Myth

People tend to equate "myth" with "untrue story," but myths are actually stories that tell deep, abiding truths about who we are as human beings.  The Bible, for example, is full of "myth," and that doesn't mean it's not true.  The great contradiction is that Christians tend to dismiss the stories told by other people as "myth" (applying the "untrue story" definition), but insist that our own are somehow different, somehow more true.

There is a Greek myth about a man named Narcissos (Americans have typically made Narcissos a woman because of the assumptions we make about gender), who sees his own reflection in a pool of water, falls in love with it and, unable to leave, wastes away and dies. 

Evangelical Christianity, in many ways, is Narcissos.  We have fallen in love with our own reflection.  We reject anything we do not understand or cannot shoehorn into (or extract out of) the Bible, which we follow instead of God much of the time.  Instead of looking for deep, God-given truth anywhere we can find it, we've decided that the only place God has ever truly revealed himself is in our sacred text.  Anything else is nothing more than false truth.  Sure, it may seem like truth, or peace, or goodness, but it's really just a "counterfeit" sent by the devil to fool us.

The Bible, by the way, is the reflection I'm talking about.  Evangelicalism largely doesn't bother to really examine what the original meaning was; instead, we formulate doctrines or rules based on our own cultural prejudices, and then find justification for them in a mis-reading of the Bible.  Women in ministry and the big moral issue with the gay community are two obvious examples.  It's not God that hates women and gay people, it's Christians.

Truth arises in many places, including many sacred texts.  That doesn't mean one has to accept every tenet of every faith as God-given, as people introduce distortions into everything God does.  It's unavoidable.  But we must not dismiss truth because it didn't come from the Bible.  We must not insist that the whole world adopt our version of "truth," which is much less about the Gospel than it imperialism, and the wholesale adoption of conservative capitalism wrapped in a (very) thin layer of Christianity.  We must allow God to speak to different cultures in different ways and yes, sometimes wearing a different face.

We might just have to accept that, were God to desire to form a relationship with a non-Western culture, he might just look like one of them and speak in ways that would make sense to them.  We might have to see that the "narrow gate"** is far wider than Christians may want it to be. 

I mean, really, does anybody honestly think that Gandhi didn't know God?


**The "narrow gate" analogy in Mathew 7 isn't about non-believers.  Jesus is talking to the Jewish religious elite, warning them that their identity badges, all the things they think make them part of the in-crowd, won't get them very far.  In other words, the "narrow gate" applies to Christians, not non-Christians.  It's not non-Christians who find themselves on the "wide road" that "leads to destruction," but Christians.