MYTH AND CHRISTIANITY—THE SAME?

MYTH AND CHRISTIANITY—THE SAME?

The Skeptics • Jesus story parallels • “How the Dwarfs Wouldn’t be Taken In” • The Last Battle

The Church • Straying from doctrine • Contemporary church • Post-Modern church movement “We want a God without wrath who took man without sin into a kingdom without justice through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” (H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America)

Early church • Gnostics, Stoics, Hellenists, etc. • "Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables [myths]. But you be watchful in all things..." 2 Timothy 4:2-5

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Truth, Myth or Both? by Berit Kjos - December 2001 Rejects any ties of the church with myth • Demonic, foolish, perverse

MYTH BECAME FACT (According to Lewis) • Why not cut the chords? “Yet the odd thing is that even those who seem most embarrassed by the sediment of ‘barbaric’ Christianity in their thought become suddenly obstinate when you ask them to rid of it altogether. They will strain the cord almost to breaking point , but they refuse to cut it.”

“Even assuming that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.”

2. Why has the Christian myth endured? “It is what Corineus calls the myth that abides; it is what he calls modern and living thought that moves away…Where are the predecessors of Corineus?...where are the Gnostics, …the design of Voltaire, the dogmatic materialism of the great Victorians? They have moved with the times. But the thing they were all attacking remains…”

3. What consequences does the fall of man leave? “The degree to which the fall has affected human understanding is unknown to man; hence man is unable to maintain any real sense of objectivity about his understanding of the world. For Lewis, God could only communicate to men by myth, that is stories with clouded meanings due to the terrible consequences of man’s fall.”

4. Myth—the combination of the abstract and the principle • The pain experience vs. cognition “This is our dilemma—either to taste and not know or to know and not to taste.” “In the enjoyment of a myth we come nearest to experienceing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.” Orpheus and Erurydice example

5. Should Christians be nervous about accepting the myth? “We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’and ‘Pagan Christs’…if God chooses to be mythopoetic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love an obedience, but …wonder and delight…”

The Last Battle • Tashlan and the Dwarfs • "Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables [myths]. But you be watchful in all things..." 2 Timothy 4:2-5

Resources • Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Truth, Myth or Both? http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/rings.htm#Lewis • C.S. Lewis and myth http://frontieregulator.blogspot.com/2005/09/cs-lewis-and-myth.html • Tolkien and Lewis on Myth http://www.lightforthelastdays.co.uk/docs/current_events/j_r_tolkien.html • Pagan Origins of the Chrisitan Myth • http://home.earthlink.net/~pgwhacker/ChristianOrigins/ • Myth Became Fact • The Last Battle—C.S. Lewis • http://www.christianmyth.com/JesusHistory.htm

MYTH AND CHRISTIANITY—THE SAME?