The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Doubleday, 233 pp., $19.95, paper; the video series: Mystic Fire Video, P.O. Box 30969, New York, N.Y. 10011; six tapes, $149.95 [$29.95 each]). Reviewed by Terry C. Muck.
Forty years ago New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann made myth a four-letter word for conservative Christians. That made Joseph Campbell’s life work, resensitizing religious Westerners to the importance of myth, all the more difficult. Using a 38-year teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, a score of scholarly and semi-scholarly books, and finally a PBS television series with Bill Moyers, Campbell spread the word myth like graffiti across America’s consciousness. In the end, Campbell served us better than Bultmann.
Taped three years prior to Campbell’s death in 1987, the video series and accompanying book are a fitting climax to the career of a man most would identify as the world’s leading mythologist. Using an extraordinary range of examples from the world religions and religious art, Campbell demonstrates and explains the role myth plays in everyday life. In response to thought-provoking questions from host Bill Moyers, Campbell teaches one overall lesson: myth is a good and necessary bridge to the eternal.
Remythologizing
Campbell’s concern was that our secular age has lost all contact with the transcendent dimension of life, largely because we let science debunk myth. Consider, he says, the architecture of Europe in the Middle Ages. In almost every town the highest building was a great Gothic cathedral stretching heavenward in a symbolic attempt to touch the hand of God himself. Next in height came government buildings, and then squat merchants’ huts. Look at our modern cities. In New York it is the World Trade Center that reaches heavenward, and in Washington, D.C., monuments scratch the bottom of the clouds. In their shadow, if they can get that close, sit smallish, square churches. Can there be any better paradigm of what has happened to religion in modern life?
Campbell’s point is a good one and has obviously struck a responsive chord in American viewers and readers. The television series, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” was enormously successful. The accompanying book, The Power of Myth, which is little more than edited transcripts of the television series, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year. The videocassette series has sold 17,000 copies at $149.95 a set and is still pumping. And the whole package has so piqued interest in myth that books Campbell wrote 20 and 30 years ago are again in demand. Obviously, interest in myth is alive and well in people’s hearts. Considering the secularized ills of the day, it is pretty obvious that Campbell’s advocacy of remythologizing is a far more fruitful line of inquiry than Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing.
An Insubstantial Transcendence
Unfortunately, both Bultmann and Campbell miss the boat—but for widely divergent reasons. Bultmann wanted to “demythologize” the New Testament; to do this he threw out all the “unscientific” parts of the story and so missed the point of The Story. Campbell, on the other hand, laments the loss of myth from modern consciousness. Religious truth, he insists, is incomplete without a sense of the transcendent—which can only come through stories laden with meaning that go beyond the capacities of our intellects to understand. To make this valid point, he goes too far in three respects.
First, he disparages the indispensable rational element in religious faith. “Fastening on theology and systems means the decline of religion,” he says. Had he said fastening exclusively on the rational element, he would be more convincing. None of the great Christian theologians have denied the essential nature of mystery and transcendence. The key is always the balance between the rational and the mysterious. Campbell defines myth well—“the interface between what can be known and what can never be known.” Yet he seems to identify all of religious faith as residing in this intellectual purgatory, and that won’t do.
Second, Campbell identifies Western religion as rational (thus in decline) and exalts the mysterium of Eastern faith traditions. By focusing so heavily on Eastern mythology, Campbell disparages the uniqueness of the Christian story—God incarnate in history in the person Jesus Christ. Instead, he trots out and puts on a pedestal all the beautiful Eastern myths of Krishna, Vishnu, Brahma. Beautiful, yes; but they are quite different from the unique contribution of Christianity—a mysterious combination of the divine and the mundane. Where in history is there a better example of the “interface of the known and the unknown”?
Third, he seems to go beyond simply extolling Eastern philosophy and actually to embrace Eastern monism as well. “We all have God in us,” he says at one point. “God is a thought, a name, an idea. God is a reference to that which ends all thinking.” Well, God is all these things, but most of us would feel more comfortable if high on the list of things God is, Campbell had added that God is a person, capable of relationship with individual human beings.
At one point Bill Moyers asks Campbell about the meaning of the universe. “It’s just there—that’s it,” was Campbell’s reply. Perhaps what would have helped this beautifully produced series and book more than anything else would have been an assertion that religious myth points to a meaning with a tad more content than just that.
A Theological Sermon
The Sermon on the Mount: A Theological Interpretation, by Carl G. Vaught (State University of New York Press, 217 pp.; $34.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Walter W. Wessel, professor of New Testament, Bethel Seminary West, San Diego, California.
This book represents material originally presented to an adult Sunday school class by Carl Vaught, professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His approach to the Sermon on the Mount is not the ordinary one. He shows little or no concern with the sources of the sermon. He assumes it is a unit, presented by Jesus in its present Matthean form. His interest is in exposition, not dissection.
Vaught divides the sermon into the following parts; divine perfection and Christian maturity; the past and the future; five practical problems; six expressions of perfection; and final considerations about God’s kingdom.
Three things in particular are impressive about Vaught’s work. One is that he insists on interpreting the sermon theologically. This frequently results in in-depth study of theological terms and ideas. (A good example is his well-informed discussion of the righteousness of God and the kingdom of God.) Another impressive feature is his knowledge of the Greek text. He works comfortably with tenses, voices, syntax, and so on, where these are important, if not crucial, for a clear understanding of the text. A third commendable feature of the book is the excellent summaries at the beginning of each chapter. It is in these that Vaught’s conviction of the unity of the sermon comes through most strongly. What he identifies as logical and theological connections and transitions are, for the most part, convincing.
Not all is right with the book—his discussion of temptation surely is wrong, and his word studies do not always bear the weight of the theological point he wants to make (e.g., the meaning of blepō [p. 77] or of eis [p. 132]). However, I found the book to be a stimulating exposition of the sermon, containing many valuable spiritual insights. I would recommend its reading by any and all who seek illumination of this important part of the Word of God.
Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics, by Doug Bandow (Crossway, 271 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Reo Christenson, adjunct professor of political science at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
In Beyond Good Intentions, Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at a conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, and a nationally syndicated columnist with Copley News Service, makes a valiant effort to identify and apply biblical principles to politics today. A careful scholar and thoughtful analyst, much of his book will command respect even from his critics.
Bandow believes the Bible provides general principles rather than specific answers to most modern problems. Since there is no clear “biblical agenda” for our times, we usually must seek “prudential” answers to our public problems. Also, he believes Christians should be political activists—the “salt” of the earth and a “light unto the world.” But they should remember that their first responsibility is to live in a Christian manner and advance the gospel of Christ. So far, so good.
But while Bandow seeks a “Biblical philosophy of government that can unite all believers, whether on the Right or Left, rather than a religious litmus test that will only divide them,” his prescriptions, unfortunately, fail his own test.
Less Is Better
When he applies his biblical principles, a pronounced antigovernment bias emerges, which will not sit well with either camp.
Politically conservative Christians will approve of many of his positions: support for educational vouchers; opposition to abortion; commitment to minimal government; a generally negative stance on welfare, “comparative worth” legislation, foreign aid, government regulations, high marginal tax rates, and government subsidies. Also, his enthusiasm for free trade and a free-market economy will gratify, as will his respect for nuclear weapons as a deterrent to aggression. (He is careful not to condemn social security or Medicare.)
But politically conservative Christians will be less pleased with his opposition to aid for the contras, or with his antagonism to controls on pornography, on drug abuse, and on efforts to reintroduce prayer into public schools.
A major problem is that Bandow’s attempt to apply the Mosaic code—prepared for an agricultural and theocratic society light years removed from our industrial, technocratic, nuclear age—is pursued with far more confidence than most Christians would find justified.
For instance, while condemning pornography as morally evil, Bandow says “there is no Scriptural mandate to ban sexually explicit materials” for adults and suggests the apostle Paul would not jail pornographers. Are we really to believe that America, which was legislatively and judicially intolerant of porn from 1787 to the 1950s, was thereby less Christian than when porn became the unfettered cultural disgrace it is today? And where does Scripture even indirectly distinguish between what may be sold to children and what to adults?
Although conceding that “drug policy is more a matter of reason that revelation,” he would deregulate even the most dangerous drugs for adults because current enforcement efforts are ineffective and attempts to legislate morality generally do more harm than good. How many Christians want to toss in the towel on the drug epidemic long before we have exhausted many enforcement options available to us, or believe Scripture even remotely advises this course?
Bandow comes down hard on those who would raise taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth. Such action smacks of “envy” and “covetousness.” Although he insists that Christians should seek justice, no injustice seems involved (worthy of public concern) when hosts of people become multimillionaires by means that contribute nothing to the public good. (One responsible observer found that only one super-wealthy person in seven had won that wealth by a socially beneficial activity.) Apparently he cannot believe it is deeply offensive to some people’s sense of justice when income differentials are outrageous. The greed of the wealthy does not concern Bandow—just the greed of those who want the wealthy to pay what they can so well afford to pay.
Bandow suggests that what these dissenters are seeking is economic equality. I know of no one who believes all incomes should be equal, but many thoughtful people believe tax burdens should fall most heavily on those who can most easily bear them. An unchristian view? As for the inevitable incentive argument, what entrepreneur with a bright idea for a new or improved product or service ever declined to develop it because marginal tax rates were 50 percent instead of 28 percent? The potential market is what’s crucial.
Necessary Regulation
Environmental protection is the area where Bandow’s bias more seriously undermines his antigovemmental thesis. Everything we know about acid rain, the destruction of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, and threats to our underground water supply tell us that government will have to play a much larger role in our economy than he envisions if the future of the planet is not to be endangered. Loving our neighbor as ourself surely means profound concern for the well-being of our children and grandchildren.
Scripture does not forbid us—and perhaps even encourages us—to take governmental actions that discourage entrepreneurial malefactors, promote economic justice, and do whatever is needed to protect our environment—even if this requires more government than Bandow’s interpretations of Scripture permit.
