The Dean of Clonmacnoise, the Very Rev Andrew Furlong, who has refused an invitation from his bishop to resign, has said he has "the highest respect" for the court of the Church of Ireland's General Synod to which his case has now been referred.
However, he reserved his right to disagree with the court's decision, he said.
Asked whether he contemplated taking a civil action should the church court find against him, he replied that he not given any thought to such a course of action.
The dean, who is also rector of Trim and Athboy in Co Meath, had his episcopal authority withdrawn last December after he published articles on a parish website disavowing the divinity of Jesus.
Pending the findings of the court of the General Synod, which will sit shortly, his episcopal authority remains withdrawn, though he will continue to receive an income and to reside in the rector's house in Trim.
Explaining his reasons for wishing to remain within the Church of Ireland, while believing few of its tenets of faith, he said it was through the church community that the narrative of Christ was preserved, interpreted and passed on to the next generation and that significant change in the past had been achieved by reformers who remained within the church.
"Any institution has a corporate face and changes slowly," he said, pointing to the Church of Ireland's position on the priesthood as an example.
It had been "reinterpreted" to allow women priests, he said. He spoke of the great diversity among laity, clergy and theologians on many of the questions surrounding Jesus and said "the Church needs to accept that diversity and agree to live in tension with that diversity . . . it might grow from that". There were too many inconsistencies conected to the myth about Jesus to make it meaningful today, he said, warning against attempts to historicise Jesus or literalise his story.
"It is historically true that Jesus lived in the first century CE," he said. However, it was part of the metaphorical narrative to do with him to say that he was a mediator between God and human beings, or that he came down from heaven and eventually ascended back to heaven to be seated at the right hand of God, he said.
"Such a metaphorical narrative might be claimed by believers to be true if it symbolised for them a belief in a God who loves and cares for the world and its people and who helps in the process of their healing and becoming whole in some mysterious way. But such a narrative would not be true, to my mind, if it was historicised or literalised," he said.
