The Twain Shall Never Meet is a mythology book that will explore the differences in Western and Eastern Christian belief and practice as the natural result of a continuous cultural mythological tradition. My thesis is the idea that Christian practice and theology differ between regions of the world as a result of culture derived from pre-Christian mythology rather than differing Christian theological viewpoints derived simply from the Christian scriptures and tradition. These cultural traditions affect one’s understanding of the Christian God, his relation to man, man’s place in the world, what it means to be spiritual, and ultimately the nature of salvation itself.
I grew up a staunchly Western Christian. Born into a Roman Catholic family in the Northeast, and converting to the Baptist tradition at a young age with my family, I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. I have always been interested in words, languages, and texts, so as my fundamentalist sect became more and more exclusionary based on the use and affirmation of the King James Version of the Bible, I came to understand that this faith was based on a belief that made no sense linguistically. I moved to a more logical sect, Calvinism, and learned how language could be misused to make the mystical rational, and to connect yourself with forefathers who would disagree with your usage of their texts.
This brought me to Eastern Orthodoxy, a Christian sect that has retained the mystery, and striven even in our mystically-poor modern English to retain the beauty of the myth. It tells us the most outrageous-sounding stories without tongue-in-cheek, without denying them, without requiring affirmation of facts, and allows the story to make itself a part of our thinking. This is how myth works; if your faith doesn’t work, this is what it is missing.
All story is religious - it is all designed to impart some piece of truth, as defined by the author (even if he doesn’t realize he’s defining it). This is especially true of the extant ancient documents that we refer to as "myths". Myths are simply stories that have defined a culture, or redefined a culture. We see some striking similarities among all myth - stories of creation, the beginnings of man (or at least local men), relations between gods and men, great disasters - shared themes that every culture needs to address in order to be a culture. While all the elements are present in myth of all regions and times, the depictions of the elements are often very different, and these differences have direct correlations to the disagreements between Christian theologies and practices.
The goal of this work is to trace these differences, and provide an appreciation for the faiths of our fathers and our neighbors’ fathers, as well as a greater understanding of why we approach the Christian faith in the way we do.