If you watched the HBO series, Succession, you understand what it is to follow a story with absolutely no protagonists. Everyone is horrible, irredeemably so. Despite a cast of characters who are all villains, the writers managed to compel the audience to root for these characters at different times. That’s the power of good writing. The arch-villain in Succession is its main character, Logan Roy, a poorly veiled caricature of Rupert Murdoch. Brian Cox, the actor who masterfully crafted this character of Logan Roy, has been in the news recently and is making waves in some corners of the Christo-sphere (what I call the Christian media environment).
Last week, he was on a podcast and the subject of religion came up. Cox is a very vocal and avowed atheist. He has not been shy about it in interviews in the past. Brian Cox is also a crusty dude; not altogether different than the character he played in Succession. To be fair, Brian Cox is a good guy. He has a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit, and I like him for that. But the hot take that is getting a lot of attention in the Christo-sphere is that the bible is, “one of the worst books ever.” He added, “[The bible] is not the truth, it’s a mythology.”
I don’t feel like the bible needs defending, so I’m not going to push back on what Cox has said. I would like, however, to pick up on his juxtaposition of “truth” and “mythology.” I suspect that if you are reading this and have been educated and raised in the West, you agree with Cox. My own impulse is to agree with this. Myths, after all, are not real, right? Gilgamesh and Enkidu didn’t really slay Humbaba, right? There isn’t some creature really cruising around the enormous Loch Ness in Scotland, right? Myths exist for many reasons. Sometimes they are created to draw tourists like the Hodag or Rhinelander, Wisconsin. But most of the time, they exist to assist us in accessing some truth or to make sense of some kind of tragedy.
It’s seldom one finds a truly coherent quote from David Lynch, but I have this one written down in a collection of quotes. I think it gets at why the creation of myth is an essential human activity and why it is a powerful vehicle for truth. Lynch said, “I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.” To Cox’s point, the bible is, indeed, a lot of myth. The primeval history (creation, the flood, and the Abrahamic covenant) is almost entirely a mythos trying to get at where a particular people came from. It is not science. It is not, in an Aristotelian sense, real. But it does, as Lynch suggests, make sense of an unpredictable and hostile world. The myths in scripture impose order, a framework for understanding things like why bad things happen to good people.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s well-know quote about truth and myth is beautifully put (as we would expect from Tolkien): “Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” This is what the scriptures are. They are myths that carry truth in them, in a way that was intended to be passed along orally, as stories told around the campfire or dinner table.
Cox is right about the bible, though. It is a mythology. I wish more Christians understood this. Instead, Christianity has ossified the squishiness of the story-telling tradition. We have enshrined in paper and ink that which was to be alive on the breath of story tellers and prophets. Unlike the Loch Ness Monster and the Hodag, however, the scriptures contain true myths (and perhaps a few false ones) that will assist the faithful along the spiritual path.
Cox’s own journey for meaning came through acting in the theater. He has referred to it as “the one true church” because it is, “the church of humanity.” Perhaps, if Christians had not so abused the scriptures and turned them into a cudgel, a person like Brian Cox might be apprehend the theatrical elements of the scriptures. I don’t think Cox needs to be convinced of the rightness of any religion. He has the freedom of conscience to choose his way through life. But if I could respond to him directly regarding his quotes about the bible, I would say that, as a committed Christian, I agree with him. The scriptures are myth. Some of it is historical, some is theological, and some of it is legendary. I would also affirm his experience of the scriptures as propaganda. They have been used that way for centuries. They have been used to justify war, genocide, slavery, and abuse. But, for my part, the beauty of the scriptures is that they are full of great stories and wisdom that, as myth, are good for the soul.
That's awesome. When I was doing counseling at the Vineyard, there was a woman who would come to talk every couple of months or so. Never saw her at church, but she knew Waylon and he tossed her my way. She was really in to reading fantasy books and like to talk about them. One time she mentioned that she had read one of her fantasy novels and something a character said really helped her with a sort of fucked up relationship she had with her dad and step mom. She asked me if that was okay. I asked her what she meant. She thought I would want the help to come from the bible. I chuckled and asked her, "Did that novel help to feel less pain?" She said it did and I just affirmed it. We didn't have to call it God or the Holy Spirit or anything. That has stuck with me. If the medicine worked, there's no sense in questioning it's validity.
Great to hear from you, BTW.
I really liked this, friend. It made me think a lot about how I've found my way through grief. And how, in that utter place of despair, my mind and dreams brought animals to help me make sense of things. I realized that it didn't matter if the world of Spirit or animal medicine was "real" to everyone — they were real to me, they were binding up the brokenhearted inside me. And if they are a myth, they are also setting me free. ☀️