Curious Christian

Every now and then I come across Pagans invoking the “Pagan Christ’s” of ancient mythology as an argument against the uniqueness of Jesus and his death and resurrection. It is interesting to note what C S Lewis had to say in response to this:

Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallel” and “pagan christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.¹

If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are of course instances of the same or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparation evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form of the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation.²

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying God without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other is.³

¹C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 67 .

²Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 132.

³C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in The Grand Miracle and Other Selected Essays on Theology and Ethics from God in The Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 38-42 (41-42).