Imagine This

John Lennon, the genius that he was, certainly nailed it with his song "Imagine." I really love the song even though it pretty much dismisses a biblical worldview without much looking back while also embracing a pretty naive hope for the future.

That is telling us something about the power of art and the imagination. When a song does not assent to what I believe fundamentally about life and existence, Heaven, Hell, and all that is between, and I still give it a thumbs up of affirmation, that is impressive. And, the song has lasted in the consciousness of our culture long after Lennon was brutally gunned down.

Why? I have been thinking and writing a lot recently. I have also been reading a good deal also. In writing my book, and in being observant of how others write, I am persuaded that how we tell the facts of the biblical narrative is crucial and often plays into the enemies hand because we lack imagination. This insight is essentially due to my own struggles in trying to communicate a life-giving and motivating message to students who are going to college. A book, I hope, that they will actually want to read versus being force-fed. My editor looked at the second draft and called me out on it. He did what I paid him to do. Identify where my writing was weak. Although factual, most of what I had written had little imagination in how I was saying it. High on the Informational, low on the Inspirational.

I am finding less and less enjoyment, edification, and encouragement from what, for the lack of a better term, is straight factual writing. I am particularly distressed by Christian writing that sees the written words like an attorney in a courtroom arguing a case against strident secularists, thinking that apologetic is where the battle is being lost. It is not.

The battle is being lost in the mind for sure, but not because of a lack of evidence for the Truth of the Bible. If food were facts, we need to become much more skilled in culinary/literary techniques, presentation, themes, and setting. In other words, skillfully use a lot more imaginative in how we say, show, and symbolize Truth. We can't just sit a theological steak on a platter and say, "Here it is." Even cutting the meat into bite-sized pieces is not enough. There needs to be drama, a retelling of the narrative of Scripture.

I read this yesterday. It is part of the last section of a ten part blog series on imagination.

"In the kingdom of the mind, imagery and symbols are the coin of the realm. Whoever controls the minting of these symbols will largely control the perceptions of the age. It is in this sense that Artists (the writer said poets/Shelley, I just broadened it) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If we are guided through the world by an inner map, and if that map is a function of the imagination, and if the imagination works through symbols, then whoever controls the symbols controls the world.

This is the reason that the Church must not surrender the creation of symbols to the world. We cannot entrust the mapping of the Christian mind to secularists. We cannot trade upon symbols that have been invented primarily to inflame the appetites. Others may control the remainder of the world, but we must take charge of the symbols of Christianity. If the symbols should be corrupted, then our ability to perceive rightly and to feel rightly would be lost.

Postscript

The applications with which I have closed this presentation are perfunctory at best. My main concern has been to attempt to provide us with an anatomy of the imagination that will allow us to discuss the subject more intelligently. In detailing that anatomy, I have borrowed freely from many sources. I have attempted to credit those sources at least by name, if not by page number.

What is clear to me is that American Christians in the beginning of the Twenty-First Century have barely begun to discuss the imagination. We are hardly cognizant of the discussion that has taken place in generations past. One of the characteristics of a genuinely conservative Christianity must be the attempt to recover that conversation and to understand how the imagination does its work. Our motivations are two in number. First, we wish to produce works that will both reflect and evoke ordinate affections. Second, we must be able to critique intelligently the works that bombard us." Kevin T. Bauder.

The Post-Modernists are correct when they postulate that facts are not enough. However, they falter much in subtracting out the facts in their stories. We cannot remove the ingredients of the Christian faith and put in fillers, even if we do so in innovative ways. Instead, we are to use all of the ingredients, handed down from God and all of the saints for thousands of years, and imaginatively make them compelling for a generation that is hungering less for fads and more for facts, but just doesn't know it.