Book Review
Net Mending
Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith
by Holly Ordway
As an English professor at a Christian university who specializes in British Romantic poetry, I often find myself in the precarious position of defending England's second most naughty, faith-denying poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. (I reserve first place for his friend and partner in debauchery, Lord Byron.) Still, despite the fact that Shelley wrote an essay on the necessity of atheism when he was in college and was an early advocate of free love, I do not feel the need to apologize for my professorial defense of the much-maligned poet.
Hedonist though he was, Shelley understood something about poetry that is often lacking among Christians, especially American Evangelicals like myself. In his lengthy critical essay, "A Defense of Poetry" (1821), Shelley boldly defends poetry against those who would accuse it of promoting immorality. Far from encouraging sin or disseminating lies, he argues, "poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man." He explains:
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
For Shelley, it is through cultivating our sympathetic imagination that we gain the ability to move out of ourselves towards others; only thus can we see the world through their eyes, feel fear, pain, and confusion as they feel it, and walk a mile in their shoes. I have always believed that Christian witness in America would be far more effective if our apologists learned to cultivate just such a sympathetic imagination.
The task, however, is far from easy. American apologetics, as opposed to the British apologetics of Chesterton, Lewis, and Sayers, has long been driven by a focus on reason, logic, and evidence. The apologist who ventures into the territory of the imagination risks reinforcing the modernist dismissal of Christianity as nothing more than an emotional crutch, a sort of fairytale for adults.
Ordway Ventures In
Thankfully, Holly Ordway does not flinch from going where American apologists often fear to tread. In Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, Ordway, Professor of English in Houston Baptist University's Master of Arts in Apologetics program, shows how the imagination can be used as a powerful tool for sharing the faith with a population that no longer speaks or understands the language of the Bible and of Christianity.
According to Ordway, the goal of imaginative apologetics is to "harness the God-given faculty of imagination to work in cooperation with reason, to open a way for the work of the Holy Spirit and guide the will toward a commitment to Christ" (15). This goal, important at all times and in all cultures, is particularly important in our present moment, for we live in an age when a profound language-meaning gap exists between believers and nonbelievers.
Imagination allows us to convert raw sense data into meaning. Yes, reason performs the final act of recognition, but reason cannot do its work unless imagination provides a framework within which to organize the data. My reason cannot confirm that the four-legged animal charging at me is a horse if I don't have a correct image of "horseness" in my mind. Often a modern apologist will fail to convince a religious seeker of the truth of the God of the Bible, not because the seeker finds a flaw in the apologist's logic, but because the seeker's imaginative conception of the word "God" is flawed. "Even if the atheist can get past difficulties with the idea of 'faith,'" Ordway explains,
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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