There is a lot of evidence that all religious myths and doctrines go through a process of re-interpretation, often incorporating historical data and the cultural milieu of the immediate writer/thinker while incorporating the earlier insight and adapting it. Older myths and proverbs were a way for people to interpret, understand, and talk about the situations and experiences they were immediately encountering.
This happens in our own culture today. Part of the reason religion still remains a part of the cultural economy is that religion often gives people a way to talk about what they are experiencing that other modes of discourse don't. So the African American struggle for civil rights is interpreted, for instance, through the lens of the Exodus, and any scapegoated person is likely to talk about being 'crucified'. Not to mention the way stories and sayings in the Bible are just a part of the way we talk...'read the writing on the wall, 'pearls to swine', 'you need to be a good samaritan'...I could go on and on.
People find a nexus between their own experiences and the stories, ideas, and outlook of the Biblical stories. So the story of creation, for instance, helps me express the otherwise ineffible experience of the beauty of a sunset or sunrise. I might, and often do, recite a psalm to try to describe to someone what that beauty comes to me AS, effectively.
Another way to illustrate what I am talking about is to look at the Jewish writings from the Hellenistic Period, the WISDOM OF SOLOMON or the MACCABEES. Images like the suffering servant from Isaiah are used to interpret the experience of the suffering of the Jews under Greek and Roman rule, and a key to how that suffering should be understood and responded to is found within the Servant Songs. What's more, the experience of, say, the Maccabean revolt itself went on to shape how later writers (like the gospel writers) understood and looked at the servant songs themselves. So its two way, with mythological and religious language shaping culture and historical experience, and historical experience influencing and changin how the myth and language itself is used and understood.
There is tons of historical evidence to back up this account. This is simply how religious language functions. It shapes the experience and is shaped by the experience.
People are right, for instance, when they point to the evidence that the resurrection account of Jesus has mirrors in earlier cultures. But this makes good historical sense, and religious sense. One can construct a reasonable historical scenario where the disciples use the earlier stories to express what they were experiencing in and through the events surrounding Jesus. THOSE stories were ways for them talk about what was happening to them. And indeed the experiences surrounding Jesus then shaped how we think about death, and rebirth, and plays a role in how we Christians experience life. The real question, the fundamental difference is whether these interpretations serve to hide, or reveal, something about the experience and possibly life itself. I am loathe to bring those old arguments up yet again. I'd rather focus on something new.
Another way to put all this is like this: we need not think of memes as parasitic. We can be impressed by the idea that ideas themselves act alive in some sense without assuming that they impose themselves upon us without any deciding subject involved. It may be that I CHOOSE to become apart of this or that living idea because it indeed allows me to say, see, think, the truth in a way I couldn't otherwise do.
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