IF YOU are at all acquainted with the narrative works of J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, or Terry Pratchett, you will have engaged with what Andrew Shamel calls mythopoetic fantasy. Furthermore, you will have been engaging with “the fictionalised myth-making occupying those twilight borderlands between contemporary secularity and a religious world-view”.

This attractive prospectus invites us not only to explore with him the theological dimensions of a great cultural phenomenon, but also dovetails it with the mythopoetic dynamics of Christian scripture, doctrine, and sacraments. It is all indicative of “the drive to tell stories in order to encounter the world as meaningful”. The mythic turn of popular culture signals the ongoing hunger for “something more — more dense, more present, more itself”. It represents “the desire to glorify and so to participate in God”.

The book is in three parts. The first explores what is meant by “mythic sensibility” and, crucially, the power of narrative to shape our understanding of the world. Part two expands on such mythic sensibility as indicative of a longing for God, with creation myths but one example of theology and mythopoesis as “inextricably intertwined”. All human making, mythopoesis included, can be thought of as “making towards God”.

This raises questions about how alternative myths — for example, of creation — co-exist in this interpretative model. Shamel contests John Milbank’s conclusion that they are essentially in conflict. Rather, he promotes such alternative myths as just that — alternative expressions of a desire for God predicated on mythic sensibility as being evidence for such creativity as essentially divine, whether or not the myth-makers acknowledge any theological dimension to their creativity.

Readers may baulk at Shamel’s insistence that, with reference to individual authors and texts, he is not “baptising their work by giving it its ‘true Christian meaning’”, but simply alluding in general to “secular” mythopoesis, and its theological character. After all, Part Three is entitled “All in Christ” which seems to claim for Christianity a normative role beyond the rather less doctrinaire affirmation of secular mythic sensibility as “making towards God”. Somehow, in spite of disclaimers to the contrary, there is a whiff of Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity” in the air.

That said, Shamel’s critique of Bultmann’s demythologising of Christian scripture, by the unusual route of a general affirmation of mythopoesis as possessing revelatory credentials, is invigorating. Indeed, the overall argument of the book is a welcome and stimulating challenge to the assumed secularity and disenchantment of the modern world. 

Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.

Theology and the Mythic Sensibility: Human myth-making and divine creativity
Andrew Shamel
Cambridge University Press £90
(978-1-009-54260-9)
Church Times Bookshop £81