From creative storytelling (see any of Jesus’ parables) to hymn-singing to poetry slams, God’s revelation refuses the confines of any single genre. The world beyond the wardrobe demands some serious attention, and Christians are uniquely qualified to give it just that.
Reclaiming God’s Playground: Poetry, Truth, and the Christian Imagination
Which of these statements is more true?
- “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared” (Luke 24:1).
- “The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs” (Psalm 114:4).
If the answer seems obvious, you may have some fundamentalist in your blood.
In his 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win,” Pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick articulated the fundamentalist-modernist controversy sweeping the U.S. in the early 20th century. A self-proclaimed modernist with liberal leanings, Fosdick believed that the foundational difference between his fundamentalist opponents and his own view could be described in terms of the relationship between “new” knowledge and the historic dogma of the church.
For Fosdick, modernists believed that “the new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination.” He cites the switch from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe as one example of this, in which the church was forced to reinterpret biblical passages in light of new scientific discoveries. Modernists set the limits of orthodoxy comparatively wide, while fundamentalists, on the other hand, drove the doctrinal stakes in more fiercely around a much smaller tent. According to Fosdick, they [the fundamentalists] “would set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the pope’s.” The specific “tent pegs” he mentions are the virgin birth, the historicity of miracles, the doctrine of inspiration, the substitutionary atonement, and premillennialism.
His issue is not so much with the fundamentalist hermeneutic. After all, it’s a free country! His issue is with the intolerance that such a view breeds toward those who think differently, effectively drawing an arbitrary line in the sand between “true” and “false” Christians. The rest of his sermon is an apologetic for the modernist position, as he seeks to pull out the fundamentalist tent pegs one by one—all in the name of Christian love: “…there is one thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.” In other words, intolerance is the one unforgivable sin.
Fosdick’s sermon fails on several fronts, chiefly because he fails to engage the fundamentalist arguments on biblical grounds. Instead, he simply dismisses them on the grounds that, since a wide variety of opinions exists, Christians cannot land anywhere definitively. In a kind of precursor to postmodernism, Fosdick argues for (or at least strongly implies) the unknowability of truth. Since we cannot know without certainty, Christians should cease tithing their mint and cumin and get on with the real business of righting societies wrongs and working for justice—which was, in his view, the essence of Christianity.
In other words, the Christian faith is law and not gospel. Ultimately, it is this lack of Christocentricity that is modernism's true downfall. While the sermon is helpful in clarifying the differences between the two camps, it is saccharine and sentimental (in both tone and content) and ultimately fails the litmus test of creedal Christianity. Whether the fundamentalists “won” in the sense that Fosdick meant is up for debate. What is certain, however, is that they did not lose.
But there is more than one way to lose, which brings us back to my initial question: Which of these statements is more true? Luke 24:1 or Psalm 114:4? The quotation from Luke is historical, employing chronology, objects, and characters to describe events that occurred in real time. The Psalmist, on the other hand, is not speaking primarily in historical terms. Instead, he is using literary devices (namely, simile and personification) to communicate something about God’s nature.
Neither the Psalmist nor Luke the Physician spoke more true than the other. Both speak God’s authoritative, inspired, and inerrant Word. They simply communicate truth in different terms: one historically, the other literarily. If we were to change the question to: “Which of these two statements do you like more?” those of the left-brained variety would gravitate toward the statement from Luke’s gospel, while those of the right-brained variety would gravitate toward the Psalm. Again, neither is more true. It’s simply that God’s truth is communicated in a multiplicity of ways.
As products of the Enlightenment, we often fail to appreciate this. And as modern Westerners, the very notion of poetry and prose attaining to the same level of truth as history is—at times—practically incomprehensible. It just seems to be a truism that empirically verifiable facts are worth more than a few flowery words and some cute parallelism. Cold, hard, objective evidence withstands the test of time in a way that typology—for example—cannot. The presupposition seems to be that the more tightly language fits the mold of direct, didactic discourse, the nearer you are to the heart of God.
The problem with this is, of course, that roughly 1/3 of the Bible is poetry. That’s a lot. Statistically speaking, one out of every three words in the Bible fits well within the genre of a poem (overwhelmingly of the Hebrew variety), which is characterized by meter, rhythm, assonance, metaphor, simile, and other tools in the poet’s toolbox. That is to say, poetry is not objective in the same way that history is objective. Certainly, the poetry of the Bible is anchored to objective truth, but the means by which that truth is imbibed is more subjective in nature.
Good poetry, like any good art, makes you feel things. It involves the heart as well as the head, because we are not simply brains on a stick, but flesh-and-blood creatures made in the image of God with desires and affections. We not only know, but love, and poetry is perhaps the best love language. For whatever reason, God chose poetry as one of his primary vehicles for revelation, which means that the poetry, prose, and songs we encounter in the Bible are not separate from truth but are instead the very form that embodies it—on par with any sort of historical discourse. Simply because a particular verse traffics in imagery rather than history does not make it any less truthful. Rather, God’s truth comes to us in a variety of ways.
One of the weaknesses of the fundamentalist position, which Fosdick rightly critiqued, was its tendency toward literalism. Literalism has been described by some (controversially) as the greatest enemy to biblical interpretation. In its effort to defend Christian truth-claims, fundamentalism unwittingly relegated poetry and prose to a 2nd-class genre. They became simply the decoration on the “cake” of historicity. Beautiful, to be sure, but not entirely necessary. Aesthetically pleasing but conveying little substance. Sure, artistic endeavors may be playful and fun, but that sort of open-ended language was just too risky to bear the weight of God’s revelation. So, because of its subjective nature, the playground of poetry was abandoned. Fundamentalists thought it best to stick to the facts and leave all the art to the postmodernists. After all, playgrounds are dangerous, and someone could get hurt. We can’t just let people run around willy-nilly!
But here’s the thing: Even playgrounds have rules. Speaking from experience, the boundaries of my elementary school playground were clearly delineated with railroad ties. If you stood on the pea rocks, you were in the playground. If you stepped off the pea rocks, you were outside of it. When it came to the monkey bars, there was no pushing and shoving allowed. Any infraction was met with the shrill whistle of the playground supervisor. The slide was for sliding. The tire swing was for swinging. The teeter-totter was for teeter-tottering. Everything had a purpose. Play need not imply anarchy. Whether it was using our imaginations to build snow forts or engaging in a full-contact game of king-of-the-hill, we learned many, many things during our time on that playground that we couldn’t have learned in the classroom.
Christianity is always at its best when it is willing to engage God on his terms. Whether those terms are historic or literary, courtroom or playground, empirical facts or metaphor, the God of Scripture communicates his truth in a profusion of ways. When we avoid the playground for fear of breaking an arm, we miss out on the playfulness of our Heavenly Father, who never tires of throwing his children in his arms and catching them again and again. He loves to see His boys and girls joyfully playing on the equipment he made for them. As Chesterton speculates: “It may be that He [God] has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore” (Orthodoxy, 1908).
While historical fundamentalism may have successfully resisted the headwinds of modernism, winds often change without warning. Christians lose not only by sacrificing the fundamentals of the faith, but by letting God’s playground gather rust. We would do well to reclaim the playground in Christ's name. From creative storytelling (see any of Jesus’ parables) to hymn-singing to poetry slams, God’s revelation refuses the confines of any single genre. The world beyond the wardrobe demands some serious attention, and Christians are uniquely qualified to give it just that.
