Stop giving mythicists short-shrift

Maybe it’s like this: Dionysus mirrors Christ not because the Second Temple Period was a cultural milieu suffused with syncretic, religious pluralism, but because God in Christ is an intentional and deliberate inversion of the way of the world. Maybe when the vine that produces chaos, evil, and death meets the true Vine who gives everlasting life, such contrasts are neither coincidental nor arbitrary, but reflect the eternal struggle between sin and redemption. This is the planned outworking of God’s redemptive purpose, gathering all things—myths and imaginations included—into His perfect order and truth.

Supernatural events and myths, then, may not always be mere figments of human imagination—meager inventions from the minds of ancient storytellers. Instead, maybe they hover around truths, echoes of real spiritual encounters distorted by fallen understanding. In that case, these myths would be the real manifestations of a mostly-hidden substrate of our world that awaited illumination and redemption in the kingdom of God. In Christ, these symbols are not dismissed or forgotten but intentionally reoriented, redeemed, and transformed.