Submitted by Holyman Preter on
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The apologist should appeal not only to one’s reason and intellect but also to one’s imagination, wooing the unbeliever—or a believer who has only granted intellectual consent rather than full-heart surrender—to Christ.
In answer to the question “[w]hy did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ,” C.S. Lewis offers up a whimsical, yet curiously evocative answer: “[b]ut supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?” (“Fairy Stories” 37). As Chronicles of Narnia readers can attest, Lewis brings the gospel to life, stealing past the watchful dragons of our inhibitions and biases. For many readers, they feel the love of God breathed through Aslan’s mouth deeper and more intimately than through Scripture, and they feel the terror of the White Witch more acutely and menacingly than the spiritual forces of evil which actually undergird our own world and press in on us. But the stories are meant to bring its readers to the truth through the imagination—to present the truth of God, of his Son, and of the battle with evil in an imaginative light that breaks into blind and shuttered eyes and that allows readers to glimpse reality, physical and metaphysical, as it is, perhaps, for the first time. Then the readers, with eyes to see and ears to hear, may come into real relationship with God, listen to his real words, and wage war with real evil, equipped with God’s armor. The details may be saturated in fantastical images, but the truth is the unchanged. It is the reader, however, who is changed.
The imagination then, is a kind of doorway, a portal, or, perhaps, a wardrobe into a new way of seeing and experiencing the world. It is the rabbit hole into wonderland; thus, the apologist should appeal not only to one’s reason and intellect but also, just as Lewis masterfully accomplished in his Narnia chronicles, to one’s imagination, thereby, wooing the unbeliever—or a believer who has only granted intellectual consent rather than full-heart surrender—to Christ. While there are seemingly infinite, imaginative ways that the apologist could introduce one to Christ via the imagination, I will discuss only three: through the use of dragon-slipping stories and myths, through poetry and fantasy that give one new eyes to see and ears to hear the good news of the Gospel, and by making the gospel attractive through beauty and art.
Before discussing these three avenues for imaginative apologetics, it would be proper to describe, precisely, what the imagination is and why apologists should aim their focus on it. Philosopher James K. A. Smith explains in his work You Are What You Love (2016) that:
…re-formative Christian worship needs to capture our imaginations. That means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums (Smith 91).
Apologists, for far too long, have entertained and lived into the Enlightenment and Cartesian myth that mankind is primarily a thinking thing. Rather, human beings are minds, bodies, hearts, souls, and as Smith says, aesthetic creatures. When we experience great art, we often say, we are moved. Logic and reason can only speak into one aspect of the human person, but stories, poetry, parables, music, and metaphors speak into one’s total being, move one through the existential valley of the shadows, and give that one a beatific glimpse of humanity’s proper dwelling place (Ps. 23). Even Nietzsche said, “without music, life would be a mistake” (Nietzsche6. 33). Speaking of Nietzsche, who created an existential and logical tower of Babel after he proclaimed God’s death, he ended his life just as the primordial builders of the tower did, in confused obscurity and regrettable insanity. Thus, his very life seemingly proved Chesterton right: “[t]he poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits” (Chesterton 7). The imagination transposes one’s head into the heavens.
Now, it may be argued that this dethroning of reason and logic in apologetics is simply child’s play, but as Christians we know that it is only by child’s play and a child’s faith that we enter the kingdom. However, the primacy of the imagination in apologetics does not abolish the role of reason. It fulfills it. Here, we will take a Lewis-ian (or Narnian) stance in understanding the relationship between the imagination and reason. Lewis penned in his essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” that “reason is the natural organ of truth…but imagination is the organ of meaning” (as cited in “How Lewis Lit the Way to Better Apologetics” by Michael Ward). Ward, perhaps the foremost Lewis scholar, clarifies that one’s imagination supplies meaning to events, experiences, facts, observations, etc. that one’s reason subsequently helps “to differentiate those meanings that are true from those that are false. But until we have meaning, we have nothing to reason about” (Ward). To demonstrate the very claim that I am making dramatically and imaginatively, remember Eustace Scrubb’s conversation with the retired star Ramandu in the Voyage of The Dawn Treader (1952): “‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’ ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of’” (Dawn Treader 209). While it is true that a star is made of its observable parts—gases, chemicals, and combustions—all of which the reason can verify as true, a star is more, on an ontological and a metaphysical level, than the sum of its parts. There is a reason why humans have never been able to stop star gazing at night and seeing myths and heroes breaking through the darkness of night. It is time that in the darkness of this secular age that we find our north star again. Only the imagination can help one connect the constellated dots and see the true meaning of a star or of any one thing, and it is only through a Christ-shaped and Christ-formed imagination that one can see the true meaning of everything: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” (“Is Theology Poetry” 17). Thus, the apologist then should appeal to one’s imagination not only because the human agent is an aesthetic creature who existentially desires meaning, a fact that is increasingly true in a postmodern world, but also to create the very “condition[s]” (Lewis as cited in Ward) that one’s reason can then judge accurately. As McGrath proclaims, “[t]he science of apologetics needs to be complemented by the art of apologetics” (McGrath 11).This is precisely how Jesus taught. As Buechner eloquently put it: “JESUS DOES NOT sound like Saint Paul or Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin when we hear him teaching in the Gospels. ‘Once upon a time’ is what he says” (Buechner). It is now to “once upon a time’s” and stories and that we now turn.
The medium of stories is, perhaps, the most potent means of imaginatively introducing one to Christ. Stories are effective because, as mentioned previously, they slip past watchful dragons of biases and rational presuppositions and speak right to the heart through the language of the imagination. Moreover, as Ward says, stories resonate with a human person’s lived experience: “[l]ife is more like a story than like an argument. And so, all things being equal, a storied presentation of Christianity will always be more effective than an argued one” (Ward). On an ontological level, stories and myths resonate with humanity because humanity was made for and written into the cosmic redemption story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation by the Author of salvation (Heb. 5.9). Mankind has always trafficked in the business of myth making because of the Imago Dei burning within them. Within the human imagination there is an innate reaching for the “infinite, To God who is Holy Mystery” (Gaillardetz 17), and every human story, secular or religious, consciously or unconsciously strives for Him (or rebels against Him). All good stories and myths, therefore, contain hints and glimmers of the truth, and they all point to the Christ myth, the true myth. Lewis, himself, perhaps the most influential apologist of the last hundred years was converted on this very point, and he is a living case study of how imaginative apologetics should be conducted. He had lived his entire life grappling with the cognitive dissonance of loving stories and myths, particularly those of the Norsemen, but knowing that they were false and of hating naturalism and all its implications but knowing that it was true. However, after the famed walk down Addison’s Way in Oxford and a Tolkien poem later Lewis found that, while all the imaginative stories that he loved were meaningful but not true, Christianity was both meaningful and true (Ward). Christ was the hero that every hero story pointed to. He was the true Arthur, and Lewis had found the grail. The Gospel, then is the “Good Spell,” and “spell,” of course, is the Anglo-Saxon word for “story.” Like a spell, good stories enthrall, enchant, and transform, and the Good Spell has the capacity to disenchant the unbeliever from the false stories the world has spun and re-enchant him or her to the true story, the one that they were made for as John Donne rightly penned, “[a]ll of mankind is of one author and one volume” (Donne 698). In becoming the characters in His story, we truly become ourselves (Smith 88).
This invitation to find ourselves in Christ’s story and to be caught up in it is the adventure that the human heart longs for. For ages, the church has been perceived by culture as a priggish yawn where adventure goes to die, stifled by stiff-necked collars and pipe organ music. Faith in Christ, however, is an invitation into a grand mystery, a summons to a pilgrimage. This invitation is the “Harry—yer a wizard” (Rowling 50), or the “this isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto” (Woolf and Baum), or the hobbit Sam Gamgee’s “if I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest from home I’ve ever been” (Jackson). All of us, in some sense, are mystics at the wardrobe door of mystery, and the apologist should present faith in Christ as being the greatest adventure story ever written and invite the other to be caught up in it, to leave Kansas behind, if only for a day, and to take the dangerously thrilling step out into Oz. There and only there, one may just find the real hope of glory awaiting and a real glimpse of home.
Also, as an aside, stories are, perhaps, the best medium for unraveling the gordian knot of intellectual problems with Christianity. In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan, an atheist who cannot come to belief because of the existence of gratuitous evils in the world, wins the logical argument of God’s nonexistence against his brother Alyosha, the novitiate in the Orthodox Church, but by incarnating these ideas into characters and by the power of drama and story, Dostoevsky shows that the humble, meek, and loving life of Alyosha is the best argument and sermon in favor of the truth of Christianity and God’s existence whereas the consequences of Ivan’s ideas lead to chaos, death, and nihilism. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “[t]he saint is the apology for the Christian religion” (von Balthasar 229). Moreover, the “Grand Inquisitor” scene in The Brothers Karamazov presents a microcosm of Dostoevsky’s wider project. The unbelieving Spanish Inquisitor levies a scathing diatribe filled with arguments that seem excruciatingly true against Christ and His Church to the imprisoned Christ himself, who has just made his second coming. All Christ does in return is meekly take the lashings of the arguments and respond with a silent kiss. This radical response somehow satisfies and silences the shocked Inquisitor, who subsequently lets Christ go free. Dostoevsky, here, lays his finger on the truth of imaginative apologetics. Human stories are filled with pain and seemingly pointless suffering, but Christ, both in Dostoevsky’s story and in the Gospel, enters into the story of human suffering and envelops that suffering into his larger redemption story by way of the cross and the resurrection. Thus, the apologist, when speaking to unbelievers who cannot logically accept Christianity on issues like the problem of evil, should meet the unbeliever not on the grounds of reason but on that of story, perhaps walking them through the crucifixion story in the Gospels. This method is also viable for the believer who is wracked by doubt. Catholic author Flannery O’Connor wrote her gruesome, gothic stories for this very purpose—to incarnate a world without faith and see, with open, sober eyes, if it is true: “[t]here are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not” (O’Connor 349-50). However, nearly every O’Connor story, after grappling with an envisioned world without God, concludes with a moment of painful, piercing grace that reverses a character’s vision, giving them new eyes to see themselves, the world, God, and others around them.
This reversal of vision is the second way an apologist can introduce someone to Christ. As creatures born into this world, our innate sense of God and of the holy eventually becomes drowned out and bogged down by the mundane world we ascertain on a quotidian basis. Victor Shklovsky diagnoses the problem expertly: “[h]abitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been” (Shklovsky as cited in Zapruder 42). However, he also provides the cure: “[a]rt exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony” (Shklovsky as cited in Zapruder 42). In reading great literature, watching great movies, and experiencing great art, a person transcends himself or herself and sees through the eyes of others while still remaining himself or herself. As Lewis says, “I become a thousand men and yet remain myself” (An Experiment in Criticism). Thus, art is a medium, unlike any other, that imaginatively woos one out of oneself and of their glazed over way of seeing the world and grants that one the gift of new eyes to see and of new ways of experiencing the world. Wallace Stevens captures this transcendent quality of art in his poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange” (Stevens 10-12). Art makes one’s experience and vision of the world “strange,” distorting one’s natural vision of the world, so that there is a potential for the subject to come to see “truly.” This is the very function of Fairy Stories that Tolkien spoke about in his eponymous essay “On Fairy Stories.” The professor explains that art and fantasy have the capacity to allow the human person to “look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red” (Tolkien 77). Art captures the imagination and provides a necessary avenue for the recovery both of the beatific vision of the world that God has made and sacramentally left his trace on:
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness (Tolkien 77).
The apologist then should take up the call to use art, poetry, and story to speak to a person’s imagination that he or she may then have his or her “windows cleaned” and perceive, perhaps for the first time a world shimmering with the glory and presence of Christ. The apologist’s task, like the poet’s as called for in Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry (1595), is “not to represent this world as it is seen by our imperfect eyes, but to ‘figure forth’ a ‘nature’ of a higher order, re-creating in his imaginative mind the world as it may have existed in the Creator’s mind” (Sidney 12). Moreover, this restoration of sight also allows a person to glimpse that his or her true home is heaven and that the signposts pointing to home are all around: “every common bush [is] afire with God / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, / The rest sit around picking blackberries.” (Browning 62-4). This is, in fact, the very way Christ conducted his apologetics. In his parables, as McGrath comments, “the familiarity of this world is disturbed by unexpected twists in the story” (McGrath 27). Jesus takes the common, every day elements of life, makes them strange, and invites us to see that our lives are truly found in Him. The apologist should capitalize on these aesthetic, imaginative distortions, flipping the world upside down through stories, art, and poetry that then empower one to have eyes to see the upside down kingdom of Christ and one’s place in it.
The final way and, perhaps, the easiest way that the apologist can appeal to a person’s imagination in order to introduce him or her to Christ is simply through beauty. Of all the transcendentals—goodness, truth, and beauty—beauty is the least imposing. In a postmodern world, if the apologist seeks to make truth claims about what is true or false or ethical, goodness claims about what is right or wrong, the unbeliever’s defenses will go up, effectively undercutting any avenue for meaningful, genuinely open conversation. However, whereas truth says to believe something and goodness says to do something, beauty says just look, just see. Beauty is inherently non-threatening and inviting. When Nathanael heard of the supposed Messiah’s appearance in Nazareth, he laughed in disbelief, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (Jn. 1.46, New International Version). Here, he doubts the truth and goodness claims based on his presuppositions of Nazareth. Phillip responds with a simple invitation: “Come and see” (Jn. 1.46). Beauty is God’s invitation to come and see, and when one experiences beauty, whether it is that of a panoramic view of a mountain top, a Van Gogh landscape, a cathedral adorned with stained glass windows, one actually begins to want to find truth and goodness. There is an innate sense of truth in the beautiful. John Keats’ poem “Ode To a Grecian Urn” ends with the emphatic declaration that “[b]eauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (49-50). In a world where unbelievers may hold to a relativistic view of truth, beauty may spark a lilt in their heart to believe, if only for a golden moment, that there really is objective truth out there. In that small window, the truth of the Gospel may shine through.
Moreover, beauty engenders a desire for total submission and total change unlike any other medium. Humanity can endure almost anything except for change, and choosing to follow Christ with all of the submission, necessary heart change, and suffering involved is the greatest change that can possibly occur in one’s life. In fact, most people can come to a rational understanding of Christ but never turn and follow him because of the drastic, cosmic proportions of this change. The apologist then should make the Gospel attractive by making it beautiful, and, in the face of the beauty of the Gospel, one will come to find that life change and submission are actually one’s deepest and most salient desire. In Beauty and the Beast (1991),it is Belle, the beauty, that transforms the Beast and makes him a man again. In the face of beauty, the human subject does not so much such see the beautiful; rather, he or she is seen by it and cannot be content to remain as he or she is: “for here [in beauty] there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” (Rilke 13-14). As von Balthasar rightly says that the “certainty,” both of the true and the good that is felt after experiencing beauty, “is founded not on having grasped but on having been grasped” (von Balthasar 130). In a world that has left truth and goodness behind, beauty stands as immaculate as ever and invites us into knowing and being known by God, grasping and being grasped by God. Found in every work of beauty, every mountaintop view, and every bird or lily (Matt. 6.24-34) is a window to the divine. The apologist then should make every effort to weave beauty into his or her efforts, and Christ, whom all beauty flows from, will begin his transformational work and pour out his grace.
In conclusion, the apologist should speak not only to one’s reason but to one’s imagination, the doorway or the wardrobe to that one’s heart. Through stories that awaken one’s desire to find themselves in Christ’s story and see Him as the hero of their lives, through poetry and art that restore a beatific vision of God’s creation and light a pathway home, and through beauty that resurrects a belief in the good and true by the simple invitation to look, the apologist can introduce one to Christ. But the real work of the apologist is not only introducing one to Christ in the imaginative realm of poesy, faërie, and story but also inviting them through discipleship to meet Christ in that one’s life and see Him with new eyes in the real world, like Lucy and Edmund who must leave the world of Narnia and meet Aslan as Christ in the world of men: “[b]ut there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there” (Dawn Treader 247).
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See “Mythopoeia” by J.R.R. Tolkien, addressed to Lewis, the “one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’”