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IN HIS BOOK Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung emphasized that one should never simply dismiss divergent views and opinions, however unpleasant or wrong-headed they may seem. Neither does it matter if these differ radically from the more widely accepted ideas or traditions of majority communities or groups. “Such opinions could never arise—much less secure a following—if they did not correspond to some special disposition, some fundamental psychic experience that is more or less prevalent,” Jung wrote. Such flat rejection, he argued, means one is directly doing “violence” to the data that alone hold the key to what is happening around us in our time. It means turning one’s back on part of the only material from which we must work to make sense of our own lives and the lives of those around us.

The depth and power of this insight really hits home when you look at a contemporary development that has shocked and shaken persons of all religious backgrounds in our time. A militant atheism has emerged as a major opponent of religious belief and faith in every part of the Western world. While books trumpeting atheistic positions have taken over the bestseller lists and their authors preach their positions in the media, the campaign is having an effect and is as deep as it is widespread today in our culture. The numbers of those telling pollsters and census takers that they are themselves either agnostic/atheistic or “of no religion” are a fast-burgeoning statistic in every developed country in the world, even in the still highly religious United States. This reality has been and continues to be well documented by others, so it’s not necessary to go into further detail here.

But since the growth of atheism and of general unbelief in matters of religion is an empirical fact, the challenging question, of course, is why is it happening? There are many sources for every river, but one usually takes precedence over all the rest. That is true here. The major reason for the growth and spread of a flood of atheism at this hour is that much of the God-talk we hear can’t be believed in by growing numbers of people because it has become utterly unbelievable. Human reason and common sense have their limits, and they have now been strained to the breaking point for millions who once owed loyalty to a denomination or Church or other religious affiliation. The message is loud and clear for spiritual leaders: those who are joining the ranks of non-believers do so because the tenets, creeds and language of religion today too often defy comprehension. They are not accepted and believed because they are for the most part unacceptable and unbelievable. They belong to another time, another place. As Harvey Cox, Dean of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard, argues in his 2009 bestseller The Future of Faith, the age of creedal allegiances is over.

I want to be very clear here: none of this means that the atheists are right. In actual fact, upon closer examination their position is seen to be based upon non-rational, fallacious presuppositions every bit as fundamentalist in nature as those espoused by extremist religionists. But at the same time, they carry a message: our thinking and language about God must change. Thich Nhat Hahn reminds us eloquently that old concepts of God must die to be replaced by new thinking and understanding. In Living Buddha, Living Christ he writes: “Simple and primitive images may have been the object of our faith in God in the beginning, but as we advance, He becomes present without any image, beyond any satisfactory mental representation. We come to a point where any notion we can have can no longer represent God.”

As described earlier, ever since I was a very young child, sitting in church for hours, not just on Sundays but at other times as well, I have often thought that there is something wrong with the traditional interpretation of the Biblical narrative. It has been badly skewed by an overemphasis upon sin and misunderstandings of “salvation.” My deepest intuition from earliest days, since then corroborated by years of study and reflection, is that we, each of us, come from divinity and are destined to return to God again. Certainly this is by no means a unique or original experience or idea. The fact that it has always felt so deeply a part of oneself is, I believe, a testimony to its belonging to a very wide base indeed. In fact, it belongs to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious of humanity. It is really the basic monomyth or underlying story that lies at the core of every one of the major religions today. It is often obscured by rituals and almost buried by dogmas, but it is there all the same. It needs to be rediscovered and reaffirmed for the common good. Here are some Biblical pointers that for me are foundational to such a view.

The Genesis mythos of the creation of Adam and Eve makes it abundantly clear that we are “made in the image of God”—the Imago Dei. The text says further that God breathed into Adam and “he became a living soul.” The words in Hebrew and Greek for “spirit” are virtually the same, and both words also mean wind or breath. Accordingly, we are made in the likeness of God and it is God’s breath or life force that forms our essence or being. There is a profound and spiritually rich wisdom in that.

But there is more. Psalm 82:6, in the heart of the Hebrew Bible and thus at the centre of both Jewish and Christian worship, states quite boldly: “Have I not said you are gods and children of the Most High?” Those being addressed are the people of Israel, but also through them the whole of humanity. It is a very significant assertion of who we are.

When we come to the Gospels, there is a passage in John’s account that one seldom if ever hears mentioned. While arguing with the officials of Judaism over allegations that he was making himself out to be the Son of God—which they said was “blas-phemy”—Jesus is given this response: “Is it not written in your law ‘I said you are gods’?” He goes on to point out that if those to whom the word of God had been given were called gods, then why do they say that he is blaspheming “because I said I am the son of God”? His opponents are unable to answer him. Quite plainly, then, according to the Jesus of the Gospels, we are all “gods” and sons or daughters of God, as he knew himself to be. The blunt truth is that Jesus nowhere makes claims to be God or the son of God in any absolute sense that does not apply equally to everyone who had “ears to hear.” Hence his sharp rebuke to the rich young man in Mark’s account who calls him “good master.” Jesus retorts, “There is none good except God himself.”

I want to return just for a moment to that wonderful account in the Acts of the Apostles of Paul’s experience while preaching in Athens. He tells the crowd that he is most impressed by all the signs about him of Athenian devotion to various deities. He notes there is an altar to “the Unknown God” and tells them that this is the God he has come to make known to them. This God, he says, made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—“though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” Then comes the crucial passage beginning: “For in Him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘for we too are his offspring’” (italics mine).* The fact that the author/ editors inserted such an admission—that early Christian and Pagan thinking were in agreement on our divine origins, the divine “spark” in every person—is of profound importance. It’s crucial for understanding the core of the message in both camps. And it’s of critical importance now if we are to find a truly universal ground on which all religions can meet and offer a global view of human evolution and destiny.

Agreement on this is not by any means a step towards having one lowest-common-denominator-type world religion to replace the great religions of the earth. God must love diversity since the whole story of Creation from the beginning has been of an overflowing, abundant, proliferating splendour of differentiation throughout the whole phenomenon of life. Science witnesses to this daily in the new species discovered, often in the most unlikely places, such as in hot springs in the ocean’s floor or in the deepest, darkest caves. The differences will remain. But what an incredibly unifying and pacifying reverberation would spread throughout the whole inhabited planet if every believer of every faith, from Islam to the smallest sect, held that every single one of us, those inside and those outside this or that faith or specific denomination, are truly “God’s offspring” bearing the spirit and image of the one source of all that is. That’s my lifelong vision and my hope.

One thing I have remained deeply certain of, even back in the days of my discussions and debates with my atheist tutor at Oriel, Richard Robinson: atheists and agnostics too have a deep intuitive awareness of an emptiness within that only God or something they cannot name can fill. Their hunger for transcendence is too often quelled or wholly deterred by bad religion, by thinking and behaviour that give the lie to claims made on behalf of an unbelievable, highly anthropomorphic deity. The noted literary critic Harold Bloom in his 2005 book Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine speaks eloquently of this deeply human longing for transcendence, “the saving remnant of divine light” without which “we stumble about in the void, beggars with amputated feet”—that profound yearning in the human heart without which we remain “mere vessels of entropy” bound for extinction. I believe that is why I get so many more letters from skeptics and agnostics than anyone would suppose.

Before he retired, the old archdeacon under whom I had served my curacy in 1955/6 paid me a visit in my West Hill parish, at the end of which he said, “Let me give you a piece of wisdom. If you can survive as many years as I have in the ecclesiastical industry [the institutional church], you have to still believe in miracles.” I spent enough time in and around “the industry” to know it intimately myself. He certainly spoke the truth. I want to claim that miracle here. While my understanding of religion in particular has been utterly transformed, reaching out to every living being on the planet and to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, I find my belief in the dimension of being that most of us call God is stronger than ever before. I have witnessed the shadow side of religion both in its bitter, warring past and in the various religions today. When doing investigative journalism on religion, I learned “where the bodies are buried”—and have critics and even enemies because of that. But I have also seen and known first-hand its glories, its great achievements for good, its help for the needy and championship of the oppressed. There is deep within me a confidence that not only Christianity but the other world religions can be born again.

But there is a secret to this. It cannot happen simply out of enthusiasm for something fresh or fear of failure. The secret has two fundamental aspects. In the first place, all faiths need to recover the central meaning and transforming power of myth. The greatest potential for evil done in the name of God flows from a failure to comprehend this. All religions begin with mythology because mere history and dead literalism cannot convey eternal truths. However, the huge error of taking myth as history has wreaked untold havoc, from the earliest book burnings and slaughter of “heretics” by overzealous Christians to the horrors perpetrated today by Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and around the world. Ultra-extremist Jews in Israel are victims of the same phenomenon. I repeat: the “letter kills” as Paul says, but the Spirit gives life.

The second insight that is essential to a rebirth for not just the Church but the other faiths as well is equally potent and indispensable. It is this: all language about God and the activity of God’s Spirit is first and foremost that of symbol, of metaphor, of verbal imagery, poetry, music and art. As Nhat Hahn says in the passage quoted earlier, no notion or idea we can formulate can represent or verbally communicate that ultimate presence. The ultimate dimension of reality (which is as close as words can come) cannot be precisely conceived of, cannot be contained in creeds or formulae. He-She can only be known by a deep, intuitive knowing of the heart and mind together. That is why the Psalmist of old said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” It is an invitation, under a metaphor, to experiment and to trust that ultimate presence for oneself. You can know God’s reality both with intuition and rationally. This is true gnosis, a knowing that nothing can shake.

World religions can never experience what it means to be born again without a clear awareness of their true purpose and raison d’être. It is to constantly remind their followers of who they really are, from whence they came and whither they eventually are bound. The authentic spiritual journey the religions came into being to foster and nurture is that of personal transformation for the believer. There is an illustration from the lore of classical Greece which for me illuminates this process. The famous sculptor Pheidias (c. 480–c. 430 BCE) spoke of his art not as imposing his own form on the blocks of marble upon which he worked. Instead, he said he saw his task as that of liberating from the inert stone the lovely shape or being that was already there within. Each cut or blow of his chisel was aimed at revealing the beauty of the image that was already present beneath the rough exterior, as it were, struggling to be free. So too with the spiritual dynamics of transformation or metamorphosis from within ourselves. With our inner eye fixed steadfastly upon the model of wholeness (holiness) afforded by the teachings of all the great world faiths, we are daily being changed and set ever freer to be what we are meant to become. The Spirit is the master sculptor behind it all. As St. Paul says, “We all . . . beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being changed into the same image from glory unto glory, as by the spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Greek word for “changed” in the text means “metamorphosized.”

Although my eightieth birthday is behind me, I feel so much younger now in spirit because of a lively, reasonable hope engendered by a fresh understanding of life itself. Because, in the end, there is the assurance that while here we have no “continuing city,” ultimately “we seek one which is to come.” If we daily practise sitting still and “waiting upon God,” as the Psalmist says (what the Buddhists and those who use their meditative approach call “mindfulness”), we find the Spirit of God working always within us. I believe that while the natural body steadily grows older, our inner self (the true self) is being renewed by the energy of the Spirit within. To be very direct—I don’t mean that I hear some voice speaking to me, or see some mystical visions of another realm, or feel some strange otherworldly emotions within, although I am aware that some do. In a lifetime of prayer and of trying to be faithful to such truth as has been made plain to me, I have never once had what I would describe as a supernatural encounter of any kind. Yes, there have been great heights and some inevitable lows. But I do try to spend some time in meditation—or directing my thoughts and heart to the God within me and without—every day. In Christian terms, this is the Christ within. This often happens when I am alone in my study in the morning. But if not there, then while walking the dog or enjoying nature in our daily strolls. At times the awareness of the divine presence is very vivid, at others not so much. However, one’s trust in God doesn’t depend on what you feel; it depends on an act of will and of total commitment.

Readers of my work over the years and of what I have set out in these pages are naturally aware that I am critical of the evangelical faith in which I was reared and which for many years I served. It would be an error, however, to suppose that I am unaware of great debts owed by me to that community of believers or to think that I make the mistake of lumping all of them together under the label “the religious right.” Evangelicals today are far from being a homogeneous group and significant changes are presently taking place within their ranks. Top American evangelist Tony Campolo, who in the 1990s made headlines when he agreed to be a spiritual counsellor to President Bill Clinton, in his 2004 book Speaking My Mind said that evangelical Christianity “has been highjacked by the religious right.” He hammers those in the movement who have given the world the impression that to be evangelical is to be anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-war and pro-gun, pro–capital punishment, negative towards other faiths and oblivious of the world’s poor. Campolo is on the liberal side on all these issues. He notes in particular the deep need for respect of Islam: “We don’t want to call its prophet evil. We believe we have got to learn to live in the same world with our Islamic brothers and sisters and we want to be friends. We do not want to be in some kind of holy war.” Campolo has been severely criticized by extremists, of course. But it is a fact that he represents a fast-growing group of evangelicals in the United States and Canada who are breaking through the typical media stereotypes. These folks are anything but anti-intellectual or dumb. They are grounds for hope.