Skeptics, Belief, and a Biblically Rooted Imagination - Part 4 in the Buried Imagination
“Lewis wrote about these deep longings of his heart and the quest to find the object of these longings.
I knew the longings first hand, but I had never read anything where someone described so clearly what I felt in my own heart. In this way, Lewis gave me a vocabulary for my soul.”
Does it matter what we see?
In this famous sketch, the artist captures two perspectives.
Depending on how you look at the image, you may see the enchanting chin of a beautiful young woman.
Or you may glimpse the bent nose of an elderly lady. Both realities are in the same image. But without realizing it, we operate on one half of the whole image.
And this makes a profound point. When there are two realities captured in one image like this, we can either miss it. Or, as we see both, it forces us to transcend what we’ve always seen into the deeper, at times even eternal, truth.
In this image, seeing the two-in-one, makes us reconcile that within youthful beauty also is the daunting reality of old age. And within old age still remains the youthful blush of beauty. There can be two realities, that are better captured as One reality.
And with the imagination, we sometimes make false distinctions between things like reason and faith, mind and heart, logic and intuition, etc. that are really pictures of the whole. What I want us to consider is how did we get to this place where the imagination that is so vivid in Jesus’s ministry, and so integral to human existence and flourishing, could be so widely diminished, jeered at, and even worrisome in many circles?
Let’s consider this together…
Despite it’s everyday use, there are a variety of skepticisms about the imagination. These rise from everything from the pain and loss of a dream. The grief of ordinary or extreme suffering. The questions of news, institutions or even what we read on the internet. We make internal adjustments, yet even the adjustments are works of the primary and active imagination, adjusting the way we view our current and future circumstances to avoid pain, to pursue a goal, to seek truth, etc. Avoiding the imagination is impossible. And it’s presence is a crucial underlying dynamic in our faith (or lack thereof).
Skeptics and critics of the imagination remain in the pews. This results from a historical false division in Western culture between fact and value that still affects us today. In this division, fact statements—statements of science, research, and objectivity—make up the foundational “stuff” of reality.[i] While value statements—statements of experience and subjectivity—remain on the one side of opinions, options, beliefs, etc., as areas of skepticism and relativity.
Facts are conceived as value-free data, underived and uninfluenced by culture or religion. The inherit claim is that facts arrive without outside-influence, emotion, or agenda. The fact/value model proposes that one could build a reasonable and secure life on facts, not explaining how that life would be barren of meaning and experience. It doesn’t take much digging to realize that Reason builds her achievements on the back of imagination’s exploration.[ii] And though it’s impossible to live without the three modes of imagination, beginning to glimpse our society’s distinctions can help diagnose why the imagination is so misunderstood.
In the 20th century the Church wrestled with this fact/value division, as movements of textual criticism and progressive moral values pushed the Church to either justify faith by facts or become increasingly irrelevant. So, the Church unwittingly separated worldview and theology into this realm of fact.[iii] Meanwhile, experience of God and spirituality stayed in the “squishy” space of value statements.[iv] The short-term gain solidified the fact/value division within the broader Church and skepticism about spiritual experience, imagination, and emotion grew increasingly suspect.
Today, one might hear it said in Church that “The heart is deceitful…and desperately sick,” but not always rounded out with, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.”[v] Of course, the former scripture validates the fact/value division, while the latter begins integration into a whole-hearted person.[vi] We separate imagination from the intellect and reason from faith, when these ought to work in tandem, serving each other underneath the love of God.
When the truths of scripture are separated into the realm of facts, Scripture becomes a source of static ideals. One can rightly say, “I have been crucified with Christ,” Or “Love is patient, love is kind, it keeps no record of wrongs,” as transcendent facts. But if they remain only facts, and not realities that invite us into an experience, then the modes of imagination begin to wither. We lose the powerful fuels of the imagination, like desire, dreaming, hope, and longing, that would engage us in a process of becoming the sorts of people who embody these truths we study. One has social permission to study scripture all day, but it’s whole different issue when the scriptures come alive in our minds, hearts, or convictions through the modes of imagination.
Consequently, great gulfs emerge between our ideals and the reality of our lives. This distance can create significant feelings of frustration, isolation, and discouragement. Our minds, bodies, and prayers need space where the active imagination can imagine what the process might look like to become a person “filled with the Spirit”. We need the permission to engage our God-given identity to image-forth that process by trusting and experiencing our hearts “crying, “Abba! Father!”[vii]
And as we face hurdles, disconnects, or failures, we need the primary imagination to consider, reflect, wonder, and integrate the truth with aspects of the journey that didn’t work and discern the best routes forward with God. All these activities fall under the God-given capacity of imagination in which Reason is a participant and co-creator.[viii]
In a healthy Christian—paramount in Jesus himself, of course—is where the fact/value division breaks down. In Jesus we see the transcendent, objective truth of Scripture finding its home, incarnated into the mind, heart, and experience of a real human being.[ix]
All three modes come alive in Jesus: 1) Jesus is the fulfilled image of God by which we see God fully and are restored, 2) he opens the disciples primary imagination to see and perceive the Kingdom of God in him through the Holy Spirit and 3) he is celebrated for his perfect use of the active imagination in his parables, poetry, and prophesy.
I invite you to talk to the Lord even now:
Lord, what has stoked my imagination in church or worshipping communities?
What has drawn me in? Drawn me toward seeing my heart? Toward seeing You?
What has disrupted or even repelled me from seeing You or myself clearly?
What must it have been like for Jesus to have an imagination?
What would go through His mind and heart in an average day?
Where is my imagination most naturally connected to Jesus?
Where is my imagination protective? Distrustful? Hesitant? Or Skeptical?
Take some time to talk with the Lord about this and invite Him into Your imagination.
We’ve been considering this God-given capacity
Called the imagination in a series of posts:
[i] In response to Western culture, which arises from Greek Philosophy, Renaissance ideas, and Reformation theology, a few authors, philosophers, and theologians shape what is called the “Romantic” tradition, the movement in Germany and England to see the transcendent in nature. Prominent figures, Wordsworth and Coleridge, form a friendship and a major body of poetry and philosophy that later impacts such writers as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald and others. These voices become major influencers for the imagination in the Protestant and Evangelical traditions. But it’s worth noting that other Christian traditions have major voices who speak about the imagination as well. In the Roman Catholic Tradition, we see Saint Ignatius forming practices, prayer models, and whole modes of Spiritual Direction shaped around encountering Christ in Scriptures through the imagination. In the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, we have a rich theology of sacramentalism that roots the logos of Christ in the literal images and forms of creation (see Maximus the Confessor). The study and theologizing of this central capacity is spread across the Christian traditions and in each one is reclaimed by rich and profound thinkers, which can encourage each of us to partner with the Holy Spirit as he shepherds us through images, forms, and creativity in our own lives and traditions too.
[ii] “’But the facts of Nature are to be discovered only by observation and experiment.’ True. But how does the man of science come to think of his experiments? Does observation reach to the non-present, the possible, the yet unconceived? Even if it showed you the experiments which ought to be made, will observation reveal to you the experiments which might be made? And who can tell of which kind is the one that carries in its bosom the secret of the law you seek? We yield you your facts. The laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. ‘He hath set the world in man’s heart,’ not in his understanding. And the heart must open the door to the understanding. It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: ‘Try whether that may not be the form of these things;’ which beholds or invents a harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not the harmonious relation of them—that is, the law of the phenomenon it contemplates.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
[iii] Of course, Scripture is fact, it’s just not fact alone. And when we converse with the culture from this fact-only point of view, we need to make clear what kind of facts we’re considering. Are all the stories literal? Well, yes, but some are illustrative too—like the parables. Are all the statements in scripture promises facts that God will fulfill? Well, some are, but if we’re not clear about who those facts were written to, who was writing them, what they would mean to those who read them, etc. we can suddenly demand ourselves and others to believe facts alone, shutting down the invitation into experience, faith, and encounter that the Scriptures have always been for the people of God. We never want to lose Scripture as fact, but we need to review the divisions we’ve made with value and invite ourselves and others into an experience of God, which requires an active imagination and room for reliability of the data we find in the landscape of experience.
[iv] The problem becomes apparent when we consider how one arrives at what a fact is and how it can be established that it has a sort of standard that transcends other systems of value. Whatever route one choses to prove a fact is value-free, requires a philosophical move that enjoins itself to a system of value (for example, facts are neutral is a value statement, that limits our knowledge to certain range of science and study). Wherever one draws that line is, it remains self-refuting. Then when enforced in our realms of knowledge, it becomes a sort of law by which we can police, judge, control, or undermine the quality of knowledge or persons in their value statements.
[v] Jeremiah 17:9-10 and Ezekiel 36:26
[vi] As a result of minimizing the imagination, one side of the Church can tend to minimize the role of the struggling, in-process, and grieving places that are rooted in imagination, cutting short ones ability to enter-into experiencing the truth of Scripture. Another side the Church as a corrective jumps into the subjective side of the fact/value division, seeking to open the space for the grieving and marginalized, often at the cost of blurring objective truth and moral values.
[vii] Romans 8:15 (ESV)
[viii] “There were no imagination without intellect, however much it may appear that intellect can exist without imagination. What we mean to insist upon is, that in finding out the works of God, the Intellect must labour, workman-like, under the direction of the architect, Imagination.” – George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
[ix] John 1:14
