152 cosmos
consequent nature” (Whitehead) or “God is finite” (Brightman). We can never
speak univocally about such matters; we must honor the symbolic nature of
all religious discourse.
It follows from these claims that all the biblical narratives, including the
Gospels, are dramatic narrative. If we try to treat them as historical biographies
we immediately run into difficulties that are insurmountable. All the so-called
quests for the historical Jesus have failed. David Friedrich Strauss was the first
postenlightenment scholar to respect the mythical limits of the Gospels and
he soon lost sight of this fact. Kierkegaard said that if we had only the story,
that would be enough. And that is what we have. To use the Gospels to try to
discover what lies hidden behind them, misses the intention of myth. It in-
strumentalizes the myth by putting it to an impossible task. Suddenly, what
the texts meant to say or failed to say becomes more important than what they
do say.
As dramatic narratives, the texts are iconic. They image experience as re-
latedness. They are not referential; they do not refer to entities, but present
characters. It is relatedness that is presented in the stories. They depict that
divinity and humanity are both relevant dimensions of life, that we are the sum
of our relationships, nothing less or more.
It is true that prior to the Enlightenment, according to the Yale professor,
Hans Frei, the narratives were regarded as “realistic or story-like,” though he
adds: “not necessarily historical.”^32 It was with the coming of the Enlighten-
ment and one of its by-products, the supernaturalists, that the earlier viewpoint
was displaced. Frei describes this change in perspective as follows:^33
They [the Supernaturalists] argued the historical factuality of the bib-
lical reports of miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy....[These]
Conservative commentators increasingly treated the narrative por-
tions of the Bible as a factually reliable repository of divine revela-
tion.
In the ancient world and more or less through the Middle Ages, mythic
consciousness was still in place. To the question, What are the stories about?
the answer would be: About the gods. With the Enlightenment the question
was extended to: What are the stories of the gods about? With this question,
mythic consciousness was broken and gave way to the primacy of reason alone.
Those who continued to live within the faith community did so on a different
basis. The rationalists had argued that the statement, God exists, is false; the
believers countered, not that God exists, but that the statement that God exists
is false, is false. Supernaturalism continued the earlier traditions, as it does in
some places today, not as something positive, but as something doubly nega-
tive. This is the seedbed of the some of the conflicts between religion and
science. It is not in the true spirit of religion to seek to undermine any genuine