1. This background for belief has been given other names, which share a family resemblance: paradigm (Kuhn), épistémè (Foucault), and plausibility structure (Berger). Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy; Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967). I have avoided the term worldview since that term can be mistakenly focused on the beliefs themselves. See this critique in James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).
2. I have been helped along enormously by the work of James K. A. Smith, whose Cultural Liturgies project first caused me to ask this question. See James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013).
3. Holly Ordway, Apologetics and Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith. (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2017), 169.
4. Ordway, Apologetics and Christian Imagination, 158. Emphasis original.
5. See the classic work by H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975).
6. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America (Memphis: Basic Books, 1992); Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008).
7. As Robinson puts it: “Is secularism on the march as we are told so often? Is the word secularism actually descriptive or useful? The old Protestantism I have invoked believed that God was continuously attentive to every human mind and soul. Is there another doctrine among us now?” Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson, eds., Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 174. See an excellent parallel discussion in Andrew Root, Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 106-9.
8. Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 40.
9. Fujimura, Culture Care, 51.
10. Fujimura, Culture Care, 61.
11. Fujimura, Culture Care, 56.
12. Rolland Hein, George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1999), 22.
13. Whereas in chapter three I discussed them in logical order (seeing, sensing, shaping), in this chapter I will discuss them in phenomenological order (sensing, seeing, shaping), reflecting our usual imaginative experience of the world.
14. Note David Morgan’s definition of the aesthetic: “the sensuous, imagined, or more broadly speaking, the embodied experience of meaning, whose significance is measured in feeling no less than in intellectual content.” David Morgan, “Protestant Visual Piety and the Aesthetics of American Mass Culture,” in Mediating Religion: Studies in Media, Religion, and Culture, ed. Jolyon P. Mitchell and Sophia Marriage (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 107.
15. Jared Hess, Jack Black, David Klawans, Julia Pistor, Mike White, Jerusha Hess, and Peter Stormare, Nacho Libre (Paramount Pictures, 2006).
16. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 4.
17. César De la Luzerne, Instruction Pastorale Sur L’excellence de La Religion (Langres, 1786), 5.
18. George MacDonald, There and Back (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1991), 226-27.
19. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2006), 246.
20. I am indebted to my colleague Mark Tazelaar both for articulating this point about humility and surprise, and for modeling it.
21. George MacDonald, God’s Words to His Children: Sermons Spoken and Unspoken (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887), 116.
22. On divine empathy see Richard Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 39.
23. Karsten R. Steuber, “Empathy and the Imagination,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind (London: Routledge, 2016), 368. Indeed a widely used assessment tool for measuring empathy uses fantasy as a subscale, understood as “the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional situations.” Mark H. Davis, “A Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy,” JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents In Psychology 10 (1980): 85-104.
24. As Steuber writes, “The greater the difference between individuals and the greater the cultural gap between them, particularly regarding well-entrenched cognitive habits and value commitments, the harder it becomes to reenact them and to appropriately quarantine our attitudes from the imaginative engagement with another person’s perspective.” Steuber, “Empathy and the Imagination,” 375.
25. Steuber, “Empathy and the Imagination,” 377.
26. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989), 7.
27. To speak the Christian story in a new language assumes, as Jennings writes “a life lived in submersion and submission to another’s cultural realities.” Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 266. To use Paul Ricoeur’s language, imaginative translation of the Christian vision necessitates not just a refiguration in the world of the recipient but also the reciprocal refiguration in the world of the messenger in response to the agency of the audience. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 76.
28. This, Jennings argues, is the true work of Christian translation: “The story of Israel connected to Jesus can crack open a life so that others, strangers, even colonized strangers begin to seep inside and create cultural alienation for the translator and even more, deep desire for those who speak native words.” Jennings, Christian Imagination, 165-66
29. George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996), 317.
30. MacDonald, Dish of Orts, 320.
31. MacDonald, Dish of Orts, 25.
32. Sarah Fay, “The Art of Fiction No. 198,” The Paris Review, no. 186 (Fall 2008), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5863/marilynne-robinson-the-art-of-fiction-no-198-marilynne-robinson.
33. I understand reimagining apologetics as an extension of what William Dyrness calls “poetic theology,” which seeks to make sense of the way that “human longing for a good (even beautiful) life inclines people inevitably to shape poetic practices . . . to find a way to flourish beyond what is given in life.” The poetic approach seeks to discern the theological significance of these poetic practices—“those projects that embody the desires and dreams around which people orient their lives”—and hopes to reorient the quest for beauty, goodness, and meaning within the project of God, what God is making of humanity and the world. I might have called the project pursued in this book poetic apologetics, insofar as it seeks to reshape apologetic methodology with poetic theology. Nevertheless, I also want to emphasize the earlier two dimensions as well: the paradigmatic power of imaginative vision and the dynamic power of desire. Both of these aspects of imagining situate the poetic space in which a person pursues a meaningful and beautiful life. Dyrness himself situates his work as a kind of “apologetic theology,” reflecting “on the presence and purposes of God in relation to cultural patterns and trends.” William Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 6.
34. See an exposition of this in Curtis Chang, Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine and Aquinas (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007).
35. Waking the conscience wakes the imagination, and in both spaces MacDonald wants to show how the Spirit of God draws the seeker to behold the good and beautiful God: “He that will do the will of THE POET, shall behold the Beautiful.” MacDonald, Dish of Orts, 36.
36. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 1.
37. This turn of phrase is from Malcolm Guite: “In a daring and beautiful creative reversal, God takes the worst we can do to him and turns it into the very best he can do for us.” Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness (London: Canterbury Press, 2014), 8.
38. Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, 152-55.
39. Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 217.
40. Penner writes that Christianity is a hermeneutical paradigm: “The reason I accept Christian faith, then, is it enables me to interpret my life fruitfully and the world meaningfully through the practices, categories, and language of Christian faith, so that I have a more authentic understanding of myself and a sense of wholeness to my life.” Myron Penner, The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 76.
41. Tomas Halik, Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us, trans. Gerald Turner (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
42. I found this lovely phrase in Rupert Shortt, “Review Article: How Christianity Invented Modernity,” Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 2016, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/at-the-prow-of-history/.
43. This is Coleridge’s phrase for describing “poetic faith.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (London: Routledge, 1983), 174.
44. All quotes in this section are from this interview for the “Why Believe in God?” episode of the public program Closer to the Truth, which was released on July 14, 2015.
45. Thomas G. Weinandy, “Doing Christian Systematic Theology: Faith, Problems, and Mysteries,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002): 120-38. I am thankful to Rich Mouw for alerting me to Weinandy’s distinction.
46. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 196.