[Oe List ...] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story

[Rod Rippel]

A reprise of what I've heard:

 

Thanks to Randy for pointing out that the event-story is not two separate realities but points to one inseparable reality.  You never have a naked fact (i.e. a completely meaningless fact), all you have is an event-story.  Every significant 'event' in your own life is never separate from the story you tell about it - its impossible, otherwise you would never recall something that had no significance whatever for you.  Non-significant 'events' are never remembered, never talked about.  Event is a word which already comes with significance, i.e., already has story attached.

            

Even a story which is fictional has the 'event' imagined.  The question arises: does a fictional event-story become 'historical' once it has been articulated and remembered by readers and carried forward as fiction by subsequent generations.  (e.g., Does Mountain Rivera's experience-event-story become 'historical' in the sense that it is recorded on film and can be re-told?)   What if we have no way of finding out whether a reported event-story was 'fictional' or historical in the accepted sense?  Is the impact the same?  Knox would seem to say so when he points out that in the re-telling of an event-story the original impact is re-created.  Otherwise what's the use of sermons, homilies, plays, literature, the Proclamation of the Gospel?

 

            Case in point:  We children of the Enlightenment are the inheritors of an 'event-story' which is not just second-hand - it is 100th-hand -- being passed down to us by 100 generations of retelling from the 1st or 2nd century until now.  I first heard of it from my parents who had a Bible story book.  Later, it came from Mr. Ornburn, my Sunday school teacher.  I trusted those sources.  But I had no real way of knowing whether the event-story really happened or if it was fictional.  There isn't any way to establish which of those alternatives is 'true,' or not, whether about the whole or parts of the accounts.  We cannot discern where the event leaves off and the story begins.  All we have is the event-story.  

 

And, incidentally, this is the state of affairs for any so-called historical happening whether recent or ancient.  It is extremely difficult to establish which part of any narrative can be called factual and what cannot.  Indeed history is the combined event-story (i.e., its current interpretation of so-called 'events) and that is why history is always changing as we 'see' it differently with the eyeglasses of time.

            

It makes me wonder if Christianity can really claim to be a 'historical' religion as opposed to Eastern religions who never bother to worry about historicity but rest on a solid mythological foundation.  The Jesus Seminar labored for two decades in the most recent search for the 'historical Jesus' and their results are reported in the publication, The Five Gospels.  They concluded there perhaps was such a historic person and perhaps as much as 20% of what he has been reported to have said can be accepted as authentic.  But they deal, as trained historians, in probabilities not certitudes.  And, as monumental as their work is, it will have to be re-visited in another generation as data and times change.

 

But back to John Knox.  Whether fictional or historical, it is in the current re-telling of the Christian Proclamation that the power to 're-create' the original event-story results, and has transformed the lives of persons in every age, as witness ourselves and many colleagues.   Through RS-1 and other means many moderns have dug through the layers of outdated frameworks, metaphors, world-views, distorted meanings, etc. and struggled to find meaning and poetry sufficient for their lives and times.  And many have found faith and the call to care and serve.  Today the re-telling is falling on many dulled and numb ears and lost power to inspire the struggle to understand (or be grasped by the story).  Or perhaps distorted simplistic faiths have become easy substitutes.  A new mythology (NRM) for our times and spirit mood is needed.  It would seem that faith doesn't require historicity at all.  And perhaps it doesn't need even a plausible event-story if it is metaphorically and mythically powerful.



Rod Rippel

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