On July 10 2007 I enjoyed apricot tea with Tom Harpur in the lobby bar of Vancouver’s Fairmont Hotel. Harpur, the author of books like The Pagan Christ and Water Into Wine, has become notorious in conservative Christian circles for doubting the existence of the historical Jesus. He graciously accepted my request for an interview, and, like an overly eager fanboy, I used the opportunity to pepper him with oddball questions about Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Docetism, and other esoterica. For over an hour he patiently answered everything I asked. It was only after we were finished that I realized the dilemma I faced. The Republic has just so much room for articles. How on Earth could I possibly select only a few jewels from the pile of journalistic gems he had given me?

After fretting a while, I decided to focus on one small but particularly revealing segment of our interview. Harpur said that during the Vietnam era he felt constrained by both the Church and academia. These institutions were resistant to new ideas, and they seemed out of touch with the upheavals occurring in the wider culture. He decided to reach out to the community through a radio call-in program on, of all things, a country-western music station that played songs like “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goalposts of Life.” His liberal views enraged many of his right-wing listeners, and the station received its share of bomb threats. He enjoyed the work, however, and he learned how to better connect with ordinary people. He went on to work as a religion editor for the Toronto Star, a paper that paid him to travel the world and to learn about other religions on their own terms, as well as about the shadow-side of his own faith tradition. This period of his life was spiritually very stimulating, and it helped him develop his own voice. I suggested that the world today resembles the Vietnam era in many ways, and I asked him if this was having a similar effect upon his thought. He told me that it was.

He said, “Looking at the world and realizing more and more the incredible folly that we’re engaged in, and the incredible depth of the role of religion in that folly, has caused me to rear back and try to think my way through more clearly than ever before what it is that religion is really all about. It helped me take a look again at great world faiths. Alvin Boyd Kuhn was something of a catalyst for me. He’s a wild man in some ways with his rhetoric, and he didn’t always source his references properly and all that, but he had genius, and the thing that came through for me from Alvin Boyd Kuhn, and that’s relevant to what we’re talking about, was when he said that the common datum of all religion is incarnation, that is the spark of the divine in the human.

“And when I thought about it in depth, I thought that really is it. We talk about incarnation in Christian theology, but always in terms of the one person, Jesus. When you look at it differently, and see it as applying to everyone, and then you look at Sufism or Kabbalah or the heart of any other of these faiths, you find that in the mystic tradition they’re saying the same thing: they’re always saying there is the divine in each one of us. Maybe it’s a simple thing, but once you really get a hold of that and realize that it’s true, that underneath all the terrible things that religions indulge in, there is that deep, common bond that, if only they could realize it, if only they could help their people kindle it alive inside themselves, would be a way of bonding the human family together, and beginning to take the evolutionary task seriously and move on.

“We aren’t now. It seems to me that consciously we don’t seem to know what we’re really here to do, and so everybody tries to get by in any way they can, and to get the edge on the other faith, the other country, the other person, the other economy, whatever it is. If we could catch that dream, it seems to me, there would be a new way, and there would be hope. I see all faiths as needing to be reborn.”

Harpur expressed concern about the tendency towards literalism in faith, and about our drive to cage the ineffable with language and concepts. He said that “We’re literally drowning in literalism. It seems to me when I try to analyze the basic problems of religion, that the fundamental problem is this literalistic approach to scripture and religion in general, this inability to realize that any language about God has to be in terms of imagery.

“I think the atheists have a good point here, and should be listened to. There is no literal descriptor that can be used about God that isn’t instantly idolatrous. As soon as you put it into words, you have created a prison for the notion of the ineffable, which cannot be imprisoned. That’s my problem with creeds. We need to be self-aware that the language has its limitations, that the language is not the same thing as the reality that the language is pointing to. I sometimes talk about the God beyond God to try and get that sense across to people.”

He described literalism as a “besetting temptation,” and that “We want to have it in our hands, we want control. Something in us balks at the total surrender to the utterly ineffable. Literalism in terms of eschatology is especially frightening, I mean it scares the hell out me that George Bush is being lobbied by people whose eschatology is a literal Armageddon. It doesn’t bother him that he’s threatening war with Iran or whoever because it’s all scripted that way anyway.” Harpur described this kind of thinking as both blasphemous and stupid. He said that “Religion has a demonic ability to become the very reverse of what it’s supposed to be about.”

I asked him about this tendency, and what it says about the dynamic relationship between transcendence and literalism, and more fundamentally between spirit and matter. He said that “In order for anything to happen, in order for there to be anything other than a big blob of pudding instead of life, in order that we may grow, we need this tension, this dynamic between the two in which all of the process of the evolution as us as soul and matter takes place. And so it’s a question then of balance or poise, and spirituality is, to a large degree, the attempt to hold the yin and the yang together so they don’t fly apart or end up as entified in themselves and become a kind of dualism. It is a dynamic interplay and it is in a sense morally neutral. I don’t think it’s good or bad really, I think it’s just reality, that’s the way it is.”

Harpur has written that his rejection of the historical Jesus has deepened his faith. Talking with him, I had a clear sense that he was being absolutely sincere. Harpur’s imaginative approach to religion, an approach that self-consciously relies on imagery and metaphor to direct one’s attention towards a region of being that can’t be pinned down by language, seems to speak to the numinous heart of religious experience. I wonder, though, whether this approach can be institutionalized, a process that seems inevitably to encourage the kind of literalism that he cautions us to avoid. And, indeed, the response his views have received from the public has been far more positive than the response he’s received from the Church. Perhaps this is as it should be. Christianity didn’t start out in cathedrals, but rather in people’s houses among groups of like-minded friends. It’s no slight to say that Harpur’s views will likely find their home outside of formal institutions, in what is, perhaps, the ineffable’s natural habitat.