Christianity as creative myth

this is a truth very often uttered but very little assimilated. There are many people in the Christian world who call themselves Christians, but believe that the essence of Christianity is Christ’s teaching and not his person.! “The only new doctrine’ he wrote, ‘specifically different from all other religions is the teaching of Christ about Himself, the reference to Himself as the living incarnate truth “I am the way, the truth and the life: he who believes on me shall have eternal life”.’

The attempt to approach the reality of Christ as myth in the sense in which myth has been described above requires a particularly open mind, for there are several different interpretations which have been given to the gospel story, none of which are inherently impossible. We need a mythology which is not incompatible with any of these interpretations and is relevant both to our present human life and to the whole human future. Finally it must be such that it can find some support in our actual or possible experience. How then are we to assess the statements made by persons who may claim to know by experience things that do not and perhaps cannot enter our present experience? Provided we find them thinkable or imaginable, the critical attitude to such claims would be neither belief nor rejection, but acceptance that what has been claimed is to be regarded as a serious possibility, which may provide for many people a firm foundation for, their faith. The mythological approach allows anyone both to hold this open mind about different interpretations and to affirm or intuitively to prefer one without wholly rejecting the others.

What is beyond all doubt concerning Christianity is that several different persons at different times wrote the story of Jesus, of his life and sayings, and that in particular one of them, St. John, had the most profound vision of a man who was both man and God, being the incarnation in time of an eternal divine principle, the Word (Logos). This in itself does not prove that Jesus was divine or even that he existed, but it does prove that someone—and more than one person—had the vision of such a man. There is also the whole of history since that time. The works of art, of music and poetry based on the gospel story, and the writings of philosophers and saints cannot be doubted. This does not mean that we must take them at face value, but we cannot deny that