It’s not a matter of reducing religious discourse to the status of myth or fiction. Rather, it’s a matter of showing that myth and fiction as such are religious.
A good way to look at it at first might be to think of myth and fiction as degenerate forms of religion: forms faith would take when it no longer had faith in itself. In effect, myth and fiction would then be seen as forms belief would take when belief had ceased to believe in itself anymore, that is, when believers had ceased to believe that they believed.
There’s nothing new in such ideas. It’s become a cliché to say, for example, that the activity of reading fiction (or, more likely today, going to the movies) is the modern/post-modern substitute for what, in less secular cultures, would take the form of communal worship. It’s as if, when God becomes a mere “stop-gap God,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian who was involved in German plots against Hitler, for which the Nazis imprisoned and killed him, put it — that is, when God becomes no more than a sort of last-resort, made-up hero who is supposed to save the day when it’s clear that there’s no saving left from any sources anyone can see: God as a last, illusory straw to grasp at when all the real straws are gone already — then substitutes for God come to abound (sex, drugs, movies, TV, novels, internet “social networking,” wars, politics, etc.).
At any rate, whether in just that way or in some other, when God becomes no more than a stopgap God, then we never get more than stopgaps for God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s study at his home
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On the other hand, what we call fiction may be a stopgap for talk of God once God has died. If it is, then we need to learn to read fiction in a new way, if we are to restore to it its full dignity—at which point it would no longer be fiction, at least in any derogatory sense involving fictitiousness, and would metamorphose instead into the assertion of God.
If assertions of God function analogously to metaphors (without thereby simply becoming metaphors themselves), then for religious experience, as the experience articulated in such assertions, the “truth” of such experience, expressed in such assertions, does not lie in any explicit or implicit claims about the origin or source of the given experience. It lies, rather, in what it lets those communicating the experience, or having it communicated to them — what it lets the communicants of the experience, the co-communicators involved in the communication of it — see, understand, come to know.
That is, if the truth of religious experiences and of the assertions that articulate them is not analogous to the truth of newspaper accounts and the accounts of science, but is, rather, analogous to the truth of fiction, then the assertions at issue would not consist of claims about objects independent of us, to be assessed dispassionately and “objectively.” Instead, the assertions of religious experience would be just as much about us, the people involved in communicating them and communicating about them, as they would be about any object, even some object called “God.”
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Seen in that way, talk of God would not be objectifying talk at all, but would be — as various twentieth century theologians, including Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, each in his own way, have said — an effective or performative speaking that effected or performed the placing, locating, or positioning of the co-communicants in relation to their entire existential field. Hence, the simple, two-word sentence “God exists,” for example, would turn out by such an analysis not to be the assertion of the supposed “reality” of some entity corresponding to the concept God. “God exists” would not be the assertion that there is at least one x, such that x has all the attributes entailed by the conceptual sense of the term God (such attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, goodness, eternity, etc.). Rather, that simple sentence, “God exists,” would assert, posit, locate, or position human life as a whole in relation to everything else, and everything else in relation to human life.
Thus, the simple sentence “God exits” would express or articulate, in a mere two words, an entire understanding of the nature and meaning of existence as a whole.
NOTE TO READERS: This post is a revised version of section 8 of “Hushed Talk of God,” the 7th chapter of my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, which is available at this blogsite in the “Shop” above this post.
