You can find me, comfortably resting in my metaphysical hammock anytime at sdrnotman@hotmail.com, or you can leave a comment on my blog.
But remember to play nice and be warned that this dude has my back:
So don’t do anything daft 
because you know what he’s
like when riled.
I am a barrister and attorney, with an active interest in Christian apologetics, philosophy and theology. In addition to my legal practice in sunny Bermuda, I am currently enrolled in an MA program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in California. For most of my life I have been heavily involved in theatre and assorted dramatic arts, usually playing the (obviously misunderstood) villain. My acquaintance with English literature, history and politics is well-documented and much maligned, probably with good reason.
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Hey! I’m bookmarking your blog and am going to try to read what you’ve posted so far. You write well, and i’m fascinated by your dedication to religion.
Question for you. I’ve not read the bible, and the prospect of reading it cover to cover is daunting, so can you recommend some parts that are mythologically beautiful and extra profound?
Hey Lindsay,
Thanks so much for bookmarking my blog and it’s great to hear to from you! Thank you also for the compliment about my writing – one of the many goals I have in creating this blog is to foster good writing skills.
As for your question, I can empathize with the daunting prospect of reading the Bible cover to cover and am happy to direct you to Books of the Bible that you might find helpful. I first read the Gospel according to Luke in the New Testament and followed it up with Romans. You could choose any one of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) but the person who witnessed to me recommended those two texts in particular and…well, here I am with a Christian blog so at least I can say that he did not steer me wrong. Both books are certainly profound, one being an account of the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus and the other being the teachings of Paul, an Apostle of Jesus.
As for being ‘mythologically beautiful’, it really depends on what you mean by myth. C S Lewis, an expert in mythological studies and literary criticism, writes that whilst still an atheist, he was struck by the raw, unvarnished quality of the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ. One of his first conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien (oh, to have been a fly on that wall) who became his life long friend, was on the subject of myth. Lewis asserted that they were merely myths but Tolkien insisted that they are something more, something pulsing with life even today. Tolkien viewed pagan myths as being splinters of truth, each containing fragments of God’s reality. Part of our abilities as being created in the image of God, is that we seek to invent truth after God. Our invented myths are our attempts to capture the truth of God’s creation. We see glimpses of truth in pagan mythology but we could not get the whole picture on our own. So legends and myths from pagan communities can contain truth, but not the whole truth. For instance, one of our oldest stories from many cultures is that a catastrophe that precedes a happy ending. Something bad must happen, before good can come about. Dorothy must endure the tornado before she can come to Oz. What we see here is ‘good news’, that our world will not end in darkness, but with new hope and regeneration. We get a glimpse of what Lewis so poignantly referred to as ‘Joy’.
Now what Tolkien argued to Lewis is that the Gospel (translated as “Good News”) is the ultimate “eucastrophe” (his word for a bad event preceding a happy ending). And that is what the crucifixion was. The Son of God died upon the cross as an atoning death for our sins. But then comes the Resurrection three days later, Christ’s victory over death, the restoration of man once more with the Father (I appreciate that without a basic understanding of Christian theology this part will require further clarification later). In his book On Fairy Stories Tolkien referred to the birth of Christ as the eucastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection then is the eucastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This history begins and ends in joy. (I have to refer to a source here: I read a book in California called C.S. Lewis’s Case for Christ by a scholar named Art Lindsay. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to set it all down while it’s still roiling around in my short-term memory!
When Lewis examined the Gospels for himself he found that they were written in a style he identified as intending to convey historical facts, witness accounts of something that actually happened, rather than mythological stories intended to convey only some sort of folk truths about how society viewed itself. The fact they contained miracle accounts did not make them mythological. Rather, the inclusion of miracle accounts in the Gospel accounts led Lewis to conclude the miracle accounts were there because people actually witnessed them. He wrote the following in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter that they set down in their artless, historical fashion was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this…Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, man.” In a letter to a friend soon afterwards he referred to the story of Christ as simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in a similar way as others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened.
As for the other parts of the Bible being ‘myth’, see my article on inerrancy. Whilst it is true that the Bible is certainly written in many genres, the word ‘myth’ is too loaded with a philosophical presupposition against objective truth for me to comfortably agree with your usage of the word without qualification. If you mean ‘myth’ in the Lewis or Tolkien style, then ok, but if you mean ‘myth’ simply because they contain accounts of things like, for example the parting of the Red Sea, then I will have to disagree with your use of the word. If God exists, then I would think that in comparison to creating the entire universe literally out of nothing (as is advocated scientifically by Big Bang cosmology) then parting a few waves is chicken feed by comparison and not something to dismiss so easily as counterfactual. My point is, miracles can only be assumed to be myth rather than actual events if and only if one holds a philosophical presupposition against the existence of the God of the Bible. The man who holds such a presupposition does not look at miracle accounts and say, oh look, those are impossible, therefore God does not exist. Rather, he denies the existence of God a priori, then come to the Bible and finds, oh look, the Bible contains miracle accounts by something that does not exist, therefore the Bible is mythological only.
The interesting thing about the Resurrection of Christ, is that it is purported to be an event that actually took place within the course of human history. Evidence for the Gospel accounts is supported by extra-biblical sources such as the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and archaeology (such as the discovery of the tomb of Caiaphas the high priest and a paving stone confirmed that Pontius Pilate was the Roman Governor during the time of Jesus’ death). Now these evidences may not point directly to the resurrection itself but they confirm circumstantially the account of events as told in the Gospels. The point is that the Resurrection is an event that lends itself to historical investigation and evidence gathering. It is something that one can look at rationally without worrying that he is going to commit some sort of intellectual suicide by giving it serious consideration. Over the course of time, I will be presenting and defending the evidence for the Resurrection. The most renowned atheist of the 20th century, Anthony Flew, abandoned his atheism a few years ago (you and I were living at Goodenough College in London at the time). Flew has concluded that there is in fact a God, a grand architect behind the universe, although he still denies the God of Christianity. He has readily admitted however, that “The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity.”
You indicated your fascination by my dedication to “religion” as you call it. I would eschew the term “religion” in favor of “truth”. Religion is on the one hand too clinical and devoid of life or substance. On the other, the word “religion” also comes firmly laden with Dan Brown controversies, subjectivity and fuzzy feelings about hippie versions of Jesus. I prefer the term “truth” because I argue for the veridical experience of the risen Christ within our hearts, rather than any mere ethical or personal preferences about social behavior, devoid of objective truth simply because it is non-empirical (see my article: About My Blog) I welcome your comments and continued patronage, Linds. We’ve known each other a long time and experienced a lot together. I am hopeful that this stage in our friendship will be even more rewarding than anything that has already come to pass. Your friend, Stephen
Hey, Stephen, I’ve check your blog out. This is some very heavy but helpful stuff. Good stuff!
I’ll mark this in my favorites as a place to which I must return…….and learn.!
Thanks for all the time and effort. I hope many will profit. And, I too enjoyed our chat under the tree