Another View 2

“One of the things I most like about myth is that it does not supply us with facts.” At least, not in the sense that it gives us a useful hope for predicting the future. Hence, all the confusion between the terms “eternal” and “everlasting,” as ways of talking about salvation as something that looks like “temporal immortality.” We have created a monster -- survival at all costs, and we continue to keep folks alive because life has become one of our present day idolatries, and living divorced from its desired effect. Death is the fear, life the idolatry. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. So, we allow people to “live” in bodies that breathe, and that we’ve corrupted as our personal idolatry, and call it “life.” I am not suggesting what to do -- except to rethink our theology around this myth called life, and the misappropriation of what the term salvation truly is.

If salvation is to turn towards God’s intended purpose for our life, sin, for instance would be to turn away fromthat intended purpose. Jesus becomes for us Christian’s the means by which we see a human being living into that intended fullness. We catch a glimpse of human failure and imperfection (another of the lies my teacher told me) in this one who moves towards his fulfillment of what it means to become the Christ (called sanctification, or Jesus’ own journey towards holiness). His name is Jesus, his fulfillment is “the Christ.”

Doesn’t it make sense that Christianity is the annual re-living of the Christ-life (as we every year rekindle that fire in the seasons that call us to holy living), and that in those seasons, we experience the union of ourselves as Christian’s with Christ in his birth, his labor, his passion, his resurrection, and his ascension in glory?

Our other concepts of Christianity-in-practice are post-mythical, that is -- they are rationalized, historical, and moralistic -- they have become “dead history” and can only be resuscitated by our commitment to the holiness that is God’s intended purpose for our lives. In truth, in this model, Christianity is no longer a symbolical re-living of the Christ-life, but rather it becomes the place of participation and sacramental presence in contact with the culture, the place where we live, the people with whom we are present day-in-and-out. This is moral theology lived and practiced.

I’ve wondered often what is most forgotten about this world of myth-making that needs to be re-valued. Typically, myths present us with an “upside-down world.” Hence, there is a wisdom that no longer will be “conventional,” meaning the accepted way of seeing life and its living -- conventions that make us “comfortable,” and the Jesus our best friend. It becomes, rather, true sapience -- wisdom that searches and probes the depths, turning the world inside-out, upside-down, and makes Jesus all the more difficult, and his words “follow me” almost untenable.

Spirit stories do not allow much breathing room for the literal. It becomes too limiting, too easy to control and contrive to my liking, my values, my individuality, my ego as interpreter. Superstitions begin to substitute themselves for gospel, and God becomes knowingly or not, relegated to the realm of the prototypical bearded old man on a cloud. How does this have anything to do with something so revolutionary as our faith. What will give it dynamism again. Where is the zip that is the passion of an active tense, present reality of God-alive-in-me. It is difficult to conjure that up with a faith that continues to speak out of history and fact. All of that is past tense, and non-present reality. When will we stop trying to explain myth historically, and know it will never be boundaried by all of our explanations in reference to its Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek antecedents -- because they do not explain anything.

“The theological analysis destroys the myth in just the same way as the ’scientific’ analysis, because theology is a psuedo-science. Christianity began to die in the moment when theologians began to treat the divine story as history -- when they mistook the story of God, of the Creation, and the Fall, for a record of facts in the historical past,” says Alan Watts. The past goes ever and back into nothing. Where does it lead? Not even to its Creator. “Time does not flow forward from a Creator who made the world; it flows backwards, like the tail of a comet, from a Creator who makesthe world, and whom no one can remember.”

How do we tell these Spirit-stories differently, with the vigor and courage they demand. My honest search and hope is that these articles will begin to spur in you, and all who read, Another View.