Episode 264: Big Ideas | Myth

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘myth?’ You might use it to describe the opposite of what is real or factual, maybe a widely held but false belief. However, sacred narratives are also called myths—traditional or symbolic stories explaining the origin of the world, natural phenomena, or cultural customs. Most societies have their own creation myths, for instance. Sound familiar...maybe even like scripture? Yet it would be a profound shift for many Latter-day Saints to consider approaching our scriptures through a mythic lens. In Episode 264, Cynthia and Susan discuss some benefits of changing the way we think about scripture and how it can function to teach spiritual truths and deepen understanding of our human experience.

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Notes & Quotes:

ALSSI Ep. 84: Do I Literally Have to Believe That? | A Conversation with Kajsa Berlin-Kaufusi
Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet, by Jeffrey R. Holland, 04/2015
Come, Follow Me, by Pres. Russell M. Nelson, 04/2019
Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It, by Brian D. McLaren
After 18 years living with cancer, a poet offers ‘Fifty Entries Against Despair’, Terry Gross with Christian Wiman, Fresh Air, NPR, 12/13/2023
Comedy Sex God, by Pete Holmes
The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, by Peter Enns
The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell & Bill Moyers (Collaborator)
The Body of Christ, by Adam Miller, Times and Seasons, 10/16/2014
The Challenge of Honesty: Essays for Latter-day Saints, by Frances Lee Menlove
The Great Search: Turning to Earth & Soul in the Quest for Healing & Home, by John Philip Newell
How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News, by Peter Enns
Why Most People Never Question Their Faith, by Britt Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality
Why Nephi Killed Laban: Reflections on the Truth of the Book of Mormon, by Eugene England, Dialogue Journal, Vol. 22 No. 3
Interpreting Scripture, Center for Action and Contemplation, 12/24/2015
Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, by Rachel Held Evans

“...there was an actual Adam and Eve who fell from an actual Eden, with all the consequences that fall carried with it.” —Jeffrey R. Holland

“Adam and Eve, Noah and his wife, Abraham and Sarah, Lehi and Sariah, and all other devoted disciples of Jesus Christ—since the world was created—have made the same covenants with God. They have received the same ordinances that we as members of the Lord’s restored Church today have made: those covenants that we receive at baptism and in the temple.” —Russell M. Nelson

“I was a very loyal person, respectful of authority and always ready to give the benefit of the doubt to my tradition and its spokespeople. But over time, I not only lost confidence in many of the beliefs that gatekeepers required: I lost faith in the gatekeepers themselves and their whole system of using beliefs as markers of belonging. If I was going to be a person of faith, it couldn't be in a community that was obsessed with policing my beliefs. I needed a different understanding of faith entirely, as something beyond beliefs.” —Brian McLaren, (p. 123)

“Christianity has been afflicted with theology. It's a theological religion. And I think that's largely a mistake. I love theology, but I think most of what Christianity ought to be is a poetic religion. It teaches us a way and gives us models of experiencing the world and not directions for how to be in the world.” —Christian Wiman

“My whole religious life, if someone had told me the Bible was a myth, I would have wanted to punch him in the face … because myth had meant ‘not true.’ I think that’s still what it means to most of us.” —Pete Holmes, (p. 151)

“[Myth] is a perfectly fine word—as long as we remember ‘myth’ doesn’t mean ‘silly things we made up while on acid.’ Myths were stories that were part of ancient ways of describing ultimate reality, which is found not here and now but on a higher and more primal plane of existence.” —Peter Enns, (The Bible Tells Me So, p. 119)

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” ―Joseph Campbell

“Don’t ask the thin question: ‘Is the Church true?’ Ask the thick question: ‘Is this the body of Christ?’ Is Christ manifest here? Is this thing alive? Does it bleed? This is a load-bearing question. This is a question properly fitted, by Christ himself, to address the existential burn that compels its asking….If your life itself depends on the question, then ask a question that is rich enough to cover the whole rich span of that (messy, unfinished, broken, vulnerable) life.” —Adam Miller

“[Faith] means fidelity to God, faithfulness to God—not to statements about God. I was impressed by an answer given by Steven Shields at a recent Sunstone Symposium when he was asked if he believed in the Book of Mormon. His reply embodied faith as fidelitas: ‘I don’t believe in any book. I believe in the God to whom the Book of Mormon points.’”—Frances Lee Menlove

“Moses’s encounter with the burning bush is not about content. It is about presence. Moses doesn’t come away from the experience with statements about God or with a name for God or a definition of the divine. Nor does he come away with divine prescriptions such as ‘You must do this” or ‘You must believe that.’ ‘The guiding counsel of God,’ says Buber, ‘is simply the divine Presence communicating itself directly to the pure in heart.’ Revelation does not consist of the dispensing of religious commandments from above that are to be etched forever into stone and followed meticulously. Rather, revelation consists of encounter, and ‘the Presence itself,’ says Buber, ‘acts as counsel.’ —John Philip Newell, (p. 57)

“If to believe in God means to be able to talk about God in the third person…then I do not believe in God. But if to believe in God means to be able to talk to God, then I do believe in God.” —Martin Buber, (quoted by John Philip Newell, p. 59)

“I still understand that seeing the Bible this way [as a book of wisdom] might cause some a bit of concern. I get it. After all, if the Bible is God’s word to us but isn’t clear and direct, what good is it? If we see the Bible as a book of wisdom that makes us figure things out rather than dispensing unambiguous divine instruction shaped for our eyes and ears, it may seem like we’re caving in to a ‘less than’ view of the Bible that isn’t of much practical use for anyone—a Plan B because Plan A unraveled. But again, nothing could be farther from the truth. Wisdom is Plan A.” —Peter Enns, (How the Bible Actually Works, pp. 38-39)

“Mystics don't take their texts as if that they are literal. These are just playgrounds and mirrors with which to play. And that's when the world opened up for me again…I could let go of having to claim truth. I just get to explore.” —Britt Hartley

“Myths are messy.” —Carmen Acevedo Butcher, CAC

“When I looked at [the story of Noah] with fresh eyes I thought, ‘oh my… this is a story of genocide where the entire human race is wiped out indiscriminately.’ ….Noah gets off the boat, invents alcohol to get drunk and passes out because he has such unbelievable survivor's guilt and PTSD over the whole thing. And then even God looks at the situation and says, ‘oof, that was a really bad mistake. I'm not going to do that again.’ I had been taught all these theological conundrums like people saying, ‘Does God change God's mind or not?’ Instead of realizing, no, this is a cautionary tale. When people say, ‘Why doesn't God punish the bad people?’ Well, this is what that would look like and it's an unmitigated disaster.” —Mike Petrow, CAC

“These mythological stories can inspire us, but they also can warn us, and it creates this mechanism for social learning.…we can pass on collective societal learning through these stories.” —Jennifer Tompos, CAC

“Or could it be (and this is what, finally, I believe myself) …as others have suggested, God was both teaching and helping Nephi to develop, through this Abrahamic test, into a servant and leader who could be obedient — but that God was also teaching Nephi (and us) the costs and limits of such obedience?” —Eugene England

“The New Testament was written in Greek—a language which Jesus did not understand—and was composed thirty to seventy years after Jesus’ death. We can conclude that the exact words of Jesus were apparently not that important for the Holy Spirit or for us. We have only a few snippets of Jesus’ actual words in his native Aramaic. This should keep us all humble and searching for our own experience of the Risen Christ instead of arguing over Greek verbs and tenses. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning.” —Richard Rohr

“It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.” —Rachel Held Evans

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