Useful Things | October 28, 2019
Greetings!
Enjoy this complimentary article from the October issue of The Worldview Bulletin.
Also, be sure to check out our recent interview with Craig Keener published at Christianity Today.
Happy reading!
Christopher Reese
Managing Editor
On Renewing the Imagination
By Paul M. Gould
Five hundred years ago, just about everyone believed three things about the world. First, the physical universe (the heavens and the earth) functioned as a sign, pointing to its divine source. Second, the kingdoms of this world reflect a heavenly kingdom. Finally, the world is enchanted; the world is sacred.[1] Not so today. We live, as many have noted, in a secular, or disenchanted age. Disenchantment has changed everything. It has made unbelief possible and belief more difficult. It has contributed to the rampant idolatry, foolishness, and blindness so characteristic of this day and age. For those of us who are Christians, we have not escaped unscathed. We too struggle with disenchantment. We too don’t always feel the presence of God or see all of reality as a gift. As a result, our imaginations have atrophied. We struggle to imagine ourselves as part of a world lovingly created, sustained, and cared for by God.
The Apostle Paul implores believers to “renew their minds” (Romans 12:2) as part of their discipleship unto the Lord. This, of course, means that we need to examine the propositional content—the beliefs we assent to—for logical and theological consistency. Importantly, it also means that we need to renew one of the oft-neglected faculties of the mind: the imagination. The imagination is the “organ of meaning” according to C. S. Lewis. It is that part of our mind that helps us understand what we experience so that reason can judge it as true or false. The Christian imagination, like the Christian mind in general, needs constant renewal. How might we join with God to renew our imagination? Part of the answer is to pay attention to the metaphors and stories we live by. In this month’s edition of The Worldview Bulletin, I share three metaphors that capture what it feels like to live in a secular age—metaphors you might unknowingly have adopted—and offer three new metaphors that we can embrace as we seek to imagine our place in God’s good world.
Instead of a Broken Cord, a Sacred Tapestry
We live, according to the Jewish sociologist Philip Rieff, in an utterly unique culture. Every culture before our own understood the natural and social order as a reflection of a sacred order. In our secular age, the cord uniting the divine with the natural, the sacred with the secular, is broken. As a result, culture today is “a warring series of fragments.”[2] There is no unifying thread in culture; rather there are just warring “fictions” that compete for the mantle of self-legitimacy in an otherwise meaningless world. The secular age is like a broken cord.
Instead of a broken cord, a re-baptized imagination envisions this world as a sacred tapestry. On this conception, there is a tight connection between earthly realities and their heavenly source. Earthly realities “participate” in heavenly realities. As the Psalmist declares in Psalm 119:89-90,
“Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations; you established the earth, and it endures.” (NIV)
In other words, created realities are founded upon and share in the being of the eternal Word of God. The image of a sacred tapestry is from the theologian Hans Boersma, who in his book Heavenly Participation argues that “the church’s well-being depends on the recovery of [a] sacramental tapestry.”[3] As Boersma summarizes, “The entire cosmos is meant to serve as a sacrament: a material gift from God in and through which we enter into the joy of his heavenly presence.”[4] There is a tight connection, then, between the natural order and the sacred order—the one participates in the other. This means too that reality is, at rock-bottom, mysterious. In perceiving the world, we perceive the eternal mysteries of God. This should lead us to a posture of (epistemic) humility, theological modesty, and a sense of awe and wonder as we contemplate the givenness, and giftedness, of this world.
Instead of a Dungeon, a Theater of God’s Joy and Glory
Another mental image delivered to us by the purveyors of disenchantment is that of a dungeon. The dungeon imagery helps us understand how it feels to live in a secular age. According to the philosopher Charles Taylor, we live now in an “immanent frame”—a dungeon—where all of life is understood without appeal to transcendence. We feel the “absence of God” in a secular age.
To join with God in re-baptizing our imaginations, replace the image of a dungeon with the image of an open-air theater. The world is a “dazzling theater” in which God’s glory is on full display.[5] Our disenchanted age offers us a false dilemma: you can have pleasure or meaning, but not both. But, as the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf helps us see, on the Christian story, meaning and pleasure are united: “attachment to God amplifies and deepens enjoyment of the world.”[6] As Volf argues (following Maurice Merleau-Ponty), pleasure is partly mediated to us through the senses, but it is also partly mediated to us through the social relations inhering in things. For example, we derive a good deal of pleasure from an original painting, but that pleasure dissipates if we learn that it is a reproduction. Thus, “What matters most for pleasure isn’t the object ‘as it appears to our senses’ but an experience of the object as a thing that is also a particular relationship to other persons.”[7] And now the pay-off: “To put this in theological language, we enjoy things more when we experience them as sacraments—as carriers of the presence of another.”[8] In thinking of the world as God’s dazzling theater, we come to see it as a gift. Thus, “Each thing in the world is now a relationship marked by love.”[9] We can unite meaning and purpose in God’s good world. We do so when, as Volf summarizes, “the right kind of love for the right kind of God bathes our world in the light of transcendent glory and turns it into a theater of joy.”[10]
Instead of a Shopping Mall, a Home
Jamie K. A. Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom helps us see that we are shaped by our passions and daily habits. One metaphor to understand our secular age discussed by Smith is the shopping mall. The shopping mall is an apt description of the dominant way of living in a secular age. In a disenchanted age cut off from the divine, we are witnessing the commoditization of just about everything: people and things find their value in terms of the pleasures they bring. We shop because we want to and we need to and we can. In acquiring stuff and new experiences, many hope to find the good life.
Instead of a shopping mall, a sacramental imagination encourages us to seek our identity by finding our true home. The home is one of the closest metaphors for life. Home is the place where you know and are known, where you love and are loved, where you are present and approved and accepted. Home is where God is and where the people of God are. Home is the place where we find rest from the hurry of life, healing from the wounds of battle, and hope to sustain us on the journey. As I write in my book Cultural Apologetics,
Home is an apt metaphor for our hearts’ deepest longings—for God, wholeness, meaning and purpose; a place and path where life is experienced as it was meant to be. It is little wonder that the orphan Anne, as she drove to what she hoped would be her forever home, exclaimed to Matthew Cuthbert in L. M. Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables, “I’m glad to think of getting home. You see, I’ve never had a real home since I can remember. It gives me that pleasant ache again just to think of coming to a really truly home.”[11] Before finding faith in Jesus, all of us are like Anne; we are all orphans like Anne, aching for a place that is “really truly home.”
A sacred tapestry, a theater of God’s glory, a home. These are the metaphors to live by as we learn to re-imagine our place in God’s ongoing divine drama.
Notes
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25–26.
[2] Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 25.
[3] Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), xi.
[4] Ibid., 9.
[5] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1.5.8, p. 61.
[6] Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 203.
[7] Ibid., 204.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 206.
[11] L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 19; quoted in Paul M. Gould, Cultural Apologetics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 203.
— Paul Gould is founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute and a Visiting Fellow at the Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Receive more great articles like this one every month when you subscribe. For a limited time, receive a year’s worth of equipping by leading Christian scholars for only $3.75 per month, delivered directly to your inbox!