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But, this Holy Week and Easter likely will not be Christo-formative for those who reduce the mystery of the Passion and Resurrection to a celebration of what happened back then. Nor, is it likely to happen for those who, entrapped in an opposite, naturalistic, and reductionistic rationalism assume that the events of Holy Week and Resurrection are too “unbelievable” to believe. Hopefully, we can find a middle way between the literalistic-regressive or spiritualistic-demythologistic mentalities.
I am not prepared to relinquish the word “myth,” though I often imply it by using other words, like Event or Story. “Myth” is jettisoned by modern fundamentalism and many others will not use it due to its widespread corruption as “fictitious story.” So, I define my understanding of Christ Myth, which I call Christ Event or Christ Story, in this paper:
The Christ Event, both inside and outside spatiality and temporality, arises to us, by Divine Energy, in personal and collective immediacy, and through, among other means, the collection of stories in the written Gospels and personal and collective engagement with them in worship, as they reveal to us the inner, abiding, and evocative significance of historical events related to Jesus Christ and the early Church for us today.
For some, the primary focus is the events that happened in Jesus’ life. For others, the primary focus is the experience of Jesus as the living Christ after the crucifixion. However, this latter group does not simply ascribe “fiction” to everything written in the Gospels. The two groups, nevertheless, will, generally, disagree on the importance or essentiality of the literal historicity of events in Jesus’ life or the degree to which the historicity applies. This article is not an effort to contend for the rightness of either approach. In fact, I find both groups often to represent a rationalistic mentality that keeps in primacy the intellectualization that blocks surrendering to the Christo-form intent of the Christ Story.
The degree to which particular biblical events are or are not historical, strictly speaking, is a point of healthy difference in the Christian faith. And, as Christians, we have a bias in this regard. For example, many Christians, it seems to me, can live quite well with a spiritualized understanding of God writing Ten Commandments on tablets and giving them to Moses. This can be read as an etiology: a story intending to explain an origin, along with the “significance” of a social reality, be it legal, familial, religious, ... Thus, the experience of the Torah (Divine Law), over time, could have led toward formulating the story, to point, not to a fiction, but the truth that the Torah derived from Divine inspiration. In such cases, the experience leads to the story, while the story does not precede the experience. The community is not writing fiction, in the sense of fancy; rather, it is seeking to embody truth within a format to pass along the faith. This is logical, for humans are imaging creatures.
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However, such interpretive freedom to see a story or event as meaningful narrative and not historical, is narrowed, often, when looking at the Gospels. There are logical reasons for this, among them the perception that matters surrounding Jesus Christ are central to Christian faith. Many Christians can live quite well without God having written the Ten Commandments on stone; but, they would have great difficulty relinquishing matters like the virgin birth or literal-bodily Resurrection.
Of course, much of these matters rest on prior assumptions about the nature of Scripture. If one is literalistic in Scripture reading and assuming an infallible agreement among all parts of Scripture, she is prone to find other passages to verify her understanding of a first passage. This is called proof texting and is a form of circular reasoning. For example, one might argue for interpreting the Resurrection narratives in one manner by appealing to a passage from St. Paul that would contend that the literal-bodily Resurrection happened and must have done so. The person, then, says, “See, it had to have happened.” But, if one does not assume that one necessarily knows what St. Paul meant by “body” or “bodily,” or any such words, or does not approach St. Paul as always right, or infallible, in what he wrote, that throws a monkey wrench in the proof text modality.
I offer a sane, intellectually mature resolution to the dualistic divisions between those who contend for a literal Resurrection, for example, and the ones who contend for a spiritualized understanding. The literal Resurrection goes like this: Jesus, in the flesh, got up out of the tomb, or was raised from the tomb by God. The spiritualized has been presented like this: The story of the Resurrection arose out of the experience of the early disciples after the crucifixion, while the presentation of it as a bodily Resurrection is the way persons, generally, embodied spiritual significance in story form. Both agree on the essentiality of the continuance of Jesus after the Resurrection and His continuing relationship with the disciples.
But, how about us today? The Resurrection is true each moment. Myth takes the event out of linear time, into the Eternal Moment. However, I find believing in a historical Resurrection of a bodily nature, in line with the contention of Barnhart, part of the Christian understanding. Yet, I would not contend that the events around Holy Week and Easter have not been shaped by later experience. Such remembrance or recasting seems clear, even by a cursory reading of the Gospels. However, the Gospels and early Christians give a consistent witness to an actual Resurrection of a bodily nature, but a body that could manifest on different planes of existence. So, the body was a glorified, or transformed body.
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