Christianity is not ultimately about Jesus. Buddhism is not ultimately about the Buddha. No religion is ultimately about the literal content of its narratives. The narratives of traditional religions are mythic. Even when the narrative has a historical setting, the historicity is of little significance. In fact, insisting on the literal truth of myths is a good way to miss their deep meaning. The important meaning is always to be found in the mythic message, and that message is always delivered indirectly in stories and parables—through the images, metaphors, analogies, symbolism, relationships, interactions, and plot lines they contain.
This is the difference between exoteric and esoteric modes of religious belief. Exoteric (externally focused) religion takes myth literally. Esoteric (internally aware) religion finds deeper meaning in myth. The esoteric forms of religion are the mystical traditions.
The message of good myth is always about the big questions: Who/what am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? How does reality work? How do I work? What is good? True? Beautiful? What really matters? In other words, religion carries important meaning about what it is to be human and how we are connected to the greater reality in which we find ourselves.
This is perplexing: Although religious narrative is generally not literally true, it nevertheless potentially carries deeply true meaning. This is because it operates on at least two levels at the same time. The narrative has literal meaning at its surface, but it is necessary to see through the surface to find the important meaning. The specifics of the mythic narrative, when we allow them to function properly, draw our attention to important patterns and dynamics in ourselves and our world. This need to look deeper is less than obvious. Consequently, religion has often been a source of confusion, controversy, misstep, and conflict. Religion can serve shallow and even repressive political and social purposes when approached in a shallow way but can bear deep and transformative meaning for those who can look deeper, who can sense the poetry behind the prose.
But, what is the source of the poetry? Who or what encodes those deeply meaningful patterns and dynamics into the narratives? This is a crucial question that revolves around one of the deepest truths of all religion. It is because Christianity has yet to fully recognize and accept this truth that it is such a miserable mess today.
The question is one of inspiration: How does the deep meaning get into the narrative? The traditional answer is that God put it there. This view sees the Bible, and especially the New Testament, as having been magically transmitted in perfect and finished form by a human-like, supernatural being through a few selected writers within forty years or so of the crucifixion. This is a top-down mechanism: inspiration is handed down from above. Modern scholarship challenges this view. It sees scripture as less than perfect in the traditional sense. Scholars have found much evidence that the New Testament emerged from the efforts of numerous different writers and communities with differing and even opposing perspectives over a period of a hundred years or more. This is a bottom-up mechanism: inspiration arising from messy processes of human culture.
The topside-down mechanism is literally false. It is central to the myth of supernatural theism, the traditional understanding that God is an ultimate being who stands apart from our mundane reality even while controlling it. This myth has truth as myth—everything does come from the mystery that can be called God—but the magical, top-down mechanism is not literally how it works. It is how ancient peoples imagined reality to function based on our instinctual social intelligence, but the mechanism does not hold up to critical scrutiny. The invisible puppet master who pulls all the strings just is not there.
The bottomside-up mechanism is more literally accurate. Religion evolves through the messy processes of human culture. But there is also a problem with this “scientific” perspective. It is the tendency to regard religion as only a human product—a quaint, superstitious way of understanding reality that is now simply outmoded. That is true to a significant extent, but it misses something. With this attitude, the deep meaning of myth tends to be overlooked; spirit is lost.
These top-bottom, up-down paradigms have become a hindrance. They are two sides of an argument that is not helpful. This is where religion has been stuck for far too long.
We need a new paradigm, one that is both inside-out and outside-in at the same time. Does religion come from God or from people? The answer is YES! Both at the same time! God and people are not separate!
In the Christian myth Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30) This is a pivotal passage for Christianity. To see the deep meaning, we must look beyond the surface of the story and the related theology, beyond the idea that Jesus was a uniquely divine part of God come to Earth at a specific time in history to accomplish a specific task. As I have suggested, myth is always about us and our relationship to reality here and now. To look through the surface of the story for its deeper meaning, we must recognize that all of it is about us. Especially, we must see that Jesus is us and we are Jesus. The deeper meaning is that we are all one with God. It is not good enough to say that God is in us and we are in God. There is still too much separation in that way of thinking. Better to simply say, we are God and God is us. “Us” here stretches to include everything; the oneness is pervasive. This message of oneness is centrally present in all healthy religion, even if not immediately obvious to the casual observer. This is the deep truth that is not being fully seen by popular Christianity or by the exoteric forms of any other tradition.
There is a hugely important change of perspective that must happen here. Traditional Christianity tends to see the world as a mundane, fallen place and God as a very separate, magical being who controls everything from Heaven. This two-world mythology is fine as myth—lots of important psychological and transformative meaning to be found there—but it is very problematic if we take it literally and make it the basis of our worldview. Two-world mythology does much the same thing as science: it breaks reality apart into intelligible pieces so we can make better sense of it. But, the breaking apart is an artificial, analytical exercise and not finally how reality is. Reality is finally a profound unity. It is a oneness—a oneness of Jesus, who represents us and all of Creation, with the Father, who represents ultimate reality as the source and ground of being. Whereas traditional religion projected its awe onto imaginary, supernatural beings, it is this seemingly mundane, everyday reality we occupy that is truly worthy of awe. This reality, right here, right now, is totally spiritual and awesome all the way through. It is all God—if that’s the name we want to give the mystery. We and all things are manifestations of and participants in the divine flow.
The mystery we call God (Reality, Being, the Universe) is profoundly intelligent, and it is the root reality behind all intelligence. Human intelligence arises from God’s intelligence. It is collective human consciousness and intelligence that encode the deep meaning into myth, but our consciousness and intelligence stand on much deeper things. Divine truth bubbles up into our myths from those depths.
© Copyright 2024 John Speers
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