Read the footnotes!

Sometimes the most interesting things come up in sidebar discussions. Here's a good example, from The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. (pp. 319-320) Bear in mind that this is taken out of context.

This formula is of course, not precisely that of the common Christian teaching, where, though Jesus is reported to have declared that "the kingdom of God is within you," the churches maintain that, since man is created only "in the image" of God, the distinction between the soul and its creator is absolute -- thus retaining, as the final reach of their wisdom, the dualistic distinction between man's "eternal soul" and the divinity. The transcending of this pair of opposites is not encouraged (indeed, is rejected as "pantheism" and has sometimes been rewarded with the stake); nevertheless, the prayers and diaries of the Christian mystics abound in ecstatic descriptions of the unitive, soul-shattering experience, while Dante's vision at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy certainly goes beyond the orthodox, dualistic, concretistic dogma of the finality of the personalities of the Trinity. Where this dogma is not transcended the myth of Going to the Father is taken literally, as describing man's final goal.

As for the problem of imitating Jesus as a human model, or meditating upon Him as a god, the history of the Christian attitude may be roughly summarized, as follows: (1) a period of literally following the master, Jesus, by renouncing the world as he did (Primitive Christianity); (2) a period of meditating on Christ Crucified as the divinity within the heart, meanwhile leading one's life in the world as the servant of this god (Early and Medieval Christianity); (3) a rejection of most of the instruments supporting meditation, meanwhile, however, continuing to lead one's life in the world as the servant or vehicle of the god whom one has ceased to visualize (Protestant Christianity); (4) an attempt to interpret Jesus as a model human being, but without accepting his ascetic path (Liberal Christianity).