Trapped By Religious Language

My bottom line is this: ALL religious language is ultimately about transcendent archetypes and not about history. But it is our common perception as students of religion in the West to think of religious language as historical theology—and theology is the official, authoritative teaching of the Church about what must be believed in order to be Christians. Is that it? Is that what religion and religious language is about? If it is, then we are trapped by it.

You will notice, if you are paying attention, that most official religious language is said to be based in historical facts for which we have either factual evidence or, at least, traditional precedence. One example of this is the Church’s official teaching concerning the virgin birth of Jesus. This teaching is said to be true either because we have historical or Scriptural “proof” that teaches us that Jesus was really born from a young, Jewish, virgin girl, or at least because we have we have venerable Traditional precedence for believing this is true.

In either case, if we say that one must believe this (remember it is part of our creedal statements in Christianity) either because Scripture, history, or the Church says it is so—then we are already trapped in historical literalism of some kind, and have missed the point of this particular religious language (or image) entirely. Again, that is not what religious language is ultimately about.

Regardless of what we might have been officially taught, the religious language and image of “virgin birth” is not about history, it is about archetype. One could also take any of the other “official teachings” (incarnation, resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the sacraments) and say the same. None of these are ultimately about some literal, historical fact (though they may have in fact occurred in history as real events). But, again, that misses the point. They are not about historical facts; they are archetypal teachings that are more true than history. All of these images, whether they happened historically or not (and many of them no doubt did), are metaphors pointing toward transcendent archetypes--that is their ultimate truth.

All spiritual births must be from virginity. All spiritual life must be resurrected from death. All truth from above must be incarnated. All human beings must share divinity. All mundane acts of human life are sacramental and iconic. This is the truth of things that take us way beyond history and into transcendence both personally and universally. Religious language is meant to teach us this reality, and not trap us in historical literalism.

My objection to the dogmatic tradition of the Church is not about whether or not it can prove that these things really happened in history, but that dogma and theology which focus upon the history of material causality traps religious experience on the level of the literal. When it does, then, the religious language of the literal (or traditional) becomes a “theological fact” and the Church becomes the guardian of those facts. It also becomes the "offical" mediator between heaven and earth, and truth is degraded into meaningless literalism and not transcendent vision--and membership in the church and not direct personal experience of truth becomes the way forward. It is precisely now that we must step in and start the rescue operation. If it is ever to be effective, religious language and its images must be used, as they were always meant to be, as iconic images of the archetypes.