conclusion

Sowing in Hope

The Apologetics of Culture Care

What are you seeking? Because if these arguments simply add up to a range of arid, abstract possibilities, then they are not grabbing you existentially in the way that they would if you were prepared to put your life on the line in terms of practices.

SARAH COAKLEY, “WHY BELIEVE IN GOD?”

SPELLS, SOIL, AND SOCIAL IMAGINARIES

I opened this book with the story of an emerging adult whose crisis of faith sent me in search of “stronger spells.” I wanted to know why my sermons had power on Sundays but not on Mondays. Or to move from a magical to an agricultural metaphor, why did the seeds I was planting as a pastor so often fall on shallow soil (Mt 13:3-8)? The latter metaphor captures something of the environmental factors of belief, the space in which faith flourishes or fades. I have found it helpful to follow Charles Taylor, who names this background for belief our social imaginary.1 A social imaginary is an unarticulated and often unexamined sense of the world and our place in it. It consists of habitual ways of experiencing the world, worked in and worked out by the rhythms of our common life. It is carried around and carried on through practices, stories, and cultural artifacts, which are often profoundly dissonant with what we say we believe.

Let me give an example. As a Christian, I believe that food is God’s good gift, meant to be cultivated responsibly, enjoyed gratefully, and shared freely. Yet my social and cultural world is arranged to shape my relationship with food in conflicting ways. Within this sociocultural matrix, I have developed habits of consumption that continually reinforce this relationship. Where I live food is widely available and easily accessible, produced and distributed on a massive scale. It comes to my table with little direct effort on my part. I am presented with a myriad of eating options and commercial jingles that train me to “have it my way,” prioritizing convenience and personal satisfaction, obscuring my awareness of those who pick, process, and prepare the food, or others for whom healthy options are not so easily accessible. A cultural commitment to “getting my money’s worth,” combined with excessive portion size, habituate me to stretch my enjoyment to overindulgence, or to waste my leftovers, deterring me from responsible enjoyment. Addiction to busyness, short lunch breaks, and ubiquitous drive-through windows conspire to facilitate meals that are quick if not “on the go,” undermining my commitment to receive my food with thanksgiving. I could go on. The point is that I may say that I believe in grateful, responsible, and generous eating. But my context privileges visions of eating that are resistant to my beliefs. Like the parabolic seed, my theology of eating finds itself on rocky soil.

So, what happens to my beliefs when they are so situated? If I continue to prize them, they may begin to function as superficial identity markers. In other words, they are meant to reassure myself and others that I hold a “biblical” view of food. I may still mutter hasty prayers before meals, only vaguely aware of the incongruity between the vision of eating that I profess and the one that my actions endorse. Alternatively, I may decide that the Christian vision of eating is idealistic and naive, and that food is nothing more than functional fuel for everyday life or comfort for my creaturely cravings. The point is that my relationship with food—what I actually do with food—is shaped less by articulated beliefs and more by my intuitively felt and constantly reinforced sense of my place in the world and the options available to me. This is my social imaginary.

I often say that I went back to school in search of better answers, but instead I found better questions. It struck me that while much of my ministry was aimed at what people believe, I had not adequately considered the imaginative context that situates belief. These two emphases are not mutually exclusive. It is certainly essential to articulate what the Christian faith compels us to believe. But how does one address the unarticulated background of belief, grounded as it is in the structures and stories of a society, and in our deeply ingrained habits of experience?2 Related to this, I wondered: If I could only do so much to affect the larger social imaginary, might it be fruitful to address the imagination itself? Could that be done? What might it mean to disciple the imaginations of those I was called to serve? And what might it mean to address the imaginings of those outside the walls of the church? These are the questions I’ve tried to explore in this book, questions that continue to orient my professional and pastoral work.

Let me briefly review where we’ve been before giving a sketch of how I will attempt to bring the threads together. In part one I demonstrated the need for a reimagined apologetic method by considering the imaginative crisis in Western secularity, the absence of imagination in contemporary apologetic method, and what a constructive account of the imagination might entail. In part two I offered two models of imaginative apologetics, sourcing their shared approach in a theological vision that discerns God’s active presence in the midst of everyday life. In these final pages I want to offer some parameters to guide a reinvigorated approach. Earlier, I drew a contrast between the apologetics of hope and the apologetics of despair. Here I want to draw a second contrast between the apologetics of culture care and the apologetics of culture war.

THE APOLOGETICS OF CULTURE CARE

I have noted the suspicion with which many younger Christians experience the word apologetics. Part of the problem with using the word is that in our contemporary context apologetics (already associated with “defending the faith”) is further wrapped in militaristic metaphors and leveraged as part of the culture war. This defensive mentality can even find its way into the work of even the most winsome apologists. Holly Ordway, who also advocates an imaginative approach to apologetics, writes that we should avoid “the militaristic idea that apologetics is a battle that can somehow be ‘won’ against an unbeliever.”3 And yet despite this wise counsel for interpersonal witness, the metaphor returns with reference toward the larger culture. She argues that the need for imaginative apologetics is strategic: if we “rely only on propositional argument, then we will lose the battle for meaning in the wider culture.”4

Are Christians enjoined to engage in a battle for meaning in the wider culture? The question of the relationship of the church to the culture in which we make our way is a complicated one.5 But with others I am convinced that using military metaphors (fight, war, battle) for the church’s engagement with culture betrays the character of that engagement.6 Most apologists would agree that treating an interpersonal conversation as a battle is dehumanizing. So too treating our cultural task as a battle is secularizing: it grants the assumption of secularity that there is a contested, neutral space that can be won or lost through ideological conquest and institutional affiliation.7 The culture war can only proceed on the assumption that there is such a thing as a space where God is not present. But if the world remains saturated with God’s presence and address, despite our attempts to deny or shut it out, Christian engagement with culture becomes more a matter of discernment than defense.

“Culture care” is a term used by artist and writer Makoto Fujimura, which he proposes as an alternative model in our polarized environment. He writes, “After many years of culture wars, no one can claim victory. We have all been further dehumanized, fragmented, and exiled from genuine conversation. Culture at large is a polluted, overcommoditized system that has failed us.” The solution, he writes, will not be found in taking up ever-more-incisive weapons. Rather, we must recover a biblical understanding of culture in which “culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated.”8 We must learn to care for the larger culture the same way that we would care for a polluted ecosystem or a traumatized soul. We must make space and reconnect with beauty, cultivating a generative environment where the creative spirit of our culture can be healed and unleashed. Beauty, Fujimura writes, is a recognition of the gratuity of being, of the God who “created a world he did not need because he is an artist.” Beauty may not be necessary to our survival. But it is essential for our flourishing.9 And it is essential for the church’s mission in the world.

The answer in our polarizing climate is not armed resistance but cultural renewal: telling better stories, painting more beautiful pictures, making connections that were previously unimagined. Artists are uniquely equipped to lead the way in moving from culture war to culture care. Fujimura notes how artists tend to be “border-stalkers,” moving on the margins, comfortable with ambiguity, but uncomfortable with homogeneity. It is this liminal position that makes them ideal mediators between “warring tribes”: “The generosity of an artist in this sense can mean mediation in the culture wars, beginning by overcoming caricatures and injecting diversity, nuance, and even paradox into the nature of the conversation, and then moving on to teach society a language of empathy and reconciliation. Grounded artists can provide rallying points around which reconciliation begins.”10

Fujimura is onto something important here. It is because of the hope of reconciliation that I have selected two “grounded artists” as my models for reimagining apologetics. In our postromantic context aesthetic artifacts carry more weight in imparting the felt sense of the truth of Christian faith than analytical treatises. To return to an earlier distinction, if Uppercase Apologetics is the default mode of the apologetics of culture war, then perhaps a reimagined approach might play a contrasting role in the larger task of culture care. Perhaps imaginative apologists can join artists in their aim “to surprise our jaded culture with delight and remind others of what we humans truly long for.”11 Perhaps we can join MacDonald when he writes: “I will try to show what we might be, may be, must be, shall be—and something of the struggle to gain it.”12

THREE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS
FOR REIMAGINING APOLOGETICS

What, then, are the essential characteristics of a reimagined approach? In an earlier chapter I distinguished between three dimensions of imagining: sensing (where a world of meaning impresses itself on the imagination), seeing (where the imagination expresses itself toward the world), and shaping (where space is made to negotiate sense and sight). If apologetics is to engage the imagination, it must take into account at least one of these aspects, and the more aspects that are engaged, the more potent the imaginative force. Below I offer three essential elements, corresponding to these three dimensions.13

Element one: Aesthetic sense. Reimagining apologetics gives methodological priority to the aesthetic dimension. The aesthetic dimension is the dimension in which our felt sense is essential to what is meaningful.14 Thus imaginative apologetics begins by orienting itself around the question, “What would make belief beautiful and believable for this person?” or alternatively, “What makes belief ugly and unbelievable?” In order to answer these questions adequately, we must pay attention to the ecosystems in which belief withers or thrives. These social, cultural, and relational contexts shape the contours of what is beautiful and believable; they are the soil in which beliefs take root. They constitute the aesthetic dimension of a person’s life: her lived, felt sense of the world, especially as it relates to the possibilities that orient her existence.

To make this concrete, let us examine the case of a contemporary skeptic, from the 2006 comedy Nacho Libre. In the film, the main character Nacho has a conversation about faith with his friend Esqueleto:

Nacho: I’m a little concerned right now. About your salvation and stuff. How come you have not been baptized?

Esqueleto: Because I never got around to it ok? I dunno why you always have to be judging me because I only believe in science.15

The scene is comedic, and shortly thereafter Nacho sneaks up on and forcibly baptizes scientific Esqueleto. Witness the violence of modern apologetics!

But in all seriousness, what would it mean to “baptize” Esqueleto’s imagination? It would begin with exploring what he means when he says, “I only believe in science.” Is “science” a belief system in the same way that Christianity is a belief system? What is it about science that feels more capacious than Christianity? How does each way of seeing the world limit our life in the world? What do these limits make possible?

In our postromantic situation, this aesthetic dimension is most decisive, and the first question is not, “Is it true?” but rather “How does it move Esqueleto?” or “How does it resonate with Esqueleto?” If it does resonate with him, if it connects to his desires or generates new possibilities for navigating the world, then it has the ring of authenticity, and he may be motivated to inquire as to its truth.

Accordingly, an imaginative approach aims at drawing out the desire through the imagination. This has two components. First, it means surfacing and naming the desires that are already orienting Esqueleto’s life: the things in which he is invested, the things that have already captured his imagination. What is it about science that he finds such security? What else resonates deeply with him? What is beautiful to him? In what arenas of life does he seek fullness? Next, it means rethinking the way that the gospel of Jesus Christ might address and makes sense of Esqueleto’s desires and directions. This follows the apologetic counsel of Pascal to “make good men wish it were true,”16 and of Cardinal Cesar de La Luzerne: “Our goal is less to make you see how true religion is than to make you feel how beautiful it is.”17 MacDonald’s counsel through Wingfold on how to address Richard’s unbelief also hits close to the mark: “Make his thoughts dwell on such a God as he must feel would be worth having. Wake the notion of a God such as will draw him to wish there were such a God . . . and he will go and look if haply such a God may be found.”18 We must discern what a person might wish to be true, what sort of a God would be worth having, and what kind of faith they would feel is worthy of further consideration. Or, if a person is not yet ready to consider these suppositions, perhaps they can start with something like Ames’s counsel to his son: “There is more beauty than our eyes can bear . . . precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”19 To contextualize this counsel for contemporary seekers, we must first have a sense of what precious things have been put into a person’s hands (the loves in which they are invested) and what it would look like to honor them. Imaginative apologetics appeals to the beauty of faith. But for the beauty of the Christian faith to be felt, we must first explore what a person would find resonant, what would strike them as beautiful, and what would capture their imagination. Then we must inquire in what way the gospel might speak to those desires, reorienting them, or creating a larger context in which they might be transfigured.

This does not mean altering the gospel for the sake of disordered desire. It means showing how the gospel offers something deeper than, but not discontinuous with, human longing. Just as Bible translators seek to give a faithful translation of the Christian Scriptures in the “heart language” of a people group, so too imaginative apologists seek a telling of the Christian story that resonates with the movements of a person’s heart. It is because the apologist has confidence that the Holy Spirit is already at work within human longings that she orients her presentation there. Imaginative apologetics starts with human meaning making. But it aims to draw out desire toward something not of our making: the God who moves toward creation in love.

Recognition of God’s active presence requires us to grow in receptivity. Receptivity requires humility. To explore our imaginative hopes without humility too quickly leads to hubris. But humility reverses the trajectory of desire from self-assertion to longing. It opens up space for surprise, the unexpected, the un-looked-for.20 The cultivation of humble receptivity is no mere human achievement but part of the Spirit’s work provoking the human imagination to reach toward another world.

Humility cuts both ways: it requires openness to surprise on the part of the believer as well as the seeker, as connections are sought between her story and the Christian story of reality. Even when the openness does not appear to be present, addressing the imagination, either through imaginative works (story) or imaginative exploration (supposition), can offer an immersive experience of the logic of faith, where more is caught than taught. Awakened desire means that reasons for belief may begin to engage the seeker in new ways. Exploring desire, cultivating an aesthetic sense of what is possible, can enable a second essential element: sight.

Element two: Orienting vision. Reimagining apologetics invites exploration of a larger vision of the world. Insofar as the apologist seeks not just to defend but also to commend the Christian faith, it requires that human desire be resituated in terms of the theodrama in which we are all participants. Accordingly, imaginative apologetics seeks to impart a vicarious Christian vision, inviting outsiders to view the world through Christian eyes. Whereas the previous movement asks, “What would resonate?,” this movement asks, “What would it be like to see the world through eyes of faith?” Robinson is a wonderful model of this. She takes up an imaginative stance shocked by the glory of creation, helping us to see the world through eyes filled with wonder. If God’s active presence means that ordinary perception can become revelatory, then we must offer imaginative spaces in which and from which this new way of seeing is possible.

If the previous essential element requires the cultivation of humbled hope, this element requires the cultivation of empathetic vision. This, too, is generative in both directions: it invites empathy from outsiders, and it cultivates empathy for outsiders. It seeks empathy because it asks others to take on the Christian perspective and experience the world of Christian meaning. In doing so, it commends the Christian vision, but on imaginative grounds rather than merely intellectual ones. It is not yet asking anyone to affirm the Christian creed. Rather, it is showing what it would be like to experience the world through the filter of the Christian faith. In some cases, this will mean shepherding the observer into the thick world of story, as MacDonald and Robinson both show us, though it can also mean offering micronarratives embedded in personal testimony. When I tell someone my story, when I explain how faith has opened up the world for me, I hope that our shared humanity will open the door for my story to be received with hospitality.

But in inviting an empathic gaze, the story I tell requires empathy for outsiders. Asking someone to try on the spectacles of faith means recognizing just how different the world looks to someone on the outside. To invite another person to explore the Christian way of seeing means meeting them where they are, clearing a space for mutual understanding, and showing hospitality toward their doubt and unbelief. In Gilead, Robinson reminds us that even John Ames’s capacious vision is still fraught with finitude: Ames does not see his godson Jack clearly for most of his memoir. Even at the end of the story, in the absence of mutual understanding, the best Ames can offer his godson is blessing. Blessing, the posture of the imaginative apologist, requires an act of mutual recognition. It assumes the active presence of the God in whom all live and move and have their being. Like Robinson and MacDonald, we must be careful to carve out an imaginative space large enough for the longings and losses of outsiders who have not yet found their way in. As MacDonald writes to his doubting contemporaries, “But do not think that God is angry with you because you find it hard to believe. It is not so; that is not like God; God is all that you can honestly wish Him to be, and infinitely more.”21 For both these authors, it is divine generosity that makes space for the authentic human search. This space is important because what we are really after is not primarily a pronouncement on the details of eschatological renewal (how and when and by what means God will heal creation). What we are called to is a posture of blessing that generates hope and empathy for the other, warning and inviting, in imitation of God.22

Here the imaginative resources of the Christian faith are not simply its intrinsic attractiveness but also in its empathic generativity. There is a burgeoning body of literature on the role of the imagination in cultivating empathy. Philosopher Karsten Steuber summarizes the basic starting point of the research as the assumption that “our ability to empathize with another person is based on or activated through our ability to imaginatively take up that person’s perspective.”23 Yet even as our shared human experience creates a common ground for empathic imagining, sociocultural differences create gaps that set limits for understanding. The political polarization of our current moment bears this out: next-door neighbors may inhabit in entirely different imaginative universes. This is because different sources are fueling our imaginations, stirring up disparate desires.24 For empathetic understanding to take place, it is not enough to be sensitive to the differences.25 What is needed when sharing the Christian vision is not merely the willingness to share—in expectation that it will be well received—but the willingness to translate that vision into an accessible form.

We need not look outside of our Christian tradition to find resources to do this. Indeed, missiologist Lamin Sanneh has called Christianity a “vernacular translation movement.”26 What he means by this is that the Christian movement has always sought to retell the Christian story in language and logic that makes sense to the cultures it encounters. Indeed, from the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost we see the dignity that is given to human language and culture (Acts 2). When people from many nations hear the Word of God in their own language, we learn that the Spirit has something to say to these people too.

This is because what is being narrated is not an abstract truth but a particular story that happened (and is still happening) in history. Outsiders are invited into the story of God, not just my story, or my tribe’s story. God’s story, a theodrama, embraces these smaller stories, but it does so by catching them up and transfiguring them. As Willie Jennings argues, with respect to this story all non-Jews are outsiders who have been invited in. Every new act of translation requires an act of joining, which enriches the story itself as it unfolds in new ways, as well as the storyteller.27 True Christian translation is “loving, caring, intimate joining . . . a sharing in the pain plight, and life of another.”28 We know that translation has occurred when the longings and laments of outsiders have been taken seriously enough to break open our own world in the encounter.

Translation is usually reserved for communication across cultural and linguistic gaps. But insofar as this strategy is entailed by the Christian story itself, translation is also the model for apologetic communication. Imaginative apologetics aims to open up a uniquely generative space for negotiating difference and imparting understanding. Here our experience of imaginative artifacts can shed fresh light on biblical truth, even as the spectacles of Scripture reorient the vision of all. What we are really after is an experience of seeing the world in all its particularities through the lens of the Christian story: creation, fall, and redemption. This brings us to our third essential element.

Element three: Poetic participation. Reimagining apologetics situates human projects within the redemptive project of God. It is in the space carved out by imaginative vision, which explores new possibilities that the third aspect of imagining plays its part. If in the first movement we explore desire, asking, “What kind of faith would resonate?,” and in the second movement we inhabit vision, asking, “What would faith feel like?,” in the third movement we seek the negotiation of the two. Here we explore the question, “What new possibilities would faith facilitate?”

All humans are hungry for meaning; we cannot live without it. Meaning is experienced as a sense and depth of connection to the world. And yet the meaning we feel in our work, in our relationships, in our loves and losses, always exists against the larger horizon of God’s redemptive project. It is precisely because God’s imagination is the source material for human imagination that there is a surplus of meaning in all our making. As MacDonald writes, “A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art the more things it will mean.”29 He goes on:

One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant. For in everything God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of thought: it is God’s things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol.30

This does not mean that any interpretation is valid; it means that there will always be more meaning in our projects than we can foresee, because it owes to “a larger origin than man alone . . . the inspiration of the Almighty shaped its ends.”31 This creates profound space for human creative projects to be situated in the larger creative work of God. Yet the imaginative reframing of a person’s projects and pursuits should never be a violent imposition that ignores the agency of a seeker to reinterpret her own life. The Christian narrative cannot be simply painted over her pursuits. What reimagination offers is a more capacious and liberating possibility for interpreting reality that must be taken up by the seeker in her own time and her own way. Thus, imaginative apologetics proceeds by way of provocation. Faith provides, as Robinson writes, “a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions.”32 What if the universe is not empty, but full? What if there is more meaning than you imagine? What if culture is not reducible to power? What if the claims of Christ were true? What would that mean? Rather than saying, “Here is why you should believe,” imaginative apologetics says, “Here is how faith could reframe your quest” (see fig. 2).33

We have seen this kind of reframing on a larger scale, such as in Augustine’s City of God. But the strategy of retelling the Christian story in such a way that it offers a larger frame for particular human desires is an imaginative strategy that can be taken up by everyday apologists as well.34 This involves discerning how the creative projects of doubters may actually already be moving within the grooves of creation. MacDonald was particularly attuned to the Victorian longing for moral order: to be good and to do good. He sought to resituate the Victorian quest for virtue as a quest for God, showing how virtue opens the way for imaginative vision.35 In our own setting the quest is for authenticity, and imaginative apologetics will involve helping the seeker to discern how the search for a beautiful, resonant life connects to the active presence of God.

Figure 2: Apologetic Desiderata

Aspect of Imagining

Sensing:

imagination as

aesthetic sense

Seeing:

imagination as

orienting vision

Shaping: imagination as poetic participation

Operative Question

What is worth pursuing?

Where are we?

What will we do?

Kind’s Taxonomy

Sensory Imagining

World → Mind

Propositional Imagining

Mind → World

Creative Imagining

Intermediate Space

Apologetic Desiderata

Gives methodological primacy to the aesthetic dimension

Invites exploration of a more capacious vision of the world.

Situates human projects within the larger project of God.

Orienting Question

What kind of faith

would resonate?

What would faith

feel like?

What new possibilities would faith facilitate?

This larger horizon, God’s redemptive project, requires us to reevaluate what it means to make a beautiful life. The classical understanding of beauty has to do with proportion, balance, and symmetry: things properly ordered, arranged as they should be. But the Christian understanding of beauty centers on the cross of Jesus Christ. Here is the most unique contribution of Christianity to human imagination. As Fleming Rutledge reminds us: “Until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man.”36 An instrument of torture, humiliation, and death, the cross reminds us that imaginative passion leads people not just to build and create but also to tear down and destroy. The cross forces us to recognize the ugliness and brutality of the world, and our complicity in it. It forces us to come to terms with how severely we fail to live up to our highest imagination. Celebration of the imagination, apart from a consideration of the cross, can lead only to an apologetics of glory. But it will be a lesser glory, one limited by our best imaginings. If the human imagination is never confronted and humbled by the cross, then it will be unable to imagine the deep hope that only the cross can provide.

For once the cross has humbled us, it offers us hope, precisely at the moment we least expect it and least deserve it. Indeed, in the gospel, this symbol of the worst that humans can do has been reimagined as a sign of the best that God can do.37 Whenever we place the cross on our tombstones, we do so in hope that what happened at the cross will make some difference for those who lie buried beneath the ground. The cross invites us to reimagine beauty and a beautiful life in cruciform terms. Like the Japanese art of kinsukori, it repairs our shattered hopes with gold, opening up all the possibilities of redemption. Faith in Christ does not change the past, but it can change the meaning of the past. Christian faith opens up the most capacious possible life, because it tells us that even death will be swallowed up in the end.

BEAUTIFUL, BELIEVABLE, BELIEVED

But perhaps this exploration of the beauty of faith does not go far enough. Ordway, in proposing her own imaginative method, notes where such a project runs into problems. She writes,

A challenge for imaginative apologists in the modern era, however, is that people often have difficulty moving to the next step. It is entirely possible, in this culture, that people will find the Christian faith interesting, even meaningful, yet not be interested in the question of whether or not it is true. Or, less noticeably, people may (and often do) accept Christianity only insofar as they, personally find it to be acceptable: each doctrinal point weighed and possibly rejected. Someone who accepts Christian teaching on the basis that it is beautiful and meaningful has come far, but has not come quite far enough unless he also accepts it as true—independent of his own preferences and views, even contrary to his own preferences and views. . . . We must offer a meaningful, compelling story, yes. But we must also bring people to realize that they must decide whether they believe the story also to be true.38

There is a common-sense, analytical clarity that Ordway’s distinction brings to the discussion. Finding a story beautiful is not the same as finding it believable, still less actually believing it in a way that makes a meaningful difference. When the film ends, after all, the willing suspension of disbelief is broken, and we go about our business in the “real world.” A similar danger exists for imaginative apologetics: that once the spell is broken, we go about our business having been entertained or engaged but not challenged or transformed.

And yet putting things so starkly oversimplifies the complex dynamic of what it means to believe. The line between what is beautiful and what is believable is quite porous. Beauty itself trains our sensibilities to recognize its own inner logic. Beauty is, as Robinson writes, “a conversation between humankind and reality, and we are an essential part of it, bringing to it our singular gifts of reflection and creation.”39 Indeed, to feel grasped by beauty is in some sense to assent to its truth, to allow ourselves to be touched by its goodness. Furthermore, the move from recognizing beauty and affirming truth is not a straightforwardly cognitive act. If the Christian faith is not simply a set of truths to affirm but more fundamentally a way of seeing the world (as the theater of God’s glory), then it has to do with more than convincing our intellect. It also has to do with exercising our imaginations and cultivating imaginative dispositions.40

We have already seen one of these dispositions, humility. Let us consider another: patience. God is unspeakably patient with his creation, and so we too must learn to wait and hope. Theologian Tomas Halik provocatively suggests that perhaps atheists are simply those who have grown tired of waiting for God. They want to resolve the apparent absence of God by slamming the door of belief instead of enduring it. But believers also wrestle with God’s apparent silence, inaction, and delay; when you live with faith, it does not do away with the experience of absence. Rather, faith changes how you experience it. Faith, Halik writes, is patience with God, grounded on the conviction that the experience of absence is not the deepest reality.41

How is such patience, the willingness to hold the door ajar, cultivated? Only through practices, and secondarily through their approximation in imaginative immersion. Faith, after all, is not just being convinced of propositions but being committed to practices, in which I put my life on the line trusting that the cosmos is really meaningful, authored by a God who is present and active, who wrote himself into the story in the person of Christ. Believers pray to this God, even if we do not always sense God’s presence, and the practice itself is an instantiation of our faith. Mature believers will testify to the continuing experience of doubt, of struggles to believe from one day to the next. Yet the struggle has integrity because it happens in the posture of faith, where believing and wanting to believe may be difficult to distinguish. Ordway is right: we cannot suspend disbelief forever. The Christian story, and the cross at its center, makes a claim on all who encounter it. But helping people to make the leap from agnosticism to faith will not be aided by discounting the imagination. Indeed, the move toward meaningful practice is essentially a leap of the imagination.42

TWO MORE MODELS

Everyday imaginative apologetics. For Christians, these questions are lived realities, and many believers address them with winsomeness and warmth. My wife works for a health care management company based just outside of a major city. Her irreligious coworkers find her Christian faith quaint or exotic but respect her enough to express interest. On one occasion, a coworker ventured to ask why we would indoctrinate our children with Christianity rather than allowing them to choose a religion for themselves. Melissa understood that a frame had been placed on faith; for this coworker, faith is opposed to freedom and thus should always be consciously chosen. Underneath the objection is the ethic of authenticity: people should believe what feels right to them rather than being told what to believe. Melissa’s response was to sketch an alternative picture. “That’s not really the way faith works for us,” she said. “For us, faith is the most liberating thing we have ever experienced. We feel like it is this amazing gift that we get to pass on to our children.” The coworker was stunned: “I’ve never thought of it that way.” She had never imagined that faith could feel so generative.

What Melissa had offered this friend was a glimpse of what faith feels like from the inside. The invitation to see the world through the eyes of faith affirms the value of authenticity but situates it in terms of the Christian imaginative vision, asking, “What if faith can actually set you free? What if the open space that you are looking for can actually be found in living with faith?” Melissa’s short testimony prompted her friend to reconsider what it means to live an authentic life, embodied in her concrete person. Another coworker, who describes himself as “religiously apathetic,” recently told her that her faith is “the one thing about you that doesn’t make sense.” What I think he means is that she is generous, funny, and intelligent, and this does not fit with his picture of people of faith. The cognitive dissonance created by a beautiful life is itself an imaginative provocation. It is an apologetic opening that challenges the habits of too-quickly-closed minds. The provocation invites, if not yet belief, at least the suspension of disbelief. It invites the observer to hit pause on their incredulity and to take a look.43 It invites the imaginative leap of imagination that may be already the first movement of faith.

Extended imaginative apologetics. I want to offer one more model of an imaginative approach in a traditional apologetic setting. Robert Lawrence Kuhn hosts the PBS series Closer to the Truth, which boasts the tagline, “The world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions.” In the eleventh season, Kuhn interviews Anglican priest and theologian Sarah Coakley on the question, “Why believe?”44 Kuhn begins the interview by admitting two things: that he would like to believe in God, but that he does not. So why should he believe?

Instead of turning to rational argumentation, Coakley presses him on his inclination to believe, because as she says, the arguments for God’s existence will strike him differently depending on his motivation. Coakley notes that she values such arguments but that they must be situated in terms a person’s desire. For some, the classical arguments will be necessary; for others, not so much. Arguments will not take root unless a person’s will is in some way “turned towards the reality that might lie behind them.” So instead she begins by asking Kuhn the question asked of monks upon entering the monastery: Quid petis? “What do you seek?” In other words, what is needed before the demonstration of the rationality of Christian belief is the provocation of the impulse to take the demonstration seriously. What is needed is an exploration of the desires that would draw out belief, and this is the move that Coakley makes: “Let’s say that God is reaching out to you in some way to work on this niggle that you have, that you would like to believe in God, and let’s say that there are some arenas of your life which have a sort of element of vulnerability in them, of love, of desire, of pain, where God could get in, under what conditions do you think that might lead to something?”

Two things are of note here. First, in addressing Kuhn’s question, “Why should I believe?” Coakley operates in the subjunctive mood throughout her response. She uses phrases like, “Let’s say,” and “I would ask you,” instead of directly confronting and asking him. If Kuhn chooses to engage her suppositions, he must join her in the realm of possibility. She explores the contours of a hypothetical conversation, because for them to have a real conversation Kuhn would need to acknowledge the way that he is already invested in faith and doubt.

Also, in keeping with our first essential element, Coakley is beginning with the aesthetic dimension, suggesting that it is in the spaces of longings and losses that God may be reaching out to him. But this is precisely the point of Kuhn’s resistance, and Kuhn answers that he has elements of vulnerability in all of these arenas, and this is the thing that concerns him:

I would love to believe in God because that would give meaning to the universe and to my life. It would give at least the only possible hope of a life after death. So I have every reason to want to believe in God and would like to believe in God but that’s exactly why I am concerned, because I have the desire, that the end product of that would be generated by my desire rather than by reality and the last thing I want to do is to fool myself.

Notice that Kuhn is resisting the impulse of authenticity from fear of embracing something that might be inauthentic! The same desire that draws out the inclination to believe also seems to disqualify that inclination. He is concerned that wanting to believe would be tantamount to fooling himself were he to give in. Coakley reminds him that this “rather abstract and arid view of the intellectual life” is not really accurate, because no one lives in a space uncontaminated by desire. He is also operating from the standpoint, as Coakley points out, in which he is remote and solely responsible for what he chooses to believe. But rather than further deconstructing Kuhn’s standpoint (which would follow an apologetic of despair), she instead moves in the direction of hope. She surfaces his desire for authenticity by reframing his Closer to the Truth programs as a spiritual quest: “So your quest for the deep reality of life, which seems to animate these programs, seems to me to have some spiritual dimension to it. It may not find its place in any practice of religion at the moment, but it clearly is an itch. You wouldn’t be making all these programs if you didn’t find this an ultimately fascinating question.”

In calling the program a “quest for the deep reality of life,” Coakley gives spiritual legitimacy to Kuhn’s projects and resituates them in the larger possibility that just as Kuhn reaches out to reality, that reality is also reaching out to him. This is a wonderful illustration of the third essential element, which shows how the very act of questioning joins the conversation that God is already having with creation.

It is at this point that Coakley says that she would bring in rational arguments, though she does not do so directly in the interview. Her point is that the arguments for God would not matter until the desire is engaged and oriented toward the possibility of God. She says she would be “very happy to lay out a range of arguments why it seems to me very rational to believe in God, including profoundly experiential reasons.” But after laying out these arguments, she says that she would return to the existential question that frames the entire quest:

Then I would ask you the big existential question, which is “where are true joys to be found?” Which is to circle back to that question, what are you seeking? Because if these arguments simply add up to a range of arid, abstract possibilities, then they are not grabbing you existentially in the way that they would if you were prepared to put your life on the line in terms of practices. Because I as a priest, as a believer, find that it is in silent waiting on God that ultimate, transcendent reality impinges on me. And every time I do that I think of it as a sort of rehearsal for the moment when I have to give over control, which will be the moment I die. And as a priest I think that rehearsing for death is one of the most important things we do as humans, because when we’re no longer afraid of death, we’re no longer afraid of life.

And here Coakley fulfills the second essential element, inviting Kuhn to glimpse the world through her eyes. She invites him to see: “as a priest, as a believer,” here is what I find. Since he is unable or unwilling to put his “life on the line in terms of practices,” she allows him to vicariously experience the presence and solace that she feels in surrendering to God. The invitation itself is a series of imaginative provocations. What if in silent waiting you could experience God’s presence? What if you could rehearse for death by surrendering every day? What if freedom from the fear of death could lead to a more liberated life?

Coakley offers an example of what imaginative apologetics looks like even with an interlocutor that is resistant to the provocations of desire. She begins and ends with the aesthetic dimension that situates his unbelief, reframes his creative projects in terms of a spiritual quest, and offers a vision of life through the eyes of faith. Insofar as she operates in the subjunctive mood, she does not force her vision of reality upon him. Rather she offers the generative possibility of belief, which has the power to shift the paradigms of doubt. She makes space for the classical arguments, but she begins and ends with the aesthetic dimension, asking the question, “What do you seek”? For it is only once this question is becoming clear that the practices and professions of Christian faith will begin to have purchase. The provocations of desire lead to a consideration of the new possibilities that faith facilitates, which in turn invites the seeker to put her life on the line and take the leap.

CONCLUSION: IMAGINATION, MYSTERY, AND HOPE

Opportunities to sketch such a comprehensive response to the question, “Why believe?” may not come as frequently for the rest of us as for Coakley. And yet all believers are called to “give the reason for the hope that [we] have . . . with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet 3:15). Notice that it is Christian hope—the confidence in a not-yet-realized future reality breaking into the present—we are answering for, not just extracted Christian truths. Certainly, the conviction that “these things happened” grounds Christian hope (1 Pet 1:3). But the starting point of answering for our hope is not proving its ground. It is showing the way that hope generates a fully authentic life. Indeed, the apostle assumes that embodied Christian witness is always already generating the kind of dissonance that challenges perceptions and leads to questions.

But apologetic theology, like all theology, is not primarily about giving answers, even if that is an important part of the pedagogy of faith. Theology is, as Thomas Weinandy puts it, less about solving problems than discerning mysteries.45 Theology is grounded in our exploration of mysteries that are open secrets: the mystery of God’s work in Christ (1 Tim 3:16), the mystery of our inclusion in Israel’s story (Eph 3:6), and the mystery of the gospel (Eph 6:19). These things are mysteries, not because we know nothing about them, but because we are just beginning to explore the ways that God’s plan to renew all of creation opens up new possibilities for life in God’s world. To extend this exploration in the direction of apologetics means to move toward the world with faith seeking understanding. It means discerning the surprising presence of God’s Spirit at work within and among the imaginative impulses of human beings who have been made in God’s image.

Taking the imagination seriously has great promise for the contemporary apologetic task. Insofar as it casts an inhabitable vision, cultivates empathic understanding, and creates space for negotiating difference, reimagining apologetics offers a salutary resource for bridging gaps in apologetic communication. A life of faith, after all, is less like an intellectual achievement and more like a work of art—a work of imagination. As such, it requires a sense of receptivity and a sense of responsibility. Such a work remains rooted in reality. We find ourselves hurled onto a stage we did not make, confronted by the givenness of things. But we must also take authentic ownership of our lives, making something that is attuned to the beauty, goodness, and truth that we find. In a certain sense authoring some sort of imaginative project is unavoidable. So too the call of reimagining apologetics is not just to tell beautiful stories but, by God’s grace, to cultivate beautiful lives. Such lives may give a sense of something greater, offering resonance for smaller stories to be taken up in the story of God.

Hope, after all, has a definite object. The goal of a story is not just to take the characters on a journey but ultimately to arrive with them at a more spacious place. For Lewis as well, the baptism of his imagination was only the beginning. As his character John finds in The Pilgrim’s Regress, “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live.”46 If there is some other end for a reimagined apologetic, surely it is penultimate to this one.