… I find that the imagination is a vital ingredient in my sanctification. I need to keep the big biblical picture (creation-fall-redemption-consummation) in mind as I attempt to live day by day, minute by minute, as a follower of Jesus Christ who desires above all to have one’s thought and life correspond to the gospel. To do that, I have to keep the gospel story (together with its presuppositions and implications) in mind, and I have to connect my story to that of Jesus. That requires imagination.
…
Reading is the way we learn to inhabit the world. Not the natural world, but the cultural world: the world of meaning.
…
My concern is that many Evangelicals are suffering from malnourished imaginations. This impedes their ability to live coherently in the world–that is, according to a meaningful metanarrative. We want to believe the Bible, but we are unable to see our world in biblical terms (this is a major theme of my Pictures at a Biblical Exhibition that I mentioned above). That leads to a fatal disconnect between our belief-system and our behavior, our faith and our life.
…
Reading … is a kind of strength-training that flexes the muscles of our imagination. Those who read widely are often those who are able to employ metaphors that connect ordinary life to the wonderful real world of the Bible.

(HT: Kingdom People]

… imagination is required… 

By imagination here I am speaking of the ability to perceive connections between things that are not spelled out, not immediately apparent on the surface… First and foremost, imagination of this sort should be applied to our reading of scripture. we need to live inside the world of these texts and inhabit them so deeply that we begin to recognise links, lines of association, and webs of meaning that may not always be laid out explicitly or at any length but that nevertheless give scripture its coherence, contours and overall directions.

…similar imaginative skills need to be applied to our reading of the world through the doctrine we discover. Good doctrine jolts our perspectives and shakes up the way we view things; it invites us to perceive the world in a different way…

…a third way: we ask what it means to live in and live out this “reading of the world,” to ask how life could be (indeed, must be) different. … This demands imagination because, of course, the Bible does not spell out the details of Christian behaviour for all times… The church needs to improvise imaginatively…

If you haven’t been following, then best to start way back here. But basically, we looked at how culture fits into the Christian story and some of the consequences.

There are many places we could have ended up, but I tried to have a brief look at how we should think about culture as a result. One problem have now is that I’ve just finished reading Everyday Theology (ed Vanhoozer et al). This is so good that it has pointed out loads of ways this bit of the seminar could have been improved. But never mind, let’s go for the original form and maybe when I come to discuss the book, alternatives will be clear.

We wound up in the previous section by concluding that our cultural lives should reflect God’s new creation and also that we should remember that the fall implies not every area of culture matches God’s intentions. All this leads us to conclude that we need to think carefully about culture from a Christian context. A prime reason is that understanding helps us in our involvement in the mission of God. One obvious example of this help is that we cannot communicate with the culture around us if we do not understand it, so our preaching, etc. will miss the mark. Another is that, is part of our mission is to work with God in the transformation of culture, then we need to be able to discern what fits God’s intentions and what needs work.

So, how do we think? In some ways, the whole seminar up to this point was an example — we tried to think about culture in general from within the Christian worldview or story. (The place of story in worldview or vice versa is a whole other discusssion. Suffice it to say, I’m keen on the story view at the moment. Perhaps because I spend many hours reading the Gruffalo to my children!)

More generally, we need to keep in mind that we all live/think within some overarching story (or worldview). The story that is influencing a person will have a direct impact on how they approach things. This works in two ways — first, we need to keep in mind the story that we hold to and, second, we need to realise that we constantly come up against cultural products that do not have that story as a basis. We have to find the way to negotiate these two components and act appropriately. For the starting point, we can go back to the quote from John Stott: we need to listen to the word and listen to the world.

So, first, we need to keep a very firm grip on the Biblical story and allow this to be the controlling narrative in our interpretation of the world. (Just to remind us, the key plot points of this story are Creation-Fall-God’s Mission/Jesus-New Creation.)

I think it is Eugene Petersen who said that the Bible is not primarily something we interpret, but is itself an interpretation of the world. We need to allow the story to shape our thinking and imagination; to ‘renew our minds’. I think perhaps we have seen how the thinking aspect works, but we need to go further & let the thinking filter into our imagination. Middleton and Walsh touch on this in the following quote:

A liberated imagination is a prerequestite for facing the future. Consequently, we need to ask ourselves some honest questions. Can we imagine a politics of justice and compassion in place of the present global politics of oppression and economic identity? Dare we imagine an economics of equality and care in place of the dominant economics of affluence and poverty> Can we imagine our work life to be at one with our worship — an act of service and praise, rather than a grim necessity of a means to an affluent lifestyle? Can we imagine a society which has broken through its morbid preoccupation with death and instead truly affirms life, both at the fetal stage and in all of its dimensions? Is a relatinship of friendship, instead of exploitation, with the rest of creation imaginable? Is it imaginable that the mass media could be an agent of spiritual awakened social, cultural and spiritual renewal, rather than the one thing that most numbs us into cultural complacency and sleep? And is our imgination open enough to conceive of a business enterprise that is characterised by stewardship, environmental responsibility and real serviceability, rather than profits, pollution, and the production and marketing of superfluous consumer goods? If we connot have such a liberated imagination and connot countenance such radical dreams, then the story remains closed for us and we have no hope.

I think it is relatively uncontroversial that music is the art form that is regarded most highly by evangelicals. There is a whole industry for contemporary Christian music, which it seems dwarfs all other cultural products (e.g. Christian novels, etc.) If you want to be a Christian musician that it is highly likely that you will get support from you church (depending on musical genre). On the other hand, if you are considering moving into conceptual art, the probability of active support is probably lower.

Possible reasons for this emphasis are the high place of music in the wider culture, the focus on word rather than image in the church, the example of the Psalms, etc. But I want to try out an eschatological possibility.

It seems to me that the most common way we picture life-after-death is as a giant worship service. That is, as a principally music-based eternity. If that is really what we think, is it surprising that music is given promenance? Whether or not we think our current songs will make it into eternity, they certainly have a close connection. On the other hand, if that is what we are picturing, is it any wonder that painting, etc. don’t really seem quite so important?

Which brings us to Richard Middleton’s article. He takes a clear look at what a lot of people have been emphasising recently — that God’s long term plan is redeeming the whole of creation, not just getting people into heaven. If that guided our imagination, I wonder where it would take us? (Of course, we’re now connecting back to The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work.)

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

It seems to me that this sums up the cynicism that comes from commericialism identified by Dick Keyes (see last post) and some of the distrust of postmodernism (see another previous post).

And what do we take from this? Perhaps that people want honesty. We know that the world is broken and, if we are going to trust, we need people to acknowledge this. We don’t want a glossing over that implies ‘try my option and everything will go smoothly’.

As Christians, we might try to ignore the brokenness of life in the mistaken belief that this makes what we have more attractive. Perhaps the example of commercialism points us this way — ensure life looks rosy with your product and everyone will want it. But we need to be careful not to fall into step with the wider culture and we need to be honest.

One reason, the Biblical story can be trusted is that is faces up to the pain and brokenness and doesn’t look away. To quote Colossians Remixed

The biblical embrace of pain refuses to cover up or deny suffering. … the biblical trajectory … highlights ‘absence’ — the absence of justice and shalom, and in the lament tradition even the absence of God.

If we want to produce art that reflects the biblical tradition and connects with those cynical from commercialism and untrusting from exploitation of the big stories then we have to face up to the absence and brokenness.

Of course, as we have to continually keep in mind, this is done in the context of the existence of God, the God who is ‘intimately involved with the suffering’, who is the true hope. We cannot feel the absence if the presence is not hoped for.

(Before I start, I’m not saying it is healthy to stay on the negative side, only that there is a place for art that looks in that direction — OK?)

First point is from an mp3 interview with Dick Keyes, his concern is commercialism (and cynicism). He points out that commercialism focusses on an unreal rosy picture of life — drink this can and your life will be OK. Consequently, we are suprised when bad things happen to us; we can’t cope and become cynical. Obviously this isn’t necessarily limited to commercialism — it can apply to Christians if we try to do the same thing. (Which raises the question, why we, as Christians, have the tendency to look away from the brokenness — are we following the wider culture? Just a thought…)

What is the answer? Perhaps, we can get a clue from Pete Lowman’s article If There Really Is a God, Why Don’t People Notice? – A Media Studies Approach (Which is great, by the way, and deserves a post of its own, if I get the time.) Let’s try this quote:

the media reshape our perception of what is normal or acceptable… Actually, this is how Bible reading should work: we read, say, an old testament narrative, we then encounter something similar in real life, and we apply the categories from the clarified narrative we have absorbed in our Bible study across to understand the real-life situation: `Ah, this is a little bit like the story of Abraham… and in the biblical story this was right, that was important… and therefore this is what I should do.’ The Bible supplies our norms. But in our society, immersion in the intensely-presented alternative (unreal) universes of media shapes our understanding of what is normal and appropriate, gives us categories to apply (consciously or subconsciously) to understanding our own experience. `What’s going on here in my life reminds me of what happened in the movie; and then what happened was….’

We need art, songs, imagination-formation that encompasses all of life, both the good and bad bits, from a Christian perspective. Otherwise, when bad things happen we have no reference points to guide us. So, either we collapse or we fall back on reference points from other sources.

Perhaps, this helps us see the value of the Bible bits that we tend to avoid. You know, the depressing Psalms, Ecclessiaties, Lamentations. They might not give cheery answers, but they engage with brokenness while retaining a God-sourced perspective. They provide a model of people in tough places who are still keeping the big Mission-of-God picture in mind. So, they can form our imgainations in ways that allow us to see God in those situations.

If we produce art that only fits the neat middle-class Christian optimal vision of life, then we miss out on this. Since art forms our imagination, we need to see the importance of art that recognises the significance of the fall as well as the hope. Of course, the point we need to get to is where we can hold both together at the same time…

(Umm, warning, there may be spoilers ahead. But then it’s not a thriller

…and it struck me that this is really an interesting example of how eschatology should influence life. In the book some friends live to see the end of the world. They then have the opportunity to go back and live in the light of what they have seen. For them it was a world that ends in a whimper — with all slowing going to sleep. So, their ‘living in the light of’ was to live against this.

It seems to me that, for Christians, there should be a similar ‘living in the light of’ the future. We should allow the prophetic imagination to shape ours. Then we live in this context and allow it to shape how we act. Of course, for us the future vision is different – we live with the hope that God will put the world to rights and re-creatre all things. Consequently, we live for rather than against our vision. But the parallels are interesting.

Bored? God forgive us for all those we have lost because we made the gospel boring. I am convinced that is why we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it’s because we don’t dare them, not because we don’t entertain them. It’s because we make the gospel to easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what are they to do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?

Shane Claiborne

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bqq38WZctA]

Jesus invited ordinary people to come out and be part of an adventure, a journey that kept surprising them at every turn in the road.
… The church exists as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief.

Stanley Hauerwas and William M. Willimon

…where evangelicals think soteriology, Catholics tend to think ecclesiology—and so we proceed to talk past each other.

This reminded me of something I was pondering a while ago. I was trying to figure out why it was that Catholicism tended to produce more great artists than Protestantism (I may mean ‘writers’ rather than ‘artists, but lets see how we go…). While reading Flannery O’Conner’s letters I came up with one possibility: For Catholics, the main focus of identity is the church and being a member of the church; on the other hand, for protestants (or evangelicals, specifically?) the main focus of identity is, perhaps, doctrine.

For great art (at least novels?) there has to be some exploration of ideas; some experimentation. If not, then we slip into propaganda. But if your primary identity is doctrine — the intellectual ideas you hold about your faith — then any exploration runs the risk of undermining your identity. Consequently, there is a strong incentive not to take such paths. On the other hand, if your identity is based on membership of a community first, then the same risk is not present. Even while experimenting, you have a safe haven to return to.

Provocations: If you’ve read Shusaku Endo’s Silence, then you might like to ponder whether a evangelical could write such a book. Similarly Flannery O’Conner’s stories. (I’m pretty sure she would say, No.)

Those who actually know what they are talking about are invited to comment…