ABSTRACT
The modern theologian is forced to understand the difference between sentimental or archaistic typology and the kind which is appropriate to a belief which has had to emigrate, like the Jews, from myth into history. He professes to use old scriptural types only as indices of the contemporaneity of the New Testament, and not as elements in a miraculous plot, devised by the Holy Ghost, to keep Old and New Testaments. Of course there are atavistic theologians as well as atavistic historians, literary critics, and novelists, though it is to me an interesting reflection that modern theology got really deeply into de-mythologising at about the time when literary critics began to go overboard for mythology. People novelists even have been heard to say of Muriel Spark that she is gifted and elegant, but a fantasist, a trifler. Mrs Spark is a novelist; she is not an antinovelist or a philosophical novelist, a realist or a neorealist, but a pure novelist.
