I write to you in the dead of winter. Even in Abbotsford, B.C., as in the rest of Canada, the leaves have fallen from the trees, some snow has fallen on the ground, the temperature dips a little below freezing and the wind is often cold. Getting up while it is still dark to face the short, often dreary, days of winter is a bit tougher for most of us.
As there's been some recent discussion about the substance and language we use about the core beliefs of our holy Christian faith in these pages, I thought I'd offer a few thoughts of my own. On the one hand, I want to be precise and certain about the basic historicity and truth of the Lord, Jesus Christ, in whom I put my trust. On the other hand, I want to admit that the language of myth and metaphor is also a part of my faith.
Just because something happened in history and is, therefore, profoundly true, does not mean it cannot be spoken of with awe and ambiguity, mystery and metaphor. This is, in fact, the way of much of the language and the literary forms of the Bible.
C.S. Lewis, himself a master of myth and metaphor, acknowledged that the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened; nevertheless, the best of his writing, like his famous Chronicles of Narnia, speaks in the hushed and jubilant, yet more nuanced tones of metaphor. Once upon a time, in the world of Narnia, Aslan, a magnificent and majestic representative of the king of the animal world, lived and loved children of all ages, yet he ended up dying a miserable death upon a stone table to save a rather nasty boy. But he was not gone forever. Rediscovered by the children of Narnia, he came back to life even more powerful and near than ever before.
Wayne Martindale of Wheaton College, Illinois, where many of Lewis's papers can be found, wrote this about Lewis's love for and growing understanding of myth:
Recounting his conversion to lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis explained he'd always found the notion of a god dying for his subjects and coming back to life very moving when he encountered it in the pagan myths … [They] moved him because they suggested a reality which he at some level must have thought or felt to be true, but to which he had given no assent. Lewis explained a large part of his conversion was his learning from his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that Christianity was like the myths he loved, except here it is a “true myth.” The pagan myths were human myths; the Gospels are God's myth: the stories happen in actual human history.
Some may be disturbed at Lewis's use of myth as a term applied to Christianity. Make no mistake: from 1931 to his death, Lewis was firmly committed to the historicity of Jesus and [the core beliefs of] the Bible. He put the whole weight of his belief and hope in it. [But] the great advantage is [that this allowed] him to make two important points about truth and how we apprehend it. First, it undergirds the concept that the … moral law and supernatural order [are] always present in human thinking [and writing]. Second, in myth we experience imaginatively, in the concreteness of the story, something which would be abstract if translated out. – The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schulz et al
It is spring. A long, dark winter gives way to the light and the warmth of a brilliant sun climbing in a bright, blue sky. The earth is alive and ablaze with green and the multitude of other spring colours.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
