to strike again.