Christian Myth (Dominion)

What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth? A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound – as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued – a     myth can be true.     To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution.

*It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe – that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.   *

Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’33 This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.     The Marquis de Sade, whose conviction that some people were naturally masters and some were naturally slaves saw him incarcerated in a succession of prisons and lunatic asylums. ‘The doctrine of loving one’s neighbour,’ he insisted, ‘is a fantasy that we owe to Christianity and not to Nature.’ (Wikipedia)

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Related posts:

1. Allied with God (Dominion)
2. Paul (Dominion)
3. Luther (Dominion)
4. The Chinese (Dominion)