Keeping the Meaning
“It is as if we were afraid to state the fact that beyond empirically investigatable reality there is nothing we can know.”
There’s a strange discomfort in the modern West. On the one hand, we accept without hesitation that stories like the Niebelungenlied, the Chanson de Roland, and the legends of King Arthur are mythic—cultural artefacts layered with meaning, but not history. On the other hand, many still find it difficult, even threatening, to treat the stories of the New Testament—particularly the miraculous elements of Jesus’ life—in the same way.
Why? What accounts for this asymmetry? And what would it mean to speak honestly about it?
📖 A World Awash in the Supernatural
In the ancient world, the miraculous was not exceptional. It was ambient. Dreams, omens, visions, healings, possessions—all were part of the fabric of reality. There was no clear line between “natural” and “supernatural.” What we now call a miracle was once simply what happened when the divine touched the world.
Given this worldview, it’s hardly surprising that the story of Jesus—already a compelling moral and spiritual teacher—grew luminous with resurrection appearances, angelic pronouncements, walking on water, and heavenly ascension. These elements were not exotic embellishments. They were culturally expected ways of declaring someone divinely significant.
They made sense in a world where the divine was present, not distant—active, not silent.
✝️ The Uniqueness of the Jesus Story
But not all myths become dogma. What makes the New Testament different is not the presence of fantastical elements, but the claims built upon them. Jesus is not presented as a hero among many. He is the Son of God, the way, the truth, the life.
The story is not offered as one interpretation of the sacred. It is declared to be the sacred, final and non-negotiable. Salvation itself, we are told, depends on belief in the literal truth of this story.
This absolutism—so unlike the flexibility of other mythologies—is what has made the Jesus story so powerful. And also, for many modern minds, so hard to reconcile with what we now know.
🌍 The World We Actually Inhabit
We do not live in a world of parted seas or angelic messengers. Illness is diagnosed in hospitals, not exorcisms. Weather is explained by pressure systems, not divine wrath. Dead people, however loved, do not walk out of tombs.
This doesn’t mean we lack wonder. It means our categories of explanation have shifted. We no longer see ourselves at the mercy of spiritual forces; we see ourselves embedded in natural systems, governed by causality, probability, and law.
To modern eyes, the idea of God intervening to raise a corpse, or to cast demons into pigs, feels not just implausible but incongruous. It belongs to a world we no longer inhabit.
🧠 Why, Then, Is It So Hard to Let Go?
We don’t struggle to treat Thor or Roland or Merlin as symbolic. But many of us flinch at treating Jesus the same way. Why?
Partly because Christianity is not just a myth—it’s a foundation. It shaped our laws, our ethics, our sense of human dignity. To de-literalise Jesus is to risk unmooring the civilisation that formed us.
But there’s also a deeper fear: that without belief in the miraculous, the world becomes mute. That without resurrection, death is final. That without the Son of God, we are left with no one to redeem us.
These fears are not stupid. They are human. But they should not hold us hostage to literalism.
⚛️ The Quantum Caveat: Mystery Is Not Closed
None of this is to say that reality is exhausted by what we can measure. Physics, especially in the quantum and cosmological realms, has shown us that our ordinary intuitions are deeply flawed. Time may be emergent. Space may be curved. Observation affects outcomes. Consciousness remains mysterious.
So no—this is not a claim that there is nothing beyond empirical reality. It is a more modest claim:
Beyond empirical reality, we do not know.
And we should not pretend that we do.
The honest position is neither fundamentalist faith nor reductive materialism, but epistemic humility.
🧩 Can We Let Go Without Letting Down?
Yes. But it requires courage.
We can let go of belief in literal miracles while still recognising the moral beauty, symbolic richness, and psychological depth of the Gospel story.
We can treat Jesus not as an exception to natural law, but as an exemplar of spiritual truth: a man who spoke to the heart, who challenged power, who revealed what it meant to live without possession or fear.
We do not need him to walk on water to believe that his words can still carry us across the deep.
🕯️ Final Thought
There is no shame in saying: “We don’t live in the world our ancestors imagined.” The world has changed. Our understanding has changed. But the human need for meaning, truth, and connection hasn’t.
Perhaps what we need now is not the resurrection of miracles, but the resurrection of honest reverence—the kind that doesn’t confuse poetry with fact, but also doesn’t dismiss the power of the story.
A story, after all, doesn’t need to be literally true to be spiritually real.
