Volume 2, Issue 2, February 1995


RELIGION - IMAGE AND ACTUALITY

"In the Church, you know, there is a great heightening of every moment of experience, since every moment is played against a supernatural backdrop. Nothing can be humdrum in this scheme. Every least act of the mind has infinite significance", stated Marshall McLuhan, communications theorist, University of Toronto.

In our culture we make clear distinctions between "history" and "story". The word "myth" has tended to become attached only to the latter, and hence to mean "not really true." Therefore, to some a great deal of biblical and religious teaching is seen as something untrue and illusory.

Theologians and academics don't use mythology this way. Mythology appropriates symbolic language to point beyond itself to truth apprehensible in faith. It is a unique way of communicating what is created and perceived by the imagination.

Myths are what advertising people call "images". They deal with reality that transcends the ordinary reason and observation. They always present themselves as authoritative, the statement of truth for which no "proof" is needed and none ever given.

The original Greek term "mythos" meant a decisive, final pronouncement. Myths need not argue their own validity; they must be taken as given.

Religious myths are usually accounts of superhuman beings and extraordinary events in a time altogether different from that of ordinary human experience.

Myth is what is taken for granted when thought begins. The assumption that humankind's observations can discern truth is the mythology of science.

At its best mythology answers a deep and lasting human need by embodying truth that can be expressed in no other way. Without myth, in fact, no culture can satisfactorily define itself and survive.

The Greeks as well recognized another kind of truth. Besides mythos there was "logos", which meant factual, provable, arguable truth, the kind we encounter in everyday, common sense life.

In the New Testament "logos" meant "word" and the thought or reason which is expressed in words.

Greek philosophers believing that the universe is essentially rational, used the term "logos" to denote the rational principle by which it is sustained.

Our belief in Canada as a nation is mythos. Our belief that modern Canada, a country with its own government, began July 1st, 1867, is logos.

Christianity is both mythos and logos as well. It speaks of the spiritual action in creation and how life crosses over from mythos to logos. This gives the Christian the advantage of living in two worlds at once. The Christian inhabits the timeless world of myths, in which ancient truth informs and enriches succeeding generations, and also the practical, day-by-day world of logos, where they must wage wars within and without, and seek the meaning and purpose for their lives.

It is wisdom to consider well the urging of Deuteronomy 30:19, "...I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendents may live".

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.