Remythologization.

Given my conviction that we need to grow out of the limitations imposed on the Church by Modernity and the so-called Enlightenment, maybe we should start talking more explicitly about remythologizing.  

One of the big projects of the 16th-19th century movement called the "Enlightenment" was the de-enchantment of the world.  That means, they wanted to reduce the world to physics and math, and discount, which is to say discard as superstition, anything deemed to be subjective and interior, like awe, beauty, mystery, myth, art, love, or a sense of the transcendent.  In other words, any notion that there might be something in the universe bigger than the human, and beyond the comprehension of the human mind, was dismissed as nonsense, at best.  The Enlightenment view of God was summed up by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who believed that "God" was purely invented by people for various not so good reasons.  Anything that could not be rationally explained, felt by the senses, measured, and quantified (and marketed...), did not exist.

In the scholarly study of the Bible, the program was eventually summed up as "demythologization."  That is, they sought to rationally explain the real events behind biblical texts.  Scholars had to suck up to the establishment Enlightenment view and subject the Bible to the same kind of analysis that was applied to anything else, leaving scholars -- and these were the good ones -- to find some kind of redeeming social/economic value in the text, so that other Enlightenment-influenced scholars might not dismiss the Bible as a collection of pointless fairy tales and reject Christianity altogether.  

Enlightenment thought left the world a flat, dry, harsh, linear, binary, cold, and dead place; everything became "resources" to be used in the service of some other goal, usually economic profit.  Humans were bought as slaves or workers, the creation was there to be exploited, and religion had to prove its economic and political usefulness to the powers-that-be.  (Often as a kind of narcotic inducing compliance, as Karl Marx observed.)

That Christian faith survived the Enlightenment and subsequent Modernity is a miracle attributable to the fact that many humans remain aware of a Reality beyond the measurable one, and some Christians managed to be influenced and shaped by the story of Jesus and the rest of the Bible.  There was always a witness, however small, to the Truth of God; and there were always voices, often very few, raised against injustice.  People did continue to engage in wildly irrational activities like prayer, the Sacraments, and living for the benefit of others, not just themselves. 

Meanwhile, the whole Enlightenment project started to collapse.  It was unsustainable to begin with.  But eventually, as people became aware of the stupendous atrocities it inspired, from slavery and other forms of economic injustice, to an addiction to war, guns, and armaments, to horrors like the Holocaust and Hiroshima, to the systematic poisoning of the planet's air, soil, water, and the wanton killing of its life-forms, they began very slowly to turn away from Enlightenment ideology, and discover meaning and purpose in the very things that Modernity had rejected as irrational and superstitious.  People came to appreciate intangibles and non-quantifiables like nature, music, and  poetry, and they began to develop a vision of an emerging human community based on equity and sharing.  Spirituality and religion, refusing to comply with the Enlightenment's assumption that it would just die out, actually started becoming more important to increasing numbers of people.

A gradual re-enchantment of the world has been going on in the lives of many people, and it includes some good things, like an attention to mysticism, symbol, myth, cosmology, beauty, and justice.  When people become more self-aware, they simultaneously grow more conscious of their connectedness to others, to creation, and to the Creator of all. 

Sadly, some questionable things also began to congeal: like the occult, nostalgia, religious fundamentalism, and the cynical pressing of myth and symbol into the service of death and destruction, as we see with the persistent calcification into Modernity's logical final form: fascism.  For the Enlightenment regime, because it is based on paranoid lies, can only be sustained and enforced by increasing levels of violence.  See Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four for a picture of how this works out for us.

The answer for the Church right now is a remythologization of ecclesial life, which means paying closer attention to myth and story, symbol and ritual, imagination and art.  We need to cultivate a realization that biblical stories are less historical records and more invitations to find meaningful and liberating images and connections.  What if the whole text of the Bible is intended as metaphor, directing our sight to the perception of the Creator and the Creator's emancipatory love all around us?  What if we finally realize that "did this really happen?" is an irrelevant and corrosive question, betraying the Enlightenment's agenda of neutralizing the stories -- and the community that develops and cherished them -- as obsolete and meaningless?  What if we started to understand that the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world still speaks to us by the Word and Spirit, drawing us into lives of equity and justice, compassion and peace, simplicity and gratitude, contemplation, wonder, and joy?       

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