Did Paul Oppose Fiction?
00:00:00.000 | (music)
00:00:04.000 | Well, last time we were together on Wednesday,
00:00:07.000 | we looked at a warning text in the Bible that applies to our media diets.
00:00:12.000 | It's Hebrews 2.1. That was the text.
00:00:15.000 | It encourages us to focus our attention and not get distracted from the cross.
00:00:20.000 | An incredibly important text for our lives inside the attention economy,
00:00:25.000 | as it's been called now.
00:00:28.000 | Today's question also relates to our media diets.
00:00:31.000 | It comes from an anonymous listener asking about a Christian view of fiction.
00:00:35.000 | Here it is. Pastor John, hello.
00:00:37.000 | I've been struggling to understand 1 Timothy 1.4 and Paul's warning against myths.
00:00:42.000 | What implications does this verse against ancient myths have for a culture like ours,
00:00:48.000 | full of contemporary myths and fictional storytelling?
00:00:53.000 | Jesus told stories. C.S. Lewis wrote great fictional stories.
00:00:57.000 | Harry Potter is a best-selling series of contemporary mythology.
00:01:02.000 | So how do we view our own cultural myths, our captivating novels and superhero movies
00:01:09.000 | and long-running TV series, considering Paul's warning to believers to not be devoted to myths?
00:01:18.000 | Do we face a spiritual danger in our fiction today or not?
00:01:24.000 | That's a good question. It's a good question exegetically for what Paul meant.
00:01:29.000 | We want to start there and then relate it to some things today.
00:01:34.000 | Let's put the New Testament word "myth" or Greek "mythos"—it's the very same word in Greek.
00:01:41.000 | Let's put it in front of us. It's used five times in the New Testament,
00:01:47.000 | four in Paul and one in 2 Peter.
00:01:52.000 | So here they are. 1 Timothy 1.4.
00:01:55.000 | "Charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine,
00:02:00.000 | nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies,
00:02:04.000 | which promote speculations rather than stewardship from God that is by faith."
00:02:11.000 | 1 Timothy 4.7. "Have nothing to do with irreverent and silly myths.
00:02:17.000 | Rather, train yourself in godliness."
00:02:20.000 | 2 Timothy 4.3-5. "The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching,
00:02:30.000 | but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers
00:02:34.000 | to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth
00:02:39.000 | and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded."
00:02:46.000 | And then Titus 1.12. "Rebuke the cretins sharply that they may be sound in the faith,
00:02:53.000 | not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth."
00:03:01.000 | And then 2 Peter 1.16. "We did not follow cleverly devised myths
00:03:08.000 | when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
00:03:12.000 | but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty."
00:03:16.000 | So those are all the uses of the word "myth" in the New Testament.
00:03:20.000 | The dictionary definition, if you look up in a Greek dictionary,
00:03:24.000 | of the first century, it means a tale, a legend, a story,
00:03:30.000 | that over time became fictional narrative over against historical account of things.
00:03:36.000 | Now the way Paul and Peter are using the term is clearly negative.
00:03:43.000 | If you take those five texts that I just read, here are the associations with myths.
00:03:50.000 | Myths promote speculations. They are like endless genealogies.
00:03:55.000 | They don't get anywhere. They don't land anywhere solid.
00:03:58.000 | He calls them "old wives tales" in 1 Timothy 4.7,
00:04:02.000 | and maybe that's because there were vulnerable women that we meet at the church in Ephesus
00:04:09.000 | who were "always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth."
00:04:15.000 | In other words, there was this endless speculative approach towards things there,
00:04:20.000 | never get their feet on the ground of God's reality, and myths were feeding into that.
00:04:26.000 | Myths were irreverent and empty. They were the opposite of training oneself in godliness.
00:04:33.000 | They were a wandering away from truth.
00:04:37.000 | They were cleverly devised and not based on eyewitness accounts.
00:04:42.000 | So Paul's main problem with them—if you step back and say, "What's the big picture here?"—
00:04:49.000 | his main problem with them is that they weren't serving what he calls the "oikonomia,"
00:04:56.000 | the household plan of God, namely the up-building of faith.
00:05:01.000 | I think that would be his summary criticism.
00:05:04.000 | These are not doing what God means to be done in his house, build people up in faith,
00:05:12.000 | give them a firm place to stand and make their faith strong.
00:05:15.000 | So, in summary, myths, as Paul and Peter dealt with them in their letters, were not just faults,
00:05:25.000 | but they were destabilizing.
00:05:28.000 | That is, they didn't result in helping people plant their feet anywhere in God's reality.
00:05:35.000 | They promoted speculations, endless openness, never coming to a knowledge of anything.
00:05:42.000 | Like old Chesterton, he said, "There's a good reason to open your mouth."
00:05:49.000 | In other words, be open-minded, but you open your mouth in order to bite down on something.
00:05:55.000 | You understand? Your mouth endlessly open.
00:05:58.000 | And that's what Paul was concerned.
00:06:00.000 | I see that today in a lot of places, just an endless opening to possibilities,
00:06:06.000 | but never a closing of your mouth on anything enriching.
00:06:11.000 | Now, what about myth today?
00:06:15.000 | The word has ordinary meanings and technical literary meanings.
00:06:20.000 | Kind of complex.
00:06:22.000 | For example, the second meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary is, quote,
00:06:29.000 | "a widely held misconception," period.
00:06:33.000 | That's it. That is, "Oh, that's a myth," you know, an erroneous belief.
00:06:38.000 | So in that sense, a myth is the opposite of reality.
00:06:43.000 | It's false to what is.
00:06:46.000 | Or it can refer to stories in general, and they might be true,
00:06:52.000 | and communicate truth and help truth advance, or they might be misleading.
00:06:59.000 | Or, thirdly, it can refer to something quite technical.
00:07:05.000 | Let's say in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as they develop the term
00:07:12.000 | and work on writing that kind of literature,
00:07:16.000 | a myth, they would say, is a structure of ultimate reality,
00:07:22.000 | which can be pointed to, hinted at, or embodied in lots of different forms.
00:07:30.000 | Fables, epic poetry, novels, dramas.
00:07:35.000 | And in that technical sense, myth is the ultimate story
00:07:41.000 | within various literary forms and not reducible to any literary form.
00:07:50.000 | And the really important thing to grasp for Lewis is that he means to say
00:07:56.000 | that Christianity is true myth.
00:08:00.000 | He's got this essay called "Myth Became Fact."
00:08:04.000 | Here's a quote. This is Lewis.
00:08:07.000 | "The heart of Christianity is a myth."
00:08:11.000 | If you stop there, that'd be heresy, right?
00:08:13.000 | I mean, given the ordinary meaning of the word.
00:08:15.000 | "The heart of Christianity is a myth, which is also a fact.
00:08:20.000 | The old myth of the dying God, without ceasing to be myth,
00:08:27.000 | comes down from heaven, the heaven of legend and imagination,
00:08:32.000 | to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date,
00:08:38.000 | a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences."
00:08:44.000 | So that's Lewis.
00:08:46.000 | So let's step back now and ask about whether myths,
00:08:51.000 | as Paul used the term, and as many use it today,
00:08:56.000 | is a problem or a danger for Christians who love the truth.
00:09:01.000 | What really is, that's what I mean by truth, what really is God
00:09:06.000 | and all that God has revealed about his thoughts and his ways,
00:09:10.000 | his view of things.
00:09:12.000 | Not just what human imagination can make up, but what God says is real.
00:09:17.000 | Paul's warning was that myths were leading people away from the truth
00:09:26.000 | and thus destroying people.
00:09:28.000 | They were, in fact, creating an indifference to the truth.
00:09:33.000 | As anything fixed and stirring up endless speculations,
00:09:37.000 | they were fascinating. They were intriguing people,
00:09:42.000 | but not helping them land them anywhere.
00:09:46.000 | I get nervous when I'm around people who constantly use the word,
00:09:50.000 | "Oh, that's intriguing," or "That's fascinating."
00:09:53.000 | And they don't ever use categories of truth, right, wrong, good, bad,
00:09:56.000 | beautiful, ugly. It's just intriguing.
00:10:00.000 | I think Paul was dealing with that all the time in Ephesus, evidently.
00:10:04.000 | They don't get their feet on the ground of truth,
00:10:07.000 | and they're not stable with a clear sight of God and his ways and his will.
00:10:13.000 | So that is what we should watch out for.
00:10:16.000 | That's the way I would sum up the issue today.
00:10:20.000 | The use of stories to lead away from truth and to use the stories
00:10:28.000 | to destabilize people by replacing the very concept of firm, true,
00:10:36.000 | stable reality with open-endedness, that's always going to be a problem.
00:10:42.000 | Ever learning, never coming to a knowledge of the truth.
00:10:47.000 | And that might happen through novels or TV dramas or movies or theater.
00:10:53.000 | Do they serve the truth or lead away from it and diminish the importance of it?
00:11:02.000 | But here's the reason we must not lump all fiction into the category of misleading myth
00:11:10.000 | or destabilizing myth.
00:11:13.000 | Fiction as a way of leading to truth is firmly embedded in the Bible.
00:11:21.000 | That's why we can't toss it out.
00:11:23.000 | God inspired it. God used it.
00:11:26.000 | For example, Jesus told parables.
00:11:29.000 | And the point of these little short fictional stories was to tell the truth
00:11:36.000 | in a peculiar way.
00:11:39.000 | The prophet Nathan convicted David of his sin by telling him a fictional story
00:11:45.000 | about a lamb.
00:11:47.000 | Isaiah developed parable-like stories throughout his prophecies,
00:11:51.000 | like the one in Isaiah 5, 1 to 6, where Israel is compared to a vineyard.
00:11:56.000 | And he goes on and on about Israel as his vineyard.
00:12:00.000 | In fact, the Bible rings, I mean literally rings on every page virtually
00:12:07.000 | with hundreds of similes and metaphors, which you could describe as
00:12:14.000 | tiny fictional pictures of things.
00:12:18.000 | Jesus says, "I am the gate of the sheep."
00:12:22.000 | That's a little tiny piece of fiction.
00:12:25.000 | "I am the gate of the sheep."
00:12:27.000 | Or in Revelation, Jesus says to his obedient people,
00:12:32.000 | "I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God."
00:12:36.000 | That's a little piece of fiction that tells a glorious truth.
00:12:41.000 | I don't expect to be Lot's wife made out of marble in the kingdom to come.
00:12:48.000 | It's a picture.
00:12:50.000 | It's a fictional picture of something glorious and real.
00:12:53.000 | These are what you might call micro-fiction,
00:12:57.000 | clearly intended to lead us to the truth.
00:13:00.000 | So not all fictional storytelling is anti-truth.
00:13:04.000 | So how shall we be discerning?
00:13:07.000 | And I would ask at least these four questions.
00:13:11.000 | Number one, what kind of literature or drama are we reading or watching?
00:13:15.000 | Do we know it's fiction or non-fiction?
00:13:18.000 | Two, do we know how fiction can tell the truth or mislead?
00:13:23.000 | We need to be aware of both and not be sucked in to a view of the world
00:13:29.000 | that distorts reality as God intends it to be known.
00:13:34.000 | Measure the fictional portrayal of non-fictional reality
00:13:39.000 | by the reality revealed in God's Word.
00:13:43.000 | Third, does it increase or clarify our knowledge of and enjoyment of the truth?
00:13:53.000 | Do we understand reality better?
00:13:56.000 | Do we feel about reality the way God intends for us to feel
00:14:00.000 | about the reality being spoken of?
00:14:04.000 | And fourth, does it leave us with a greater love for truth?
00:14:09.000 | Love for truth, not just knowledge, but love for truth.
00:14:13.000 | Or does it destabilize us and make us more uncertain about the very concept of truth,
00:14:19.000 | suspicious of truth, confused about truth?
00:14:23.000 | The Apostle Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 2.10,
00:14:27.000 | "People are perishing because they did not welcome a love for the truth
00:14:34.000 | in order to be saved."
00:14:36.000 | So he didn't just say people are perishing because they don't know the truth.
00:14:39.000 | He said they're perishing because they don't love the truth.
00:14:43.000 | Our salvation hangs on loving the truth.
00:14:48.000 | That was Paul's great concern with myths in his day.
00:14:51.000 | They were leading people away from truth,
00:14:54.000 | and they were undermining the very value of truth,
00:14:57.000 | and they were knocking the foundations from under faith and godliness,
00:15:03.000 | and so they were destroying people.
00:15:05.000 | And yes, that can and does happen today.
00:15:09.000 | Yes. Good caution here, Pastor John. Thank you.
00:15:12.000 | And thank you for joining us today.
00:15:14.000 | You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive,
00:15:17.000 | or subscribe to the podcast, all at AskPastorJohn.com.
00:15:23.000 | Well, every Christian will continue to struggle with sin.
00:15:26.000 | We know this, and that's why Jesus taught us to pray for daily forgiveness.
00:15:31.000 | And if that's true, that we will never live a sinless day in this life,
00:15:36.000 | how on earth can we ever attain to a good conscience?
00:15:42.000 | That's the next question up.
00:15:43.000 | How can a redeemed Christian with remaining sin within
00:15:47.000 | ever attain to a good conscience or a clean conscience?
00:15:52.000 | Another great question.
00:15:54.000 | Up on Monday, I'm your host, Tony Reiki.
00:15:56.000 | Have a great weekend, and we will see you then.
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