Within the church, most would hold Christ to be central to its dramatic narrative of sin, salvation and being reconciled to God. There are also those who readily affirm the human Jesus, but think the Christ concept has outlived its usefulness. Still others interpret the Christ as a dynamic symbol that is central to living out the vision of Jesus. A fourth, atheistic, group rejects any notion of Christ, along with the church and everything it stands for.

If the title “Christ” is used to bestow an aura of the supernatural on Jesus, or to somehow turn him into a deity, that is not helpful in the modern secular environment. It also runs counter to all that modern scholars have discovered in re-establishing Jesus’ essential humanity.

The New Testament has many angles on Christ, however, including one that still holds up in our changing world. In secular experience, Christ can be affirmed above all as an archetype, a mythic symbol that contains within itself a principle, a presence and a power.

Grounded in letters which the apostle Paul wrote to the infant church nearly 2000 years ago, this Christ reaches back into the teaching and example of Jesus, yet still resonates in people’s experience today – which is only to be expected, because that’s how valid religious symbols and archetypes work.

It’s a concept that could only have developed in the way it did as Jesus’ followers drew on their vivid memories of him. But it is not the same as Jesus the man. Paul is sometimes accused of ignoring Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God and replacing it with metaphysical speculation. I see him rather as developing the Christ symbol precisely in order to help Jesus’ followers live the life of that kingdom in the world as they knew it.

Pointing to Jesus as a model would obviously help, and Paul does that. Models, though, are always at one remove from those who admire them, and Paul saw the need to trigger a transforming motivation within people. This he found by developing the notion of Christ within.

So he writes of “Christ dwelling in you . . . and you in Christ”. At one stroke, that takes the concept of Christ beyond the human Jesus, whose life was bounded by time, place and circumstance, to a quality of spiritual experience attainable in every time and place.

That need not imply belief in a world beyond this one: it stems rather from something deep in the human psyche. So, just as Buddhists talk of the Buddha within, Christians speak of the Christ within.

As a mythic symbol, the Christ enlarged the early Christians’ experience of Jesus and challenged them to rise to a new vision of God. It has three basic elements:

■ There is the principle of the Christ within, on which all else hangs. Here Christ is conceived imaginatively as the vantage-point that gives people their basic perspective on how to live well. The sense of self can be all-consuming: dethroning the self by putting Christ at the centre changes the way people see both themselves and others – not by crushing the self, but by freeing and expanding it. At the heart of the principle is love.

■ As archetype, the Christ becomes a lively presence within the psyche of those who open themselves to it. This is not the presence of some supernatural entity touching them from another world, but arises from fostering awareness of “Christ dwelling in you . . . and you in Christ”. This is what fills out what people know about Jesus’ life and teaching, in such a way as to make that life and teaching vital in their own experience. Christ’s presence is experienced and expressed as grace.

■ Then there is power – the power of transformation, which re-orients a person’s life so fundamentally that they feel like a new being. Once it was assumed that the power came from a spiritual world beyond humanity. Secular men and women understand it rather as being generated within, as all that the Christ image symbolises plays on their imagination and makes them want to live as if God’s kingdom were already up and running.

In these ways secular people can affirm the Christ as a living myth, empowering and energising them towards lives characterised by liberation, love and grace – even towards a new level of consciousness. If that archetypal Christ is passé, then so is Christianity.