myth

Honest to God, Goodbye to God, and the Jesus Myth

Honest to God, Goodbye to God, and the Jesus Myth

I knew in 1962 at the age of 17 that I didn’t believe that things in the Bible that were accepted as literal truth by the Church were literally true. They were unbelievable. Sixty years later, I am far more disturbed by the disjunction between my faith and the belief system in today’s Church of England. A newly-published book by Chris Scott: The Jesus myth: a psychologist’s viewpoint is a succinct, clear, honest, practical book. Chris suggests that we need to make a paradigm shift from the twentieth and twenty-first century belief that truth consists in scientifically provable facts to mythical truth, stories that are about human experience that help us understand and interpret ourselves and our world.

Myths - Chinese, Trumpian, Brexit and Christian

Myths - Chinese, Trumpian, Brexit and Christian

The attempt to create a new mythic history of China and to suppress evidence of more recent events may seem remote from our concerns in the Christian West, but in this evolving age of a seamless reality we are discovering that every country and culture and human being is in some way intrinsically interconnected. The church tinkers with small issues it thinks are important and fails to see the how it needs to develop the biggest picture possible in response to the dangerous new myths that are being deliberately constructed.

The myth of the masculine God

The myth of the masculine God

The Christian Church hasn’t begun to come to terms with the nature of myth as the most powerful expression of sacred, holy truth about the divine. As a result, we live with false myths: the myth of a male God, the myth of male superiority, the myth of God Incarnate, and the myth of God is dead. It’s the male anthropomorphic God that is dead.

The culture of abuse and the transcendent heart of Jesus

The culture of abuse and the transcendent heart of Jesus

All of us are born into a culture – the culture of our parents and of our mother in particular. We are born into an extended family culture, a social culture, and as we grow, we are influenced by other cultures – schools and organisations, and church or mosque or synagogue or for some, a culture hostile to religion and the spirit. Because we are shaped by the culture we are born into and that human societies have created, that makes it difficult to see our culture for what it is and in what ways we may need to release ourselves from it and transcended it. Creator and created, the divine and the human, should be living in a co-inspiring dynamic. We need to be living into spiritual teaching and practice that, as did Jesus, helps us integrate the intelligence of our heart with the intellect of our head. This is only going to happen when the church has the wisdom and courage to let go of the mythical and ‘religious’ projections surrounding Jesus.

Time for open conversation leading to good disagreement about the fundamentals

Time for open conversation leading to good disagreement about the fundamentals

We may think that there is just one version of Christianity that we who are Anglicans share with every denomination and all Christians. Not so - we are living with many versions of Christianity, not just within the variety of denominations, but within each denomination and within the Church of England. Within the church there is an invisible, underground, disconnected, boundary-crossing set of people who are letting go of orthodoxy and dogma. In my dreams this group will reach a critical mass as the reality of the ways in which people are reconfiguring faith becomes more widely known. It’s the great secret of the current decade that dare not speak its name, though it has been emerging for decades.