Sorry, Chris,

first, i started working on a response to your post and then got called away and later did not refresh to see your rejoinder to John Doyle before finishing and posting my own comment. I quite enjoyed your thesis and agreed with you on many of your points.

Do we still have the ability to create a reality, a worldview, a myth, that is not imposed critically from without? Is the modern imagination capable of leaps into the unknown?

Perhaps true myth (in one of the older senses of the term) seems to be a dead art form not only because we have stopped telling each other stories but also because we have found that style  can take over and do the bulk of the hard work of getting a good response from an audience. Does that not mean that in the modern world we have been losing our basic ability to imagine for ourselves?  The great blockbuster myths of our time from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, Star Trek (newer TV series and the films), and Star Wars, while great tales on their own, have been rendered into film with such a surfeit of believable special fx, and that trend is perhaps best captured in the Matrix series. First, the virtual  became realistic enough to effectively substitute for reality and now we find that the virtual is even better than reality.

I seem to recall (I may be mistaken) that C.S. Lewis was somewhat disgruntled at the illustration of his Narnia Chronicles. Great tales have to be enhanced in some way or the other to satisfy the modern imagination! 

There is no longer any need to suspend one’s disbelief, all our fantasies can become reality. So, who needs their imagination?

The myth of science (and that is the dominantly believed modern and insidiously even postmodern) is the only myth that we are able to tolerate. Our assumption is that science is progress and as all of science is testable and all scientific hypotheses inherently falsifiable therefore science is the new truth, the new road to salvation. We accept that we are an odd mixture of good and evil but there is a childishly naive assumption that sciense will ultimately ‘win’.

When thinking about hermeneutics, the implications are not very encouraging. Is there great excitement at the trend to do narrative theology? Are we excited by the insights afforded by rhetorical analyses and the new perspectives that have been afforded to some very old debates? On the popular level, even though this theology is intuitively more understandable, yet the resistance factor has been high. Amongst the scholars we see even more resistance, partly (imo) because they are being asked to be less ‘scientific’, less reductive, and more accepting of a text as it stands.

Perhaps I’m just in one of those negative moods, but somehow, today, the future of true myth does not look very bright! 

Live to serve : Serve to live