I don’t mean any of the parables or ‘examples’. If the account of creation is not what really happened, how can anything else in the word of God be trusted? How can we know Jesus’ life and death happened exactly as it is said to have happened?
I cannot understand how one part can be said to be ‘myth’ or whatever without the rest going down with it. Who decides what really happened?
David,
Catholics are entitled to believe or not believe in the literalness of Genesis. It’s not really an all or nothing issue.
I personally do not believe in evolution, but that does not mean the early chapters of Genesis are to be seen as a kind of CNN eyewitness report.
These stories were based on facts, but they (the stories themselves) are myth and they are used to explain something. This is the way the Israelites and other people of the time used literary epic.
The great Biblical Scholar, Dr. Gerhard Von Rad describes the way that some scholars only analyse the historical veracity of the Torah as “historical materialism” in his book Genesis (Von Rad, G. Genesis (SCM Press, Bloomsbury, London, 1961) p.31) Designating this kind of narrative as “saga”, Von Rad explains that
the expectation that the saga should either contain historical fact, or else it can be described as merely a product of poetic fantasy is an extremely crass misunderstanding of its essence. It is true, however, that this scepticism has been the attitude prevalent since the 19th Century. The saga then offers a product born of a completely different kind of intellectual activity from that of history (historie), although history (Geschichte) is what it is concerned with.
What then are these narratives? How can they be concerned with fact and yet not be tied to fact by their contents? Von Rad answers by stating:
“Whatever saga we examine, we find with respect to its simplest and most original purpose that it narrates an actual event that once and for all occurred in the realm of history. It is therefore to be taken quite seriously – it is to be believed. In all that follows, therefore, let us hold fast to this: by no means is a saga merely the product of poetic fantasy; rather it comprises the sum total of the living historical recollection of peoples. In it is mirrored in fact and truth the history of a people. It is the form in which a people thinks of its own history.” (Ibid)
The Old Testament sagas then are concerned with Israel itself and the realities the people of Israel found in themselves. In this way they contain a much more real history, a history with much more truth in it than a purely factual historical writing would. They contain the “secret contemporary character of apparently past events”.(Ibid) This character is more than a list of the achievements, wars, political struggles, victories and defeats experienced by a people. It takes place on another level and speaks of inner guidance working and maturing in life’s mysteries.
It is a history with God.
