Christianity as creative myth

most of all money. In this world decisions are continually being made which have ethical implications. But though religion is more properly the arbiter of ethical values than either politics or economics, priests and clergymen are told to get on with their job of individual spiritual salvation and not to meddle in social or international affairs. To those who oppose the politics of aggressive confrontation which culminates in a balance of nuclear terror and in economics which impose poverty on hundreds of millions all over the world the Churches do not offer a vision of Man and of the future of humanity which is convincingly truer and more magnificent than that which now rules.

This state of affairs has come about because Christianity, the religion on which European and Western civilisation has been built, has not been able to cope with those very forces of individuation of which it was itself the origin. That affirmation of ‘T.over against the whole world which followed from the selfaffirmation of Jesus Christ and which is the foundation of individuality has led to the domination of intellectual thinking and sense observation, and thus to our modern scientific materialism. It has also been the cause of economic individualism and of that power-secking ambition which has brought about the worst excesses of nationalism. The technology to which it gave rise has brought mankind the possibility of immense blessings, but its invasion of the realm of human values has rendered those blessings inaccessible.

This supremacy of the intellect and of intellectual science has not only attacked Christianity from the outside by taking over the determination of human values. It has also infiltrated it with its own standards of verification. Belief is considered a primary requisite for Christianity. In the scientific sphere belief is appropriate for a hypothesis, which is accepted as true insofar as—and only insofar as—experiments yield the result which the hypothesis would lead one to expect. Even then the truth of the hypothesis remains only provisional. But the belief which is demanded of Christian believers is not of that provisional or hypothetical nature. It is absolute. It appears to be of the nature of belief in a fact, to which standards of scientific verification would be appropriate. And yet the story of the gospels and the doctrines of Christianity cannot properly be subjected to any such test.

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