Episode 161: Fairytales, Myths and the Bible

John Marriott (Ph.D.) is back on the podcast to speak with Tim and Mike about the cultural lenses that influence how we in the modern West read the Bible. They also unpack some of the common assumptions people hold when reading the Bible, including approaching the Bible as a fairytale or as a science textbook, and they reflect on the challenges of believing in miracles today.

Transcript

Mike Ahn: 00:02 Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Mike Ahn, Dean of Spiritual Development and Associate Director of the Winsome Conviction Project and a co-host of this podcast. I'm joined with Dr. Tim Muehlhoff, our esteemed senior director, and he leads the charge here. Tim, so good to see you.

Tim Muehlhoff: 00:20 Mike, thank you. And speaking of leading the charge, uh, Mike has led what a lot of you have heard about periodically called the Pomona Dialogues, where we uh for the last Mike, five years? Yeah, it's been five years. Yeah, five years. We've been paired up with Pomona College, a very progressive liberal arts school. And each year we take Biola students, take Pomona students, they come here, spend the day, we go there, spend the day, and we just learn how to talk about our differences in a way that's winsome. You've done a great job leading that project. Give the listeners just real quick one takeaway as you've observed these Pomona Biola students interacting.

Mike Ahn: 01:01 You know, one of the things that I've learned is that whether you're from Biola or whether you're from Pomona, uh, this idea of perspective taking and getting to know the other side, maybe even speaking about the other side and not straw manning them, but steel manning them and really um understanding where they're coming from and understanding the story behind that. That is so powerful. And we could find a lot of common ground in that.

Tim Muehlhoff: 01:23 And you know what else strikes me is just the laughter of these students coming together. And everybody universally complains about uh dorm food, right? Everyone it it can it brings Democrats, Republicans together, Christians, atheists. Everybody complains about dorm food. But to hear them laugh about that is kind of a really cool thing. So thank you for giving leadership to that. Hey, one of the cool things about this podcast is we bring on experts who just happen to be friends. Um we had Dr. John Marriott come on. Not only is he an expert in the deconversion movement, uh, that we'll be focusing more within this podcast, because if we're to raise up a new generation, Mike, of peacemakers, we're losing the pool of candidates. We're seeing a massive exodus from evangelicalism by students. And I love the fact that people like Dr. John Marriott have taken time to write books about it. John's written five different books about this. Uh John's a, you may remember from the last podcast, if you've not listened to it, boy, go back and listen to that. But John's an adjunct faculty here, very popular professor. He's also a very popular professor at Whittier Christian High School, one of our premier uh schools. He holds a PhD from the Cook School of International Intercultural Studies. Uh he's the author of five books, as I said, on deconversion. One of my favorites is A Recipe for Disaster: How the Church Contributes to the Deconversion Crisis. He's written a book with our colleague uh Sean McDowell called Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith. And then we've written a book together that's going to be out probably in about a year, called When Someone You Love Leaves the Faith: How to Stay Close Through Doubt, Deconstruction, and Deconversion. The only negative thing I can say about Dr. Marriott is he is a Canadian hockey fan.

Mike Ahn: 03:18 That's not a bad thing.

Tim Muehlhoff: 03:20 Oh, it's a bad thing, Mike. You're being very winsome, being very gracious. Dr. Marriott, welcome. He who is not smiling. It doesn't feel very welcoming, but you know you're deeply loved. Welcome to the Winsome Podcast. Welcome back to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. Oh, thank you. Great to be here again. Hey, one of the reasons we brought you on last time, and honestly, we just got just a smidgen of the book. We got on some great topics about how to interpret the Bible and how to approach it with us with the correct set of assumptions. But you've co-written a book called Is It Really the Good Book? Restoring Your Faith in the Bible by Questioning Your Assumptions About It from Tyndale. Uh awesome book, John. We just literally cracked uh the cover of that book because we got on a great conversation about assumptions. So just a reminder or listeners, really quick, the role assumptions play in how we uh approach everything, including the Bible.

John Marriott: 04:19 Assumptions are the lenses that we see the world through. And if our our lenses are the right prescription for the world, then it brings the world into clarity. And if it's the wrong prescription, then it sets us up to bump into things and to have mis mistaken interpretations and probably cause us some difficulties. And when people come to the Bible wearing the wrong set of lenses, they bring a set of expectations that the Bible's never intended to meet, that can set them up for discouragement and frustration because they will see errors whether or not errors. And when that happens it leads some people to a crisis of faith.

Tim Muehlhoff: 05:11 And sometimes those assumptions are not rooted in reality, and sometimes those assumptions flat out don't happen, right? Like, for instance, you assuming that the Canadians would win the gold medal. That was an assumption. I'm not even making eye contact with him, Mike. I'm not. And I have a black belt, so I feel very...

John Marriott: 05:20 This is the Winsome Conviction podcast, right?

Tim Muehlhoff: 05:23 But we're kind of changing. We're gonna rebrand a little bit after this. We're rebranding just a little bit. No, but listen, seriously, uh the book is awesome because you uncover different assumptions. So just quickly, what would be some of those assumptions that you and your co-author tackled in the book?

John Marriott: 05:44 They would be things like um that the Bible is uh a fairy tale. Right? That'd be one. People say, oh, talking donkeys, people living inside of whales, axe heads floating, you name it, this stuff doesn't happen in reality. So the the Bible's really more of a fairy tale for adults. Another one would be that the Bible is simple. You should be able to pick up the Bible and just easily read it and get the message out of it, and and uh that's not the case. Um, another one would be that the Bible is a science textbook. And when the Bible doesn't match up with modern science, people say, ah, well, clearly the Bible's wrong. Now, we think that the Bible speaks truthfully whenever it speaks about anything, but we don't think that the Bible speaks scientifically. It speaks truthfully about the natural world, but it doesn't do it in the same way that a science textbook would. And that doesn't mean that one is true and the other one is false. So there that those are a few of them. The Bible is not a history textbook. Does it speak truthfully about the past? Yes, it does, but the Bible overall is a record of salvation history. It's God's work in the world to restore people to a relationship with Him. And the Bible itself is not one book, it's a collection of 66 books. It's like the anthology or the church's library. Yeah, and so they all come with a different genre. They they come with uh written at different places, written at different times, written in different languages, and so all of that is all packaged into one volume for us. And if we're not careful and we just think that this is a book that's written to us, and that we can just bring our maybe our Western 21st century American expectations and assumptions to it, we will for sure find problems there. Not because they are necessarily there, but because it's our expectations and assumptions colliding with the Bible that was never met to meet some of those.

Mike Ahn: 07:36 Yeah, I appreciate the way that you're asking us to look at our expectations, our assumptions as we enter this text, as we enter the Bible. And the first uh assumption was that the Bible is an ancient fairy tale. I'd love to hear. Um, you know, you start this uh chapter with a quote from Rudolf Bultmann, and for listeners not familiar with him, how would you describe him and the influence he's had on how many how people view the Bible?

John Marriott: 08:00 Yeah, Bultmann was a 20th century German Lutheran theologian, and he's had a major influence on how scholars for sure read the Bible. And and his influence trickles down eventually into um into the to the laity, to the average church person, but his influence is largely among scholars and how scholars interpret the text. And and and he would argue that there is no good reason for someone who lives in the age of the wireless and for airplanes and for electricity to believe that the things that are recorded in the old and the new testament to have actually happened. You can't you can't really be expected to believe those things. And so he prop propagated uh something called demythologizing the Bible. He wanted to say he said things like that the kernel of truth is wrapped in a husk of mythology, and so you had to pull away all of the husk, all of the miracle stories to get at what the truth was, because he really believed that there was a truth there, but he didn't think that it was grounded in the historical factual aspects of the Bible. He also didn't think that you could get to the words in the life of the historical Jesus, and he thought that that was fine as long as you were, if you were following and impacted by the Christ of faith, but he didn't think that the Christ of faith, the person of Jesus, as you read about him in the New Testament, was really reflective of the of the carpenter who walked around Nazareth. He also thought that there was a lot of accretion and and uh stories that were built up around that. So the way he influenced our modern theological culture is when you talk about the fundamentalist modernist split, which for our listeners maybe I can unpack for 30 seconds, is is a split that takes place uh over a century ago that Biola is actually really at the heart of, where there where Bultmann's work um influenced the church in a way that caused it to move away from taking the Bible um as a supernatural book that contained real historical, miraculous things. And the churches who said, no, we really want to we were want to hold on to that became known more as the fundamentalist churches, and the churches that said, no, I think you're right. I think we just need to get at the spirit of what's going on in the text and try and figure out what's really buried in there, became those who would be more identified with more liberal or mainline churches. That's the influence that Bultmann has had in the church today.

Tim Muehlhoff: 10:23 And the reason this is so important, this little side uh tangent on Bultmann is everybody has assumptions. Everybody. You go to a doctor, that doctor has assumptions of what is wrong and how to fix it. Um news programs for sure have assumptions of what's wrong with the country and how to fix it. So just know when you go to a theologian and ask that theologian certain questions, it's really good to know who that theologian's been reading, the seminary that they attended, because everybody has a perspective and assumption when it comes to the Bible. What I love about your chapter is how you frame it. You frame it in two different ways. Uh, you write this uh it seems to us the criticism that the Bible reads like a fairy tale is the result of two different but related matters, the combined force of which makes it hard for thoughtful modern people to take it seriously. The first is that the Bible is filled with miraculous stories that are presented as historical facts, right? And so that's the assumption that anything miraculous just has to be a fairy tale. There's no way that can be a fact. So I unpack that first um assumption that the Bible is filled with miraculous stories that are presented as historical facts.

John Marriott: 11:44 Yeah, I think a very plain reading of the Bible would lead anyone to come to the conclusion that the Bible is a supernatural book and that miraculous things happen. That right from the very beginning where you have a supernatural creation, all the way through the end where you have a supernatural recreation, and in between is punctuated with resurrections from the dead, with talking animals, with uh miraculous uh body parts growing back. Right. And we could go on and for probably the the entire podcast and list all the miracles in the Bible. And I think that when miracles don't happen in our regular everyday life like like they seem to in the Bible, I think the important point there is that they seem to, because if you actually lived in the ancient in the ancient world of the Israelites, and every day you got up and you lived in, oh, I don't know, the time of the kings, I don't think that you would see a miracle every day either. But when you pick up the Bible and you read it, and if you read it quickly, miracles happen a lot. It's compressed, it's compressed, and and you get the sense of like, wow, miracles are happening all the time in this book, and they're not happening every day in my life like this. But it's it's probably the case that most people who lived in Israel in the Old Testament never encountered or saw a miracle really in in their life, much the same, probably, as most people would now. So there are a lot of things that strike us as hard to accept and hard to believe, because we also seem, I think, to assume that they were willing to ascribe miraculous powers to things that we're able now to say, oh, we understand that because science has explained it to us. We know how things work now. We understand that there are certain laws and we understand that there are chemical components that react in certain ways, and we have explained the modern world in such a way that for us, I think it's harder to believe in a miracle than it would have been uh for them. So I think that some of those are the contributing factors for why when people pick up the Bible and they read it, they say, Am I really supposed to believe that this stuff is true? I never see a miracle, never happens in my life. This sounds fairly um outlandish. And and and for the most part, you know, we understand how things work and we have used our understanding to form technology that bends nature to our own uh desires. We have remote controls that we don't have to get up off the TV and we can change the channel. That would be a miraculous miracle to somebody who was transported here from the first century. But for us, not a big deal. We understand how that works.

Tim Muehlhoff: 14:17 Yeah, and and the way this gets played out is when I was in grad school, I was on staff with CRU. I did want to evangelize. I love the fact that CRU instilled that impulse to not just go through grad school, but to impact people with a Christian perspective. So whenever I would try to do that, initiate lunch or coffee with one of my fellow uh master students or PhD students, here's what they would say. They would say, I can't believe that you're in grad school and you take the Bible seriously. And I'm like, Okay, why don't you take it seriously? Here's literally, John, what they would say. Okay, if we go back to ancient history and you understand the first time a battle was won by using elephants, by militarizing elephants, that just makes sense to me, right? But if you were to say to me, no, no, no, there were actually ancient battles that were won by flying carpets, by using a flying carpet and dropping boulders onto people, immediately I say no. My response was, okay, but do you do you see the assumption in that illustration you are absolutely discounting anything supernatural? Why not flying carpets? Like uh work backwards and give me the math on that. How did you arrive at that perspective? Flying carpets are clearly out while elephants make a lot of sense to utilize it. So let me ask you as a scholar, what do you say to people who have that impulse as a Christian? Like, like I I must say it was kind of weird to be even those words coming out of my mouth. Well, why not flying carpets? You know what I mean? I'm like exactly what you mean. Right. So talk a little bit about that weird feeling. You mentioned anti-intellectualism, Mike, a little bit. That is a weird feeling to say, okay, now I'm defending Jonah being in the belly of a whale. Right? Uh so how do you address that uncomfortableness? We even feel as modern people thinking, oh, geez, I get what Bultmann's saying about I'm using AI and now I gotta believe that uh um Adam was made out of the dust of the ground, kind of a thing.

John Marriott: 16:29 Yeah, I don't know if we'll ever be able to get over that feeling, right? And I think we have to be careful of saying that feeling is truth indicative, though, right? Just because it we feel awkward, because it feels strange doesn't is not necessarily corresponding to reality that that what we're holding to or what we're claiming is false. So I think we would want to pull our feelings apart from whether or not what we're talking about is true. The second thing I think um is that yeah, we we don't experience these things, and they are supernatural if they do happen, and they do seem to um they do seem to intrude into the regularities of nature as we understand them. And and that's what a miracle is. It's something that is infrequent, it is something that doesn't violate the laws of nature, but maybe in a in a way supplants them or is a higher law in some kind of a way. And and if that was happening all the time, then no one would bat an eye at carpets with boulders on them. So I think it's a natural reaction to say, yeah, carpets with boulders, boy, that violates not only our experience but everything we know about the laws of physics, um, about whether or not a carpet on its own could fly and drop a boulder. And and so yeah, that really does strike me as strange, it does strike me as off, but it also I think needs to be pointed out that we live in what uh what philosophers and sociologists call a real disenchanted age, right? Like w if we lived in the Middle Ages, the idea of a flying carpet might not strike us as strange as it does now. And the reason for that is is because our age is sometimes called one that's just uh that lacks any enchantment. Yeah, we have explained away, or we think that we've explained away by the process of science um anything that smacks of the supernatural. Yeah. And so I I think that we're never gonna be able to get past that. And we always might feel a little strange, but I d but I think um for a God who can call the universe into existence out of nothing, you know, um a floating axe head or a talking donkey is a piece of cake.

Tim Muehlhoff: 18:42 Or resurrect Jesus from the dead. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Hey, let me let me throw this out. Um, have you seen in your own personal life a miracle that that you would identify as a miracle? Mike, anything come to mind? Like an instant change in something. Something, yeah, that you put in a category.

Mike Ahn: 19:01 Or something in a supernatural. Yeah. I mean, personally, no.

Tim Muehlhoff: 19:04 Okay.

John Marriott: 19:05 Uh no, I don't think so.

Tim Muehlhoff: 19:07 Okay, so I'm super skeptical. I was on the debate team in college, and it's really hard to shake that. So I would have said up until three years ago, I I've never seen anything like that. Until we have a marriage group, and he he's made this story public. He's a colleague here at Biola who had an autoimmune problem. Okay. And was right about to take early retirement from Biola University, right? Um, and so, well, since they're gonna, you know, take medical disability, um, the wife reads about this place in Tennessee under a tent, reading the King James Version of the Bible, come and we think we can heal you. Well, they think, you know, they're at the end of the under the rope. I mean, he he hadn't been teaching even that year because of so they go. They go. Now, let me just tell you what this autoimmune problem looked like. Because we're in the same marriage group, he could not be around books, right? Could not be around books. Now, I've seen it affect him, right? In a house, he he would walk in and we would literally have to help him get into his car with his wife because it it just shut him down. Okay, they go to Tennessee. And I'm like, I'll just confess right now, I'm like, oh my gosh. Like, okay, okay, I guess, why not? Right? He comes back and he says, guess what? I'm healed. And I skeptical me. I'm like, okay, awesome, awesome. So uh let's uh get together as a marriage group. That we have one person in the group that had the most amazing library you've ever seen, Dr. Doug Huffman. He even had a uh um a ladder to get you to the upper parts of the library. Uh seriously, it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I'm getting emotional right now. Um, so uh he says, Well, I'd like to host uh our our next get together, but obviously we can't because of this person. This person goes, no, I'm I'm fine, I'm healed. It's okay to do it. I gotta tell you, I'm thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like this is let's not do this. Guys, nothing nothing impacted him. It doesn't matter now. He he can walk into any room with books.

John Marriott: 21:24 Oh, I I I know who you're talking about. He's you know the story. He used to have every book in his office in a ziploc bags because it he couldn't be in the same room with paper books.

Tim Muehlhoff: 21:33 Yes. Okay, now I wish I could tell you I have like ten miracle stories. And guys, I would have been just like you up until three years ago. But the uh I point to that one and I say, look, I have empirical proof. That man can now walk into any room with books not in Ziploc, and he's fine. So so yeah, maybe we need to be more enchanted just a little bit, and there's stories all across the world. Our friend JP Moreland wrote a book actually about miracles and said he has seen things that are just unexplainable. So I I love what you're saying. Let's get to the second reason you mentioned. You also say another reason people wrestle with this assumption is, and quote, "The second objection is that sections of the Bible sound a lot like, well, fairy tales. In both the Bible and fairy tales, you find wondrous encounters, talking animals, royal family drama, far-off kingdoms, and of course the theme of good versus evil." So let me go the other direction, John. Do you think because we're a Star Wars generation, right, in a land far away, maybe we immediately think I love Marvel Comics. I love uh the Star Wars franchise. So I immediately kick the Bible into that. Like that is a made-up story. When I read Jericho, the walls come tumbling down, or the parting of the Red Sea, I think, oh yeah, that's just a really good science fiction story. And there's part of me that actually really likes it. Do you think we could go the other way to say maybe some people are over-enchanted in today's science science fiction world? Kind of a thing.

John Marriott: 23:17 I suppose that that could be the case. Yeah, I suppose that could be the case because there is this, there is like I wrote in the book, there is this connection, this parallel between what we would sometimes call fairy tales or myths and and the Bible. But I think one thing that can be pointed out, and this is what Tolkien pointed out to C.S. Lewis, yeah, is that the Bible is the true myth. It's the true fairy tale. And he means that in not a myth as in made-up fake story, but it is the true story that all of the other stories are patterned after. And every time human beings sit down to write a story, to write a script, it almost always follows the same pattern, which is things start out well. There is evil entering into the scenario, there's a battle between good and evil, an unlikely hero emerges, the unlikely hero defeats evil by a turning of the tables, evil is judged, you're back up at the beginning again, and peace has been restored. And that is the script or the scene that follows in almost every movie that we watch, whether we realize it or not. Everything from um everything from uh Kung Fu Panda. Yeah, right, to The Matrix. Yeah, and and I'm just sort of dating myself here with with these these movies, but Star Wars fits into this, uh E.T. fits into this. Oh so many movies follow the pattern. Defenders of the Galaxy, what's that called?

Tim Muehlhoff: 24:54 Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Galaxy. But bunch of unlikely heroes, a massive threat. The unlikely heroes come and restore order.

John Marriott: 25:04 Yeah, and and and and so although the Bible sometimes sounds like a fairy tale, it might actually be the other, we need to think of it as the other way around, right? That all of these other fairy tales are based on the Bible itself. It's the it's the true story. In the same way that um, you know, when we think of we call God uh father, and sometimes we say, hey, you know what? Um some people who had a relationship with a father that's not very good, we can project that onto God. Uh we we maybe want to say, no, we should reverse that. We should actually think this is what a good father looks like. And maybe your father wasn't great, but that's the standard. God is the standard for being a father, in the same way the Bible is the standard for the true story of reality, and all of these other ones seem to find their inspiration in that story. And so if we're drawn to and we're attracted to these enchanted stories about reality being filled with more than what we can imagine, maybe that's because it is, and the Bible is the original story of reality.

Tim Muehlhoff: 26:12 Yeah, I love Lewis. Um, so reading his conversion experience and how he was friends with Tolkien, um, he was stuck on this issue of the resurrection, even of saying, I've read this story before, like this is not radically new. And again, being in community and dialogue with people, and Tolkien said, Um, Jack, I I think God was preparing us for the true story, and that was Jesus, and it clicked for Lewis in a really powerful way. And he said, I was the most reluctant convert in all of England. Uh, but yeah, I love that. I love that that God's been preparing us with these stories. And and one last Tolkien um point to make is he got really frustrated that people kept going to his stories and saying, Where's the Christian illusion and all this? And he said, No, no, no. Any telling of a good story, exactly what you just said, John, is the telling of the gospel. And I love that about Tolkien and the uh uh his book, The Hobbit, The Twin Towers, I mean, that's just amazing stuff. Uh, John, thank you so much for being with us. Um, thank you for the time and attention to one um tackle the deconversion problem we're seeing. Very quickly for our listeners, just unpack real quick. What when we say deconversion phenomenon, what do we mean real quick by that?

John Marriott: 27:46 That there are a lot of people who once identified as Christians who now say, I don't believe it's true. I don't identify as a Christian anymore, and I've pulled myself out of any kind of Christian community. We're not saying that they they were truly born again and they lost their salvation, we're not making any theological comment, but we are saying that in our culture over the since the 1990s, there has been an incredibly steep drop-off of people who have identified as Christians, and those stories continue to get multiplied online where they say, I once was converted to Christianity, I have undone that, and I no longer follow Jesus.

Tim Muehlhoff: 28:19 Yeah. And what's the Pew um research that we quote the really disturbing? Um

John Marriott: 28:25 For every one person who becomes a Christian, six leave. That came out last year.

Tim Muehlhoff: 28:29 Yeah, Mike. For everyone who converts, we lose six.

Mike Ahn: 28:33 That's scary.

Tim Muehlhoff: 28:34 It's scary. And and going research into that a little bit that we do in our book, um, is the younger generation's sick of watching all the hatred and the way we attack each other, even within the Christian community. And that's why I think for the Winsome Conviction Project, this is gonna be something that we're gonna tackle. Uh John's actually gonna work with us on some ways to bring this to churches.

John Marriott: 28:59 Well, maybe if you stop with those Canadian Olympic jokes, maybe maybe I'll continue to work with you.

Tim Muehlhoff: 29:04 Uh, I was gonna mention the last thing I was gonna mention is thank you so much for remaining my friend, even though I took a cheap shot, though accurate.

John Marriott: 29:13 It was a below the belt shot. It wasn't even a cheap shot. It was worse.

Tim Muehlhoff: 29:16 Wow, that's hyperbole. Um, okay. Hey, thank you sincerely for all the work you've done in deconversion. And this is a great book. Everybody needs to have a book in their library about the Bible, uh, about the complexity of it and the history of it. And I think you guys do a really good job. Thank you so much for the work you've done. Hey, if you want to find out more about us, go to winsome conviction.com and you can find out all of our past podcasts. John's now becoming a regular on the podcast. And uh you can sign up for a quarterly newsletter. We're doing some really cool stuff. Mike's leading some cool initiatives. So thank you so much for being with us. We don't take you for granted.