The Apologetics of Imagination

The past few years have seen an avalanche of Christian considerations of our current cultural moment, with scholars offering models for how Christians can maintain their faith in the private and public spheres. Prominent examples include Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option and Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. These authors would generally agree that the West has entered a post-Christian age, where many people are not only indifferent toward orthodox Christianity, but openly hostile to its propositions and adherents. 

Such authors differ on when they think society went wrong: Roman Catholic and Orthodox scholars tend to believe the Reformation and its late medieval antecedents soured the pot, while Protestants often see the Enlightenment as the beginning of the end of the Christian West. But this relatively standard narrative—that Christianity was once ascendent but has been increasingly forsaken until reaching our current cultural nadir—has challengers. 

In his work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor critiqued the “subtraction story”: the idea that the scientific advances of the Enlightenment made faith obsolete and thus led inevitably toward secularization. Tom Holland’s book Dominion traced the influence of Christian ideas from the first century A.D. to the present. He concluded that secular liberalism is in fact based upon Christian ideas and is best thought of as a Christian heresy rather than an entirely opposed religion.

Which of these analyses we favor will affect how we think about evangelization. If those who are not orthodox Christians are essentially pagans, implacably opposed to all that orthodox Christianity represents, then we will struggle to connect them to the truths of the gospel. But if Tom Holland is right, and the Progressive trends of the moment are born of Christian principles (even as they pervert them), then we have a basis for common discussion with our neighbors. In fact, we may find some persons who are receptive to a more consistent Christianity rather than the inconsistent one pedaled by Western pop culture.

But how should we have those discussions?

Telling Stories, Baptizing Imaginations

God alone can save. Unless the Spirit of God regenerates a person, granting them the gift of faith, an individual will not embrace the gospel. So no strategy we devise will ever bear an ounce of fruit without the power of God. We cannot argue or charm a person into his kingdom.

Nevertheless, God is pleased to use us as his instruments. He commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel, giving testimony to the hope within us. How should we do that?

Over the past few years, I have begun to think of our engagements with those outside the Church less in terms of competing metaphysical arguments and more in terms of competing stories. Human beings are storytellers, even as God is a storyteller. The stories we craft help us to understand the world around us. They shape and reflect our deepest desires, propelling us in one direction or another. Therefore, when we share the gospel with someone, we are essentially presenting them with a different story than the one they usually hear.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Justin Ariel Bailey of Dordt University about his book, Reimagining Apologetics. The ideas he presented in that work were an amalgamation of things I had been reading for years, but they came together in a way that made a great impact on me. Bailey sees the hostility of many Westerners toward orthodox Christianity as a kind of imaginative deficiency: they cannot envision what it would be like to lead a faithful Christian life or what benefits it would have. And imagination, he argues, is key to the development of faith.

“Doubters require more than good arguments. They require an aesthetic sense, an imaginative vision, and a poetic embodiment of Christianity … By reimagining apologetics, I mean simply an approach that takes the imaginative context of belief seriously. Such an approach prepares the way for Christian faith by provoking desire, exploring possibility, and casting an inhabitable Christian vision.” [1]

Bailey points to the fiction of Marilynne Robinson and George MacDonald as works that draw one into the Christian imagination. MacDonald was heavily influential on C.S. Lewis, who described his first reading of MacDonald’s fairy tales thus: “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.” [2]

The idea that our imaginations too need to experience baptism—that our humble stories can point people to what was once called The Greatest Story Ever Told—was particularly impactful for me as a writer. I now see everything I write, including the historical novels, as apologetic works. After all, our Lord spent a lot of time telling stories: parables that revealed truths to those in whom the Spirit worked.

Sadly, Christians in the West have not always done a good job of sharing our story. Telling great stories takes serious investment, a subject on which I could pontificate at length. But in our hearts, we often doubt that we truly have a great story to tell. We assume that people will reject us out of hand, spit on us, and remove us from polite society. Yet, in my interactions with non-Christians, I find plenty of ways to connect with them. Most people are utterly exhausted from the constant performance act that is life in the 21^st century. They want to know that there is one who knows them fully yet loves them perfectly. They want to know that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and that they do not have to earn their salvation. Tragically, many people are unaware that this is the Christian story, because it is not the story we have been telling them. 

Christians taught the world to care about injustice, love our neighbors, and recognize the inherent dignity of those who bear the image of God. Christianity was the inspiration for many of the rights so cherished by believers and unbelievers alike. There are numerous avenues through which we could show people the beauty of the Christian life and point them toward the gospel, but we are often too fearful and angry to seek such opportunities.

I believe that, in the words of Christ, the fields are ripe for harvest. Yes, I have fears like everyone else. The world is full of evils, but I know the gospel will never be snuffed out and the gates of Hades will not prevail against the Church of Jesus Christ. Our cultural moment is filled with challenges, but also possibilities. If we believe that ours is truly the greatest story ever told, then we must share that story in creative ways and allow it to change the desires of its hearers. For when the gospel transforms lives, that is an awful lot like changing the world.