The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.
– Emily Dickinson
Spokane has joined in the billboard wars. As Thomas J. Brown reported a few weeks back on SpokaneFAVS, our city is the latest in which an atheist group has purchased advertising to argue, among other things, that “Truth is real; God is imaginary.” I’m familiar with advertisements of this sort from the previous cities in which in I have lived. At Christmastime in San Francisco, atheists bought billboards on which they displayed a painting of the holy family and the caption, “You know it’s a myth.” And, in my hometown of Vancouver, BC, a similar group bought placards on buses which read, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: Allah • Bigfoot • UFOs • Homeopathy • Zeus • Psychics • Christ.”
It’s probably no surprise that, as a Christian, I am not big a fan of these campaigns. What might surprise you, however, is the substance of my objection to them. It doesn’t so much bother me that these advertisements reject God (for the record: yes, you can be a good person without going to church). Nor am I all that troubled by the binary choice they posit between reason and religion (this is simply a false dilemma, much like insisting on a choice between calculus and Mozart). What does bug me is that the advertisers’ decision to set truth and imagination in opposition to one another.
Prior to becoming a priest, I worked as a stage manager. That is to say, I spent thousands of hours sitting in a dark room helping grownups pretend to be people whom they were not. It was a career devoted to the imagination. Over my years backstage, one thing never stopped amazing me: night after night, people left the theater having understood something profound about hope, loss, meaning, beauty, and more. What happened in that dark room was both entirely made-up and entirely real.
Religion is the original theater. For the 200 millennia or so that human beings have walked the earth, we have gathered to tell one another tales of divine mystery. Every Sunday in church we do the same: we get together to put on a dramatization of the incarnation. We sing songs, we share stories, and we wonder about possibility.
To be clear, pretty much everyone around me in church recognizes that our Sunday drama does not to speak to things found in that modern category known as the fact. There is no reproducible experiment which will yield the answer, “God,” much as there is none which will prove that one person loves another (given that John tells us that “God is love,” that probably makes good sense). Simultaneously, we affirm that there are objective truths which the enlightenment model for encountering reality is entirely incapable of measuring. God belongs in this category.
As with all plays, the goal of the Sunday assembly is not to marshal evidence or to provide hypotheses. Rather, it is to respond to that strange and awesome clarity which we touch at the birth of a child, the death of a friend, or still another moment of deep wonder. It is to craft metaphor, symbol, story, song, and paradox: the great tools of the imagination. For, as the mystics know, it is only through the window of the imagination that God may be glimpsed.
There are atheists who celebrate the importance of the imagination, who do not diminish it by contrasting it with truth (consider the marvelous children’s writer, Philip Pullman). It is my hope that the authors of Spokane’s new billboards might follow their example and choose to do likewise. Celebrating the imagination offers many gifts, not the least of which is a deeper understanding of one’s neighbor. This understanding allows us some insight, for instance, into why an actor might choose to devote her life to make-believe. It also casts a little light on why someone like me might think that Spokane’s new billboards get things only half right: Yes, God is imaginary. But God is also true.
Wonderful! Oh, thank you Martin! I have struggled to articulate these very things to my congregations. Beautifully putQ
Awesome, I loved it also! Thank you! Atheists aren’t the only ones who get religion wrong in this way. Fundamentalist Christians have the same problem.
Rev Elfert confuses people having a ‘real’ experience by attending a play – or going to church – with that experience having a real ground in reality. Plays, music, literature, arts, etc can provoke insight and emotions, but this does not mean that those insights and emotions always comport well with reality. Personally, I think Shakespeare’s plays provide some great and timeless insights into the human condition – but they also convey racism and sexism and other undesirable values. Some churches provide very powerful emotional experiences while they convey that homosexuals are demon-possessed or that Jesus wants you to have material excess. Imagination is great, but there are far more ways to imagine falsehood than truth. If one cares about the difference, then imagination by itself will not sufice.
Thanks for your comment, Livingelectrically! I’ll admit that I’m at something of a loss as to how to reply: you are vigorously rebutting a case that I simply didn’t make. I neither argued that the imagination by itself might suffice (I’m guessing that by “suffice,” you mean sufficient for encountering the great questions of life) nor that the fruits of the imagination, such as Shakespeare or liturgy, ought to be consumed uncritically.
My argument is that the authors of Spokane’s billboards erred by engaging in binary reasoning. To reply to them by stating that imagination could function as a stand-alone tool for navigating reality (I’m not sure what that would even look like – how would you avoid walking into walls?) would be to make the very same error, albeit in reverse. Rather, I see the factual and the imaginative as having a complementary relationship to one another. Every great science experiment, for instance, begins with someone saying, “what if?”
Let’s agree that taking anything seriously – the arts, the church, the sciences, and so forth – necessitates being willing to criticise it. Every company which embarks on mounting the “Merchant of Venice” must decide how to name and respond to its racial caricature (see Mark Leiren-Young’s “Shylock” as a particularly thoughtful example of such a response). Every church, when it wakes up to its complicity in bigotry and economic injustice, must to do the same. Indeed, each of us is called to do this work of naming and responding to our failings in our own lives, both so that we may become more just people and so that we may live more fully.
Finally, there is no means of either proving or disproving your case that imagination leads us to falsehood more often than truth. We’re just going to have to leave that one to the imagination.
Rev. Elfert, you have a great mind and a very interesting way of writing that demands some thinking which I enjoy. I myself am one of those fundamentalist Christians who bring up all sorts of pesky arguments when it comes to truth and reason and such. I like your tone and subtle sense of humor which I could do well to learn from. I do have a couple comments that you might respond to.
First, I would wonder if you yourself are a firm believer in the Scriptures being true (your comment about calculus vs. Mozart seems to imply that the Scriptures cannot be subjected to reasonable discussion, maybe I’m misunderstanding you).
I would also say that the gathering of believers on Sunday not only could be, but should be a time to marshal evidence with the view to teaching believers how to contend earnestly for the faith, as Jude appeals for us to do in verse 6. But this is what Bruce would probably say is part of my problem, by bringing everything to Scripture, eh Bruce?
Anyway, I enjoyed your post and am looking forward to hearing more of what you have to say!
Thanks for your very kind comments, Dennis!
Regarding scripture, I don’t think I can sum up my beliefs any better than the folks who wrote the Book of Common Prayer did: “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” Taking scripture seriously as God’s Word insists that we both study it and have reasonable discussions about it. In the Episcopal tradition, for instance, we often speak of the importance of encountering scripture as informed by tradition, by reason, and (depending on which folks you read) by experience.
Regarding church as a place in which we are called to marshal evidence, I think this question turns entirely on what we mean by “evidence.” Evidence, as the term is popularly used today, tends to speak to accumulating facts, engaging in studies, and conducting reproducible experiments. While we can do a little bit of that with respect to our faith (consider what we have learned via archeological work in the Mediterranean), we run into limits pretty quickly – there is no empirical means of proving or disproving the claims of the Gospel beyond the broadest record which tells us that there was an historical person by the name of Jesus. Thus, looking for this kind of evidence will quickly become a frustrating exercise.
It is a different matter, however, if what we mean by marshaling evidence is providing the Body of Christ with stories and arguments which make the case that the Gospel is transformational and that it invites us into a life of deepened meaning, agency, healing, compassion, joy, and so on. In that case, yes, marshaling evidence is absolutely the job of the Church.
Martin,
Thanks for responding to my question. I used to attend a denominational church in another city and that sounds very similar to their approach in terms of the reason, tradition and experience. I’m glad to hear your commitment to taking it seriously, our times really demand it, I’d say.
I was in LifeWay Christian book store over the weekend and in the theology section I ran across a book by Josh McDowell that I thought of again while reading your paragraph about the limits of finding empirical evidence for our faith. I was extremely impressed with the scholarly and quite voluminous content of the book. I think the title was Evidence for Our Faith, volume 2, but not sure about that.
I am thinking of purchasing and studying what he has to say and I’d be interested in your having a look at it to see what you think. Blessings.