If the faith by which [the mind] lives does not allow it room to move, the mind is apt to exact its own revenge. A good mind denied by bad faith will self-destruct with insecurity, guilt, fanaticism, or doubt.
—Os Guinness, Doubt
I used to think birders were a little nerdy. Then I moved to Ethiopia. The variety of colors, sizes, shapes, and variety (twenty-three species endemic to Ethiopia alone) was mind-boggling for a Midwestern kid who grew up on sparrows, crows, and the occasional robin. Best of all, I didn’t need to leave our porch: mouse birds fought each other for the rotting avocados that fell from our tree; masked weavers built nests hanging in the branches just above our porch; ibis regularly walked our lawn, pecking for grubs with their long beaks; black kites circled above us with their screeching cries and nested in the tall eucalyptus across the road; herons rose from the river beyond the trees; vultures held court on the rooftops across the way. I became a bird enthusiast, bettered only by my wife, who kept detailed notes about every new species she saw. She recorded it all in her bird book, which was filled with notations after four years. (One of our Ethiopian friends began calling it her “Bird Bible.”)
At the same time that I was reveling in my new love of birds, I was teaching the theology of creation to Ethiopian graduate students. I was puzzled, then amazed, then alarmed, that most of my students saw no glory at all in creation. As I described the beauty of their country’s birds, most responded with blank faces. What birds? If they were aware of birds at all, it was mostly as pests, rarely as objects of wonder. Many had grown up in impoverished situations; in their hierarchy of needs, reflecting on the glorious birds around them was rarely a priority. Similar experiences over my first two years in Africa started me on a journey investigating worldview, with the startling realization of just how pervasively our personal worldviews shape what we see.
As I struggled to communicate this worldview issue, one day in class the analogy of a shell popped into my mind. A crab’s shell provides a safe and secure home. But as the crab grows, it must discard its old shell and create a new one. I described the empty crab shells we would find walking the beaches of California, their former occupants living dangerously until a new shell formed around them. In a several-week process called molting, crabs separate their bodies from their old shell even as they begin secreting a new, soft, paperlike shell beneath it to prepare for moving day. Without this natural process, the shell that was a protective haven eventually becomes a prison to the growing creature.
Our worldview is like the crab’s shell. It provides a coherent perspective of reality, a mental “home” that is essential to our well-being. But as we mature and grow, we must discard our comfortable worldview for a larger one. Just like the crab, we repeat this process again and again as we move through life. Each transition can feel threatening as we discard our outdated picture of reality and create a new one. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. writes, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions” (emphasis added).1 Balancing the fear of change is the exhilaration of new ideas or insights.
Daniel Migliore describes the challenge of leaving behind our comfortable worldviews of God: “We fear questions that might lead us down roads we have not traveled before. We fear the disruption in our thinking, believing and living that might come from inquiring too deeply into God and God’s purposes.”2 These fears are live issues for many of us, especially where the mystery of God is concerned. Better to let sleeping questions lie. But Migliore warns that fearing questions comes with a price: “As a result of these fears, we imprison our faith, allow it to become boring and stultifying, rather than releasing it to seek deeper understanding. When faith no longer frees people to ask hard questions, it becomes inhuman and dangerous. Unquestioning faith soon slips into ideology, superstition, fanaticism, self-indulgence and idolatry.”3 Most of us have observed this in others, if not in ourselves. “Faith seeks understanding passionately and relentlessly, or it languishes and eventually dies.”4 Like the crab’s shell, our unquestioning worldviews can imprison and imperil our faith.
Renewing Imagination
Why did the worldviews of many of my students not register the glory of the birds that I saw so easily? I eventually concluded it was a failure of imagination. Make no mistake, my students had plenty of imagination. One Ethiopian denomination’s strategic plan imagined reaching ten million new converts in just five years! Most US denominations would see this as insanity, not imagination! Why is our imagination so expansive in some areas and yet so constricted in others? I think it is worldview again. The material/spiritual divide in much of Ethiopian culture identified “spiritual” things as very important to God; issues like evangelism were thus lush areas where the imagination could roam and flourish. On the other hand, “material” things like birds were presumed to be of no account to God and therefore barren ground for imaginative interest.
In similar but often opposite ways, our Western worldviews warn our imagination that certain areas are not worth its time. Mystery is often one of these areas. Reason is our mother’s milk in the Western world, and reason does not know what to do with mystery, especially the mystery of God. Moreover, our pragmatic age has no use for mystery, beyond perhaps providing a living for a few ivory tower academics. If we are going to take biblical paradox seriously, we need to expand our worldview. Often it is our imagination that first alerts us that our worldview is constricting our growth, turning what was once a home into a prison.
By speaking of imagination in these ways, I do not mean that there are not nonnegotiable truths in the historic creeds at the core of Christian faith. Imagination is not license to jettison orthodox boundaries and conjure up whatever we wish to believe. Rather, we can use our imagination to enter more fully into the biblical worldview. Is this not our goal: to have our worldview conform more and more to God’s worldview? Can exploring paradox in Scripture renew our spiritual imagination to help us gain more of God’s worldview? Such exploration itself requires imagination: “Only the imagination can . . . unify dissimilar elements and hold opposites in life-giving tension. Christians who are challenged to believe in this paradox . . . must be able to tolerate ambiguity and mystery.”5 Like the crab, can we move into a new worldview that welcomes paradox and delights in the mystery of God?
I repeatedly encounter imagination as I read through the corpus of Eugene Peterson, one of my favorite guides into the wild landscape of Scripture. In book after book, Peterson lifts up imagination as an essential ingredient of spiritual growth. Two sentences have especially stayed with me: “If we want to change our way of life, acquiring the right image is far more important than diligently exercising willpower. Willpower is a notoriously sputtery engine on which to rely for internal energy, but a right image silently and inexorably pulls us into its field of reality, which is also a field of energy.”6 Many of my valiant but futile New Year’s resolutions show me just how sputtery an engine willpower can be!
Instead, we might explore images and imagination as a door into lasting change. Christians find these images in Scripture. Today, however, the imaginative world of Scripture that has shaped Western culture for centuries is fast disappearing, if it has not already vanished. In ages past, even unbelieving citizens knew the biblical story and were shaped by its worldview. Western civilization’s literary imagination was soaked in biblical themes. Even the leaders of the Enlightenment, who sought an avowedly non-Christian Western culture, “were linguistically and imaginatively saturated with scripture.”7
But according to George Lindbeck, the Bible is now “no longer a language with many senses, a dwelling place of the imagination.”8 What happens when this connection between Scripture and imagination is lost? Every group uses Scripture to advance its own agenda: “Pietists were wary of any use except that of legitimating and evoking a particular kind of religious experience; legalists and social activists looked only for directives for personal or collective behavior; the rationalistically orthodox used the Bible as a proof text for unchanging propositional doctrines; fundamentalists argued about its scientific accuracy and their opposite numbers, the biblical critics, treated Scripture as a set of clues for reconstructing what actually happened or was actually taught back in the days of Moses or Jesus” (emphasis added).9 If Lindbeck is correct, Scripture is no longer engaged in the larger task of shaping imagination but is held captive to pragmatic ends; whether these ends are winning souls, liberating the oppressed, or defending or criticizing certain doctrines ultimately makes little difference.
Good Problems
In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis argues that we read great literature because “[w]e want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own. We demand windows. . . . One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ Or from another point of view ‘I have got in.’ ”10
Lewis goes on to distinguish two kinds of readers. One kind of reader receives from books; a second kind of reader does things with books. The first reader suspends judgment and allows the book to make its own impact. The second reader already has a use in mind. Lewis says of the second reader, “We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.”11 Whatever our theological stripe, we seem prone to create our own “fantasy Bible” like choosing the best players from across the league to create a fantasy football team. For our fantasy Bibles, we pick only those pieces that reflect the preferences of our preexisting worldview, and thus, we increasingly meet only ourselves.
Biblical scholar Abraham Heschel makes a similar observation to C. S. Lewis: “Hebrews learned in order to revere, the Greeks learned in order to comprehend, and modern people learn in order to use.”12 Is this not exactly the pragmatic temptation Lindbeck identifies—coming to Scripture not to revere or comprehend God but rather to use God for our own ends? Are we so busy doing things with Scripture that we have little opportunity to receive from it? What about “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts”? If we never allow Scripture to challenge or change us—again in Lewis’s poignant phrase—we increasingly meet only ourselves.
Rather than spoon-size bites, biblical paradox offers truths to gnaw on. We do not know what to do with it. It offers no immediate return. We find no use for it. It solves no problem. But what if we imagine a new kind of problem?
For the scientist, nothing is more important than choosing a good problem. The history of science can be read as the propitious choice of problems: good problems led to fruitful breakthroughs; poor problems (pursuit of the elusive philosopher’s stone, for example) distracted capable minds for centuries and led to dead ends.
In Christian history, we see the same process at work. A proverbial problem for medieval scholastics was how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Yet the early church fathers addressed good problems—God as three yet one, Jesus as divine yet human—resulting in monumental theological ideas we now often take for granted. What if they had chosen to invest those centuries of spiritual and intellectual energy in trivial problems?
Michael Polyani, a groundbreaking philosopher of science, writes that a good problem requires “an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars . . . intimations of things hidden we may yet discover.”13 This sounds a great deal like the mystery we have been discussing—an intimation that there is more here than meets the eye, that there is deeper truth waiting to be discovered, that exploring this wild territory may be exciting (as well as frightening).
Cheryl’s story, with which we began, presented a problem that was a “coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars.” In her problem, the juxtaposition of not-comprehended particulars involved human freedom and God’s sovereignty. Friends she consulted did not define this as a good problem, probably either because it had no practical value or because it had no obvious solution. Yet Cheryl did not let it go. Pursuing this good problem opened up for her “a strange sort of comfort” both emotionally and intellectually: “I finally was able to rest in the fact that ‘there is a God and I am not he.’ . . . However, if I had not struggled, I never would have come to know that peace and comfort, as well as a deeper knowledge of God.”
In today’s bustling spiritual marketplace, we might think biblical paradox will rarely attract a crowd. And yet we experience in paradox a touch of the enigmatic, a hint of surprise and wonder, a street performer quality that captures our attention as we rush along the busy sidewalk so that we are compelled to stop and ask ourselves, How does he do that? In a pragmatic age, paradox can still arrest our attention—to present a good problem. Certainly this was true for Cheryl.
Redrawing Our Maps
Biblical paradox can offer us good problems. While we cannot use them, we can receive from them. What might we receive? We might “get out” into the larger landscape of God’s awesome wonder and mystery; we might also “get in” on what God has been doing all along that we did not yet have eyes to see or ears to hear. There is little we can do with paradox. And yet (paradoxically!) there is much paradox can do for us. Paradox stimulates our imagination. As we imaginatively look through paradox, it helps us see what we may have missed before.
Our language is the means through which we see the world.14 Eskimos have at least fifty words for snow; they “see” far more than I do.15 This is not because their eyes are more astute but because they have far more words at their disposal to name and conceptualize what their eyes observe. When we neglect paradox, we miss developing a vocabulary that can enlarge our view of reality.
In Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine, Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes writes, “Unexpected imagery . . . seems to dissolve the world as we know it, to disintegrate the familiar in preparation for a new order.”16 He mines centuries of English literature for a rich understanding of the role of imagination in helping us see, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s insight that imagination “dissolves, diffuses and dissipates, in order to create.”17
I experienced Coleridge’s dictum as a new and inexperienced Young Life leader. My supervisor told me I was beginning a continual process of freezing and unfreezing: how I understood high school kids would thaw and melt, then be refrozen in new forms, then thaw and melt again. Imagination aids in dissolving or thawing old worldviews even while creating new ones.
In another analogy, Scott Peck suggests growth is a lifelong process of “redrawing our maps,” a process he hopes will continue until we die.18 What entices (or prods!) us to keep exploring outside our comfortably mapped worldviews? Often it’s our imagination! We see beyond our grasp and, by God’s grace, venture beyond our understanding. My all-time favorite epigram about the power of imagination to stimulate change comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”19
Up to now, we have explored individual paradoxes. Although frustrating, paradoxes can become good problems for us. Many unearth our yearning for something more—more understanding, more completeness, more holistic faith, more trust in God. In this last section, we will move from specific paradoxes to paradox as a whole. As our faith grows, the worldview that provides faith’s home must grow and enlarge accordingly. If our worldviews do not transition and grow, they threaten to stifle and imprison our faith. Biblical paradox offers an essential ingredient in our spiritual growth—it stimulates our imagination, and imagination becomes a catalyst for enlarging our worldviews. We will look at four areas where this stimulation can lead to spiritual growth: faith, reason, hope, and finally, the mystery of God.
Reflection Questions
1. Do you agree that our faith, like the crab, needs to keep growing and expanding or else “it languishes and eventually dies”?
2. Have you ever considered that your imagination might be important in your spiritual life? What new thoughts has this chapter prompted?
3. How do you react to C. S. Lewis’s discussion of two kinds of readers—those who “receive” versus those who “use”? Does this throw any light on your approach to the Bible?
4. Can you think of a good problem you have encountered? What happened?