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,
his concept of "God" may well be "cosmic sky-daddy": the idea of an old man in the sky, meting out rewards and punishments. This is (rightly) unbelievable; given this idea of "God," it is entirely reasonable to assume that "faith in God" is a cultural construct, a story used to threaten or bribe people into submission, or something that uneducated people believed in before there was Science. (26)
An apologist in this situation might be in possession of the strongest logical, scientific, and historical arguments available, but if he can't get the seeker to re-imagine God along traditionally Christian lines, he will fail to convey the truth and urgency of the gospel. Unless he can shape and assemble a biblical framework within which belief in Christianity is meaningful and appealing, the apologist will only polarize the seeker.
Language Barrier
Although it pains me to admit it, Ordway speaks truly when she says that to "most people raised in a secular culture and educated in a secular school system, the words we use to talk about even the most basic principles of the Faith are jargon-words. They have no substantial content for the non-Christian" (25). That is why, she argues convincingly, it is inaccurate "to say that the people who reject Christian moral teachings are amoral or apathetic" (60). Scratch below the surface and you will find that such people are quite passionate about "economic inequality, social justice, and racism" (60).
Such people do not lack a moral sense per se; what they lack is a proper understanding of the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of sin. They lack an imaginative understanding of, and thus reject, Christian sexual morality because they reason and act under
the deep-seated [imaginative] assumption that personal autonomy is the highest good, one that trumps all others. Choices, in this view, are always good in themselves, independent of whether the choice is for good or for bad. Freedom is conceived of as freedom from restraint—without consideration of the purpose of that freedom. (62)
For the Christian whose imagination is aligned with the biblical worldview, the confession "Jesus Christ is Lord" is "a statement about the nature of reality: a truth that opens up the way to love, and hope, and joy" (77). For the nonbeliever educated in a secular worldview, who neither knows nor can imagine the holy, eternal, history-invading God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also the merciful, incarnate, crucified-and-risen Son, those words will be heard as "A power-claim . . . Religious mumbo-jumbo . . . A threat . . . Personal opinion . . . [or] A sales pitch" (77).
How are we to reach people who speak so foreign a tongue? First, we must cultivate Shelley's sympathetic imagination: "In order to be effective as an apologist, I need to be able to empathize with those whose experiences I have not shared" (109). Once we have done that, we can begin to construct an apologetic that speaks to the whole person, that engages the emotions as well as the intellect, that presents a dynamic universe run by a loving God: "One of the tasks of imaginative apologetics is to create, and share, stories and images that present our Faith in specific terms: vivid, compelling, embodied" (107).
We will be most effective in this work when we learn how to stir up "the longing for meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness" (129) that lies in the hearts of all people. The imaginative apologist, in possession of the truest and most beautiful meta-narrative, must learn to guide the desires of seekers beyond "shopping and sex" (139), the only two things that our modern world offers as avenues to the transcendent.
Empathetic Poems
Ordway, a convert to Roman Catholicism, points not only to the gospel itself but also to the sacramental life of the church, the communion of the saints, and Christian art and architecture as elements in a fully rounded imaginative apologetics. She even shares with her readers ten of her own carefully crafted sonnets, each of which gives poetic flesh to the arguments she makes in her ten chapters.
In the opening eight lines of "Unmaking Language," she takes us into the mind of an entire generation that no longer recognizes words like "repentance," "virtue," or "sin." Rather than engage these linguistic relics, they barricade themselves behind the flimsy wall of freedom they have built. This leaves them to live out the sad, broken lives that Ordway powerfully incarnates in the closing six lines of her sonnet:
And so we slice our bodies with no pain;
We grope in loveless sex with no release;
We search for self, though nothing there remains;
We make a ceaseless noise and find no peace.
Unmaking language, nothing left to say:
Blind impulse speaks, and wordless we obey. (78)
Ordway could not have written those lines had she merely observed this generation from the outside. Only by using her sympathetic imagination to suffer alongside them in their rage, confusion, and wordless despair could she conjure up such powerful
images.
What she does in her poem, the would-be imaginative apologist must also learn to do in his interactions with seekers who have been cut adrift from the great Christian tradition to float without compass or life vest in a purposeless sea of freedom that lacks content and meaning and that therefore can bring no contentment.
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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