In Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Ko-Ko presents his list of annoying people. Among them is “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own.”
Please be assured I am not that kind of idiot! I do not idolize the past or the people who lived in it. As one who has spent the greater part of his life in the past, I can attest that the world was not always better back then. I just think we don’t give the people of the past the credit they deserve. That’s all. As a history buff I deplore the smugness with which we dismiss them and vaunt our own superiority. We say disparagingly, “They believed the earth is the center of the universe, but of course we know better”. “They thought that if you sailed far enough from land, you would fall off the edge of the world, but of course we know better”. They thought thunder and lightning are caused by the waring of the gods, but of course we know better.

The list of “They thoughts” and “We know betters” goes on and on, and it is my opinion that our arrogance is, to use a good Anglican word, ‘unseemly’. I do not deny that people of former ages lacked all the information we have, but that does not mean they were of inferior intelligence. Indeed, whether they were born a mere hundred years ago or multiple thousands of years earlier, I am impressed by how shrewd they were. Cave dwellers who saw the night sky undiminished by light pollution could identify things in it that I don’t even notice. They lived somewhere on the food chain but not always at the top, yet they survived by their ability to make fire, spear heads of stone, and warm garments of animal skins. But lose me in the cold wilderness in just a loin cloth, without my cell phone and at the mercy of bears and cougars, and I wouldn’t survive a day.
So, yes, I appreciate how advanced and wise we are. But I also admire those who started at Square One without advantages and went on to tame fire, invent the wheel, create political empires, build pyramids, enact law codes, mine and smelt metals, invent democracy, and communicate over long distances by Morse Code. They are the people upon whose shoulders we stand as we take in the vista from our vantage point at the top. They were not stupid!
My appreciation for those who travelled this road before us extends to those who gave us the Bible. You remember them. They believed God lives up in the sky, but of course we know better. They believed in miracles, but of course we know better. They believed mental illness is caused by demons, but of course we know better”. Very well. I will grant you they did believe such things. But a lot of people today believe we are being routinely visited and abducted by extra terrestrials, that Donald Trump won the last American election, that climate change is a hoax, and that ‘canned laughter’ makes the inanity of TV sitcoms funny. Heh, I’m just sayin’ …!
I feel especially indebted to those who compiled the scriptures and were wise enough to include the primitive, oral tradition stories we find in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Those stories predate the dawn of human civilization, and they reflect some of the earliest, tentative inklings we homo sapiens had about God, about nature, and about ourselves.
Primitive hunters and gatherers were wise and resourceful enough to package those faltering snippets of insight in stories. They had no other means of passing their limited knowledge on from one generation to another, so their choice of the medium of stories was a brilliant one. Stories are more memorable than lessons and more portable than books. They are easy to share, easy to pack with information, easy to edit, easy to understand and easy to update. They are living creations, timeless, interesting, and instructive. Appreciate, for instance, how extensively Jesus used stories, and how powerful those parables were and still are.
In the mists of time when the Genesis collection of stories was still ‘alive’ and maturing, most likely they would have been told around the evening fire by the tribal elder, while children and adults alike listened intently. No one would have become bored because stories are intergenerational and the very telling of them can be enhanced by the teller.
The Genesis stories are no longer alive, of course. They were flash-frozen in print sometime after humankind crossed the Literary Threshold, so the most recent versions of them up to that time are all we have. As such, they are as important to us as dinosaur fossils because they testify to what once was but is no longer. They are precious beyond measure for that alone. Not to have preserved them in scripture would have been a great travesty, for without them the entire first volume about our human awakening to the reality of God and to our own spiritual yearnings would have been irretrievably lost.
I am disappointed about how thoroughly our generation has misunderstood stories, exploited them for profit, and deprived them of their innate power to make us wiser. In my opinion, our assault upon them has been just as devastating as our impact upon the environment.
We have devalued stories by turning them into mere entertainment. What would the movie, television and publishing industries do without them? And we have cluttered them with special effects, gratuitous violence, adult content, and course language.
Ironically, albeit unintentionally, even we Christians have devalued an entire catalogue of biblical stories by removing them from their scriptural context and publishing them as collections of Children’s Bible Stories. We have meant well, but by doing that we have effectively redesignated those portions of scripture as ‘children’s content’, whereupon adults have stopped reading them. The cruel irony is that there is no such thing as a children’s Bible story. Every word of scripture was inscribed by and for the edification of adults.
But the very worst thing we can do with respect to Bible stories is to forget something the ancients knew and understood very well. It is that a story does not need to be factual to be a vessel of truth.
Even Jesus’ harshest critics knew and bowed to that fact. They understood that the Good Samaritan was not an actual person living next door to them, but they readily conceded Jesus’ point that he was, in fact, their neighbor.
Tragically, there is a body of Christian people who believe, insist, and proclaim that every word and passage in the Bible is strictly, literally, and factually ‘true’. But by that bold insistence they render many biblical stories easily debunkable. When Adam and Eve are made to be just ‘a’ man and ‘a’ woman, they automatically cease to be ‘every’ man and ‘every’ woman, whereupon the whole story about them can easily be discredited by posing the juvenile question, “Where did Cain and Abel get their wives?”.
Dale