Essential* Christianity Footnote: Theological lessons from Mr. Burns

How I learn about myth from what I think is one of the messages in a play that I haven't seen

(A full table of contents for this series can be found here.)

Growing up, I had not thought of the Bible as an accessible, or particularly relevant text. But recently I’ve begun to encounter ideas from Judeo-Christian tradition framed more powerfully and explicitly — for instance, the dichotomy of empire and shalom — with no small credit due to Marty Solomon and the BEMA podcast — and it’s made me begin to think that maybe when I was younger, I had been reading the Bible with too critical and too unrefined of an eye. (The ayin ra’ah, the “bad eye” so to speak, as opposed to the ayin tovah, or the “good eye.”) I started to think that if I went back to the Bible now, being older, more life-seasoned, a better worker, and in a generally better position to study it more thoroughly, maybe more of a systematic theology would emerge.

So the past few years I have been studying the Bible more regularly, especially in the past year, and now I’ve even started taking some classes at Wesley Theological Seminary. One of the main things I initially noticed out of all of this effort was that I definitely did begin to sense the presence of a loving, generous, engaged, and interactive God much more strongly in my day-to-day life. That transformation has been unmistakable, and I consider it hugely valuable and important, and it’s part of the reason why I find the Bible so compelling.

The other thing I’ve noticed was that a systematic theology that I can readily embrace definitely has not emerged. (Which, again, provides an impetus for this project.) I find the Bible valuable, and I also find it complex and frustrating. There are fairly exalted parts of it that I want to hold at arms length. On a critical thinking level, there are many pieces that of the Hebrew Bible I feel I cannot metabolize without some pretty heavy processing.

The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, inserted here because of his relationship to a play I’ve never seen, and also because he seems to be doing some heavy processing, himself.

Generally, I find myself switching between two perspectives. One you might call “faith mind,” which is often a more of an unconscious almost subliminal reaction to the text. If I read with “faith mind,” I feel I can have some genuinely powerful spiritual experiences. Over time, my whole being becomes responsive to distinct ideas about goodness, discipline, humility, love, etc., and these all feel valuable. I really feel it’s possible to get closer to a real God this way.

This is a quickening, enlivening, simultaneously demanding and fluid experience. It has a dreamy quality to it. But the experience is continually marked by rocks and whirlpools: Wait. Abraham just asked Hagar to do what? God told Joshua to do what to Jericho? Wait. Did God just walk past Moses, but only so he could see his back? What? And if this is God’s word, why do we only hear about men so much of the time? Why are there cursed races? Why do even the Good Guys have so many slaves?

When I’m reading with “faith mind,” I can kind of tune these questions out — holding them loosely as I give my attention to that more subliminal, spiritual flow. I think that if you’re going to get the most you can out of the Bible, this sort of soft-focus approach, of holding details loosely for the sake of broader experiences, is an essential component of a full practice.

But ultimately I know I can’t leave alone all those obstacles that come up, and so also I try to read more critically. And then something else happens. The endeavor becomes highly anthropological. I become super-suspicious about being duped. I read, for instance, the prevailing critical opinion that the Jacob story in Genesis is actually a novella, and then I don’t have a clear idea what to do with any of it. Meanwhile, that sense of connection with a living, cosmic reality fades away, and the whole world starts to feel cold and agnostic. (And though I greatly enjoy and respect my professors, this has actually been one of the prevailing experience of seminary to this point, alas — which is too bad, but I also don’t think it’s particularly unusual, and I may say more about that in a later post.)

But I know I can’t stay in this agnostic place, either. My view of the universe is not agnostic. I am quite clear that all cosmologies are absurd from a rational perspective, and of those absurdities the one that resonates with me on the most fundamental level is the idea that there is a loving God that is both super-human and, perhaps in some ways, also ultra-human. So I’m forced to try to reconcile these two perspectives that come from reading the Bible: one dreamy, almost childlike, and unmistakably spiritually enriched, but also dogged by some thorny challenges, and the other crisp, discerning, and at some (perhaps unnecessary) risk of being forced into the view that we are abandoned in a cold universe.

How, again, does one handle the Bible?

Here’s where Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play comes in. I have neither seen nor read this play. I have read three articles about this play, including the Wikipedia entry. If I needed to attach any more of a caveat, I’d also add that it sounds like this is a pretty multi-layered play, and out of everything it may or may not address — the full extent of which I don’t know for sure, because I have neither seen nor read it — I am focusing on one particular thing that it makes me think of.

Anyway, I really like thinking about Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, even though I haven’t seen it. In the first act of the play — apparently — survivors of a post-apocalyptic event console themselves by recalling stories from pop culture, including the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare.” The second act is set seven years later, when the survivors have formed a theatre troupe specializing in Simpsons episodes. The third act is set 75 years after the second, when the “Cape Feare” story is a familiar musical, which has been transformed to epic proportions.

It’s utterly fascinating to me to think of stories being shaped over time simply through their iteration and re-iteration. What would happen if the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare” was one of the main stories told over thousands and thousands of years? It seems likely to me that Anne Washburn’s idea is on the right track: as it passed from one mind to the next, it would inevitably be shaped by the sensibilities of the storytellers. And this evolution might not only make the stories more grandiose and epic — just out of an urge to make them important — but it seems to me that it also might actually make them more divine.

Quakers have a concept called “sense of the meeting,” which is the idea that if a group of people work on a problem, and as the problem is triangulated through “that of God” in many different people present, the group can begin to perceive an emergent truth that surpasses what any individual could articulate alone, and which, because of “that of God in everyone,” can actually be quite inspired.

It’s interesting to think that something like this could happen with stories being told and re-told over time. Even from a surprisingly unlikely seed like a Simpson’s episode. As people iterate the story according to what their sensibilities demand, the story actually becomes more true to what humans need — perhaps evolving from anything as mere as wish fulfillment to actual spiritual fulfillment in the process.

It makes me think of how insects, animals, and trees work together to make things like apples, peaches, and pears — the nature of each participating species contributing, over fathoms of time, to the final shape of the fruit. Maybe this is what myth is, story that has been pulled and processed by countless human souls, until it evolves into what souls need.

It is entirely possible to see something anthropological in this, and for me it is entirely possible to see God’s hand in it, too.

This, then, also informs my reading of the Bible. I begin to wonder whether I am looking at this iterative process at work. If so, importantly, in the Bible the iterative process has been frozen in time, because we have not iterated the text of the Bible ourselves to suit our own sensibilities — other than to try to get back to original versions of the texts as closely as possible — for many hundreds of years. So in parts of the Hebrew Bible, the iterative process may have been frozen two or three thousand years ago, or more. In portions of the New Testament, that iterative process was frozen more recently, but still almost two thousand years ago. (The earliest complete-text manuscripts of any book of the New Testament date back to the 200s C.E., though the texts we tend to read today are composites from various sources, some earlier than this.)

In this regard, the Bible is sort of like the creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing when it’s first discovered by the arctic explorers — it’s predictable that I would go here, I know. We catch an evolutionary process in particular frames of time, in the process becoming what it was meant to be for people in earlier times, for cultures other than our own.

To me, this presents a clear call to do several things.

One, it asks me to make sure that I see the Bible in its context — in part for the sake of understanding which parts of that context are best left in the past and not carried forward into the present.

Two, it invites me to emulate the best of the practices of ancient peoples — only without forfeiting the non-negotiables today. I’m not giving up on the idea that suns are element factories and that the Earth coalesced from clouds of dust, that gay people are allowed their business and deserve full inclusion, that women’s perspectives are just as important as men’s, etc.

But also, these ancient people lived what’s been called a “God-soaked” life, and it seems to me that, if one really believes in a God that has anything like a human-conscious aspect, this is the only approach that really makes sense to me. So I think there’s a lot to be learned from ancient peoples, too.

And three, the first two calls clearly indicate a strong invitation to continue that iteration process, to intensely iterate the Bible stories in my own context, in order to see what can genuinely live in my life today.

This is why I think that thoughtful, intelligent reflection on the Bible can revive it powerfully. This also is why I think that there is a need to articulate an essential* Christianity. I sense that there is something frozen in time that can be unfrozen, that can still pour into this world, filling it with new life.

Meanwhile, I think it’s utterly fascinating to think that humans have had a role in the divinizing of ancient stories — countless minds, each pieces of God themselves, working on the text, over long spans of time, making its voice more God-like in the process.

I’m not sure that’s what happened, but I do find it really interesting. It makes me think that, by doing my own “growling” over the text, I am participating in something both very terrestrial — linked to thousands of generations of actual people who, though mysterious, have unmistakably inhabited this earth — and also very divine — linked to the highest mysteries that underly all that exists, and which we now only see through a veil, but may one day see much more directly.