(This is an extended combination of two previous posts)

Go back to the beginning, to the story of Genesis. Where do we find ourselves in these stories? Are these factual events relevant only to historians and the individuals involved or are they more? Could they be more than just a historical account of the long dead? Could they point us towards truth that is beyond the limited experience of those involved as we find our place in the story?

We have the unfortunate tendency to end the story of creation on the sixth day. To imagine that after God finished creating, the world lay in a state of perpetual bliss, perfection, until that is Eve screwed it up. But the word perfect isn’t found in the creation narrative. In fact, it’s not even an idea that found its roots in Hebrew thoughts. Perfect as we understand it is a Greek idea and Greek word and perfect is where we get the idea that everything was over because perfect is complete. Perfect is static. It is unchanging. It has reached ultimate fulfillment because if there was anything left to strive for it obviously wouldn’t be perfect. Thing is it is such a great idea that we read it back on to the Hebrew story and it skews the meaning of the text.

This type of syncretism is pretty common especially in religion and it played a significant role in the spread of Christianity especially in the first couple centuries of its development.

Religious syncretism is the blending of two or more religious belief systems into a new system, or the incorporation into a religious tradition of beliefs from unrelated traditions. This can occur for many reasons, and the latter is quite common in areas where multiple religious traditions exist in close proximity and are active in the culture.

Religions may have syncretic elements to their beliefs or history, but applying the label is often unwelcome by adherents of so-labelled systems, especially those who belong to so-called “revealed” religious systems, such as the Abrahamic religions, or any system that is exclusivist in its approach. Syncretism is sometimes seen by such adherents as being a betrayal of a pure truth. By this reasoning, adding an incompatible belief corrupts the original religion, rendering it no longer true. Indeed, syncretism is sometimes used as an epithet, a charge implying that those who are seeking to incorporate a new view, belief, or practice into a religious system are, in fact, distorting it. Non-exclusivist systems of belief, on the other hand, may feel quite free to incorporate other traditions into their own.
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Syncretism was early on, the bread and butter of Christianity in the early part of the Common Era. The early Christians adopted such central metaphors to the faith as the idea of Jesus as the “Son of God” from the Romans. “Son of God” was a term used exclusively by the Roman Empire to describe the Caesars. Along comes Jesus and his followers, and they decide that the “father/son” metaphor is a perfect way to describe the relationship between Christ and God and so they start going around describing Jesus as the “Son of God”. Now I realize that is touchy subject because the father/son thing is so central to our faith (and rightly so) but we do realize it’s a metaphor to talk about their relationship, right? Christ and the God cannot exist in a literal father/son relationship if they are eternally pre-existent. It’s an image we use to talk about the intimate relationship within the mystery of the trinity.

However, after the Council of Nicea in 325 CE where Christianity was enshrined as the official religion of the state the idea of syncretism fell out of favour. There wasn’t any need for it. We didn’t need to find new ways to communicate our message. We didn’t have to wrestle to find better metaphors to talk about the incredible nature of Jesus. Instead we made it law and forced everyone to believe what we told them.

But here as we read the Genesis account of creation the infection of the Greek idea of perfect influences how we experience the story. God never calls his creation perfect, he calls it good. In fact he calls it very good and instead of this idea of being complete there is this sense in the Hebrew story of not only significance but potential. Each of us as part of this very good creation is endowed with not only the significance of being invested in by the creative God but we have the potential to create more good in our experience of life. In this context the Garden of Eden becomes this interesting metaphor for the womb, this place of unlimited potential. Before we are born we are invested with this incredible potential to create alongside God but none of that potential has been actualized. However, in our experience of life outside the womb we all face into this gap between the way we have lived and the potential God invested us with.

In Brian McLaren’s book, The Story We Find Ourselves In, the character Neo talks about these first formative stories. He re-imagines the story of Cain and Abel beyond the interaction of the two characters and into the story of humanity. Abel as the archetypal nomadic pastoralist. He represents the movement of the human race beyond their history as hunter-gatherers into the stage of raising livestock. No longer is Abel dependant on his ability to find edible food. He is now in control of his most basic need, that of food. He can move his flock from fertile area to fertile area.

In the story Cain becomes the archetypal agriculturalist. He is represents our movement towards advanced agrarian society. No longer is he moving from fertile area to fertile area to feed his flock, he is raising crops. He has become even less dependant on the circumstances around him to support his life and family. But along with that independence comes new responsibilities. He is now claiming ownership over his family, his animals and his land and with that comes the need to defend and protect his investment against those that might trespass and steal his crops for their own food or to feed their animals.

So as the story develops and Cain and Abel have words, “in Cain’s field” perhaps the story hints at the societal movement away from God. That as we become more and more independent of God we become less and less aware of the significance of each other to the point where we could murder each other in the defence of our possessions.

Even the story of Babel is an interesting part of the metaphor. As advanced agrarian society develops and surplus capacity begins to be used as currency small tribal communities begin to develop around the land of wealthy agriculturalists. Now the inherent significance we all enjoy as part of the creation of God is subverted in the pursuit of derived significance in the form of wealth, power and authority. A hierarchy of value develops with the wealthy at the top. In essence we begin to develop a model to represent who is more like God and who is less like God. Perhaps the Babel story of a tower to God represents more than just a physical structure but a societal hierarchy that attempts to place certain individuals closer to the divine.

Now imagine the early development of these tribal communities focused around the wealth of localized land owners. Eventually in the ongoing economic development of these communities they are forced to look outside of themselves. They develop of the need to connect and trade with other similar communities. And so as their grasp for ever increasing wealth and significance drives them, as they seek to have their closeness to God recognized by an ever increasing audience of worshipers they begin to run into the problem of language. Similarly developed communities have regional dialects and unique customs. Communication breaks down, fighting erupts and the movement towards replacing God is muted, for a time.

The point being that these stories have more significance to them in their reality as metaphor than they could as just factual events. Were these real people, in real time and space? Maybe, but that’s not the point. The stories have been chosen and preserved in the history of Israel because they are archetypal. They speak to us of more than the accidents of the narrative but also to the significance of the human journey. It’s not in the factual reality that they communicate something of truth to us. It is in their value as metaphorical symbols that their significance is realized.

Biblical literalism is the result of our desire to contain God and to define his truth. The end result is that it often moves us farther from God by betraying the intent of the text. The early stories of Genesis are mythology. They are the oral history of the nation of Israel and the truth of the stories no longer depends on the whether or not there ever was an Adam and an Eve or a Cain and an Abel because over time the stories have been able to transcend the individuals and become part of the larger story of God’s interaction with humanity. They are now a part of our story.

This narrow minded reading of the Bible misses the form and has produced all kinds of silly arguments on both the Christian and anti-Christian side of the curtain. Just spending a couple minutes on Google will find you a bunch of websites that purport to expose the Bible’s many contradictions and moral shortcomings. One particular website I found took the verse where Jesus is tempted by the devil an an anchor to prove how out of touch Christianity is with reality. Now the idea of the devil talking to someone might seem like a pretty easy target but this website took a decidedly different tact. The Devil takes Jesus up on a hill and “shows him all the kingdoms of the world”. Clearly this verse shows just how false the Bible is since the only way you could see “all” of the kingdoms of the world from the top of a hill is if the world where in fact flat. See the Bible promotes flat-earth “science”. Silly Christians. The stupidity of the line of reasoning is only equalled by Christians that continue to hold out against all reasonable evidence to believe that the earth was created no more than 6000 years ago because adding up the genealogies in the Bible takes us back only one hundred and fifty generations all the way to Adam. Both are ridiculous because they don’t respect the narrative form of the text. To treat the Bible as some form of science text book of objective facts is akin to taking a single verse of poetry on which to build our entire understanding of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t work.

Of course these types of arguments are fairly easy to dismiss but it becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto the moral integrity of the text if we don’t understand the narrative trajectory from beginning to end. The simple truth is, there are a lot of immoral, despicable, hateful things done in the name of God across our world. The difficult truth is many of them are recorded in our Bible. If we really want to hold to the idea that the text is universal, absolute and devoid of cultural bias are we ready to embrace the stoning of disobedient children, the reinstitution of slavery and the subjugation of women? Of course not, because as we understand the text in context as the experience of humanity evolving and growing towards God we recognize that as a species we have come to understand God in increasingly more appropriate terms. The way many of the biblical characters understood God in their cultural setting seems often barbaric, cruel or primitive to us but they are part of our story, part of the human story. Their individual story has become part of our history and we have learned to use their experience to further our own. Instead of embracing the cruelty of the ancient stories as universal we embrace them as part of our history, part of the experience of humanity that has brought us to this point in time we are experiencing now.

As we move our experience of church forward into the emerging world this is the same type of invitation we need to extend to the people around us. Our story of church can’t be about a closed system it has to invite those around us into the narrative, Increasingly people want to be connected to more than doctrinal statements or brand identities, we want to be intimately involved in the stories of our communities, shaping the direction, the flavour and the nature of what it means to be church. At times we have been scared to grant this type of influence to the community. Instead we have sequestered it away with the paid professionals and believed that the people would be happy to have visitation rights. Somehow as we re-imagine church we need to develop stories that people feel not only inspired by but an integral part of. Instead of brands we need myths. Instead of image consultants we need story-tellers.