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Mistake 1: Imagination as Escape

Here the imagination is trivialized, cast as mere amusement or distraction meant to provide us with an escape from the humdrum of the everyday.  We might escape by way of our own daydreams or so-called “creative hobbies,” or by way of entertainment produced by creative types, probably in the form of TV or movies, or possibly even in the form of a novel, as long as it’s a page-turner. In this understanding imagination has no expansive qualities or positive social benefit.  It’s simply white noise meant to mask the din of the everyday.  Imagination might in some sense “take us out of ourselves,” but not for the purpose of expansion or improvement, but merely for the feeling of escape.  We emerge from our imaginative experiences, whether by way of consumption or production, like we emerge from a carnival full of spinning lights and clatter.  We stumble home at once light-headed and heavy, left woozy from the spinning rides and lethargic from sugar spikes and crashes. We might be satisfied in some sense, but imagination has made no demands of us.

Mistake 2:  Imagination as Madness

Here the imagination is feared. The fear recognizes imagination’s ability to take us out of ourselves, but dreads where that path might end.  We have seen enough greasy and wild haired geniuses to know that unrestrained imagination is nothing but a path to madness. And so we demand that imagination bend its knee to sovereign reason.  Once muzzled and tamed, imagination might serve reason the king but the Mad Hatter must never wear the crown. Artistic masterpieces serve as backdrop to political and social galas, or worse still as decoration for mouse-pads and coffee mugs.  Songs, some heart wrenching, some subversive, are invoked to sell cars, insurance, clothes, lifestyles, pills, ad nauseam. Fear is overcome by domestication. Imagination is neutered and declawed.

Mistake 3: Imagination as True Freedom

Here the imagination is exalted.  And here again imagination is pitted against reason.  In this understanding reason is something like a staid and unyielding governess, interested simply in rules and order. In a more extreme form, reason is a something like a sadistic nun bent on humiliation.  Only in rebellion against the rule of reason is there freedom. The Dionysian, the Romantic, and the myriad forms of the Bohemian all drink deeply from this wine skin.  And so the carnival becomes not a distraction from life in general, but the center of life itself.  There is no end to the revelry, and imagination becomes an end in itself, so that reason is not domesticated, but dismissed.  Reason is in exile while the Mad Hatter rules the kingdom. And this is the madness those who make the second mistake so fear.

Though each mistake is distinct, in each mistake, a god is made.  Escape becomes a god in the first mistake, reason in the second, and imagination in the third.   They all exalt the wrong thing because all three mistakes fail to consider how imagination and creativity might be used to serve our Creator.  Moreover, in these reflections, another question emerges.  What is the proper relation between imagination and reason?  Is there no reconciliation between the two?  To be sure there are real tensions between imagination and reason.  They are tumultuous brothers.  Like Jacob and Esau they battle for the birthright.  But can peace be negotiated?

When we piece together the puzzle of humanity, where does imagination fit?  Is it something like an anonymous piece of sky or ocean, that is turned and turned in our hands, only to be slammed into place somewhere in background, or, worse still, abandoned in the box?  Or if the Fall is something like a shipwreck, is imagination simply left adrift, while everything else we call human is gathered in the rafts?

Though we have had our share of imaginative geniuses, of poets and composers, of novelists, sculptors, and painters, as well as  creative entrepreneurs, explorers, politicians, and policy makers, the Church, it seems, has not really answered the question of the imagination.  In the unfolding drama of the church age, it seems the imagination has most often been cast as the villain or the fool, as Shylock or Falstaff. In which case, the imagination is something either to be repressed, restrained, even incarcerated, or perhaps  endured, tolerated, or perhaps occasionally  enjoyed. It seems we almost never ask what the shape of a Spirit-fueled imagination might be.

By contrast, we think we know what redeemed reason looks like, and for many it is reason alone that has remained untainted by the Fall.  But when you take Creation seriously, that it is good, and Ah, very good, then you must take the Fall just as seriously.  Nothing that makes up a person, not reason, not the will, not the mind, not the heart, not the imagination, emerged unscathed from the Fall.  The Fall is merciless–its stain is pervasive.

And I have known its stain.  When I think about how I daily use my imagination, I am ashamed.  When fueled by pride my imagination weaves tales of power and conquest.  By way of daydreams,  I come to inhabit something like a fairy-tale world of infinite wealth and affirmation, where I am the victor, the  hero, the king, and the conqueror.  When fueled by fear my imagination betrays me. I become an exile in a wasteland where health slips away, friends disappear, family dies, and love withers.  Peopled with swindlers and killers, cheats and liars, the fear-fueled imagination becomes a sort of prison in my own mind.  This not to mention the lust fueled imagination turning its tricks in my heart.

But even more I have known redemption.  Knowing the darkness of my own imagination on one hand, and my desire to serve the Church with a sanctified imagination on the other, over the next few posts I want to wrestle with the question of the Christian imagination.  What would does a Spirit-fueled imagination look like? What sorts of things does it produce?  Or to use Wolter’s language, what was the original “creational goodness” of the imagination?  What was its structure?  And how might it be regained and outpaced in redemption?

We deal with the consequences of forgetfulness every day. When we forget to set our alarms, we might end up being late for work.  When we forget where we put our keys, we might have to tear apart our homes to find them.  When we forget people’s names, we might stumble our way through a social encounter to avoid embarrassment. Taken together these examples are more frustrating than dire, but what of forgotten birthdays and anniversaries, what of forgotten lessons learned, what of forgotten times and places? In forgetting these things we might lose the trust of others, but even more so we might even lose ourselves.  From the minute to the grand, much of life hinges on our ability to remember. Our life in Christ is no different.

Psalm 95 is a meditation on spiritual forgetfulness and its consequences.  Throughout the Psalm the Psalmist continually implores us to remember the works and ways of the Lord, and by way of example he sketches the consequences of forgetfulness from the story of Israel.  At Meribah the people of Israel stood on the other side of redemption.  They had been brought out of Egypt by the mighty hand of the Lord and had been delivered from bondage.  But when they lacked water, instead of listening to the voice of the Lord and trusting his ways, they listened instead to their own thirst.  And in this they forgot the Lord, and in their forgetting they hardened their hearts.

Today, the psalmist says, today, the Lord is speaking, and unlike the people of Israel before us, we must not forget the Lord because a forgetting heart is a hard heart. By way of exhortation the Psalmist reminds us of the works and ways of the Lord both in creation and in redemption. We must first remember that the Lord is our maker, that “in his hand are the depths of the earth,” and that “the sea is his, for he made it.”  And we must also remember that in redemption he has made us “the people of his pasture” (v. 7). But our remembering must never be a cold rehearsal of facts.  For the church, worship must be our means of memory.   By way of worship we  rehearse the drama of creation and redemption, and in so doing we remember the Lord as creator and as savior.  Worhsip is how we remind our forgetting hearts of his works and ways.

This is why we must sing.  This is why we must hear the word proclaimed.  This is why we must partake of the sacraments.  Without these appointed means, without worship, we will forget, and we will grow hard.  In this way the liturgy of the church is the antidote to our own lethargy.  And when we do forget we must rehearse his goodness all the more by remembering the Lord’s mercy in our forgetting.  Even at Meribah he showed his mercy.  Though the people forgot, the Lord did not, and in his kindness he made the bitter water sweet.  In the work of Christ, the Lord has made all our bitter waters sweet.  Today it is his voice we hear.  And today it is his name we praise.  So may we be a remembering people.

“And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel, saying, If anyone sins unintentionally in any of the Lord’s commandments about things not to be done…” (Lev. 4:1-3).

We are so enamored with the freedom of our wills that the idea of unintentional sin seems contradictory.  We think sin by definition must be intentional because we are prone to define sin, if we define it all, in terms of action.  But this passage makes it clear that a large swath of sins originate in our nature, rather than in our conscious volition.  If my foot were rotated ninety degrees, then by nature I would have to distort my body just to attempt to walk straight.  In this case, it is my nature that dictates my path, even if my will deeply desires another way.  And so it is with unintentional sin.  To take a musical example, if the neck of a guitar is twisted enough, it doesn’t matter how carefully you finger the chords or pluck the notes.  Inevitably, many, if not most of the notes will sound off.  Unintentional sin is like that.  We try to make music and end up making noise. And often in both ignorance and delusion, we attempt to tune ourselves to the pitch of our expectations.  And when we do, we continue to make noise, and call it music.  But the law is the true measure, the standard pitch of God’s holiness sounding forth, and when we are measured against that pitch, we all rattle with dissonance.

But the Lord in his grace knew this and made provision in his law for unintentional error. He, more than anyone, understands the bent of the human heart,   We are twisted, such that even when we act out of our best motives, we often fall short. The same was true for the people of Israel, from the anointed priest (4:3), to the congregation (4:13), to the leaders (4:22), to the common people (4:27).  Everyone is bent toward unintentional sin.  Not even the appointed priest, the spiritual professional whose job it was to understand and apply the law, could avoid transgressing the law by mistake. And so the Lord provided covering for these kinds of mistakes.  And he still does.  To take up the metaphor of the guitar, in the Old Covenant, God was content to bend the notes into place to sound pleasing notes.  But in the New Covenant his grace goes further still.  With the provision of his Son as the full and final sacrifice, God untwists what sin has distorted, so that by the power of Spirit, not only are we retuned, but we are able to sing forth in beautiful song.  It is in Christ that we are being retuned to the pitch of his perfection, so we might play in harmony with him to the glory of the Father.

“Worshipers confront God as an overwhelming and yet appealing mystery, and then recognize themselves as creaturely.”  Dictionary of Biblical Theology

A peasant may not know he is a peasant until he stands in the presence of a king.  In the same way, a man may fancy himself a god until he stands in the presence of the Almighty. To experience the holy is first and foremost a confrontation between the visions we cherish of ourselves and the infinite actuality of God.  To see that God is God is to see, among other things, that we are not.   And when we have this realization we have to worship.

That is why Leviticus as a book about the holiness of God is by necessity also a book about worship. Creatures worship the Creator in part to remind ourselves that we are in fact creatures.  And when we worship the very elements of our worship serve again to remind us of our creaturely state. Indeed, for Israel, “the material of the offerings are the Israelite’s ordinary foodstuffs” (DOBT).  They offered wheat, barely, oil, sheep, bulls—the very ordinary elements of their lives. As creatures ourselves all we can offer up to God is the stuff of creation.  Without this realization, we might start to believe that what we offer up to God somehow impresses him, or worse still somehow obligates him.  Herein lies the fundamental difference between pagan worship and the worship of God’s people.  Yahweh cannot be conjured or bartered with.  Worship is not an incantation by which we summon God to do our bidding.  If Yahweh heeds us at all it is because of the surpassing splendor of his grace, not the supposed splendor of our worship.

It is easy to miss this because we might wonder why God require these ordinary things.  Why does he ask for  bulls and grain?  It is not because he is hungry.  After all, we can bring God nothing that he does not already possess.  God does not require worship in the sense that we are offering up to him something that he lacks.  God requires worship only in the sense that we as his creation are obligated to him for life and breath and all we possess.  In this way our worship is not primarily a reminder to him of our devotion, but a reminder to ourselves of our great need.  Take Israel as an example.  They weren’t offering food to God because he needed to be fed, but because they did.  To willingly offer up what sustains us is to cry out for a different kind of sustenance.  Truly, man does not live by bread alone.  We only truly remember this when we worship God.

But a God who is both immanently present, while also being transcendentally holy presents a problem for sinful humanity.  Focusing specifically on God’s unique presence in the Tabernacle, Leviticus is written in part to answer the riddle, How does a holy God dwell among a sinful people?  In answering that riddle, Leviticus describes not only the sacrificial system that cleanses the people of Israel from their sin, but also the ins and outs of daily life that come to make one unclean.  That is why a book about God’s holiness is also about menstrual cycles, emissions, and leprosy.   By presenting the stunning beauty of God’s beauty, the book must also present the sometimes crippling ugliness of humanity.  When God dwells among his people, the light of his holiness casts all that is unholy in us into the harshest of lights. In that light our ways, manners, and means of being human can appear as nothing less than grotesque.

Any faithful accounting of our true nature must always consider humanity in the light of God’s holiness, otherwise we will begin to believe in our own righteousness simply because we are “better” than some other person.  This sort of reasoning is like a beggar with $10 calling himself rich because he knows of another beggar with only $1.  Such accounting fails to recognize the possibility of billionaires.  There are several ways to reckon ourselves rightly in light of God’s holiness.  Sitting under faithful preaching is one of them.  Reading the Scriptures is another.  Living in Gospel community is still another.  And these are potent ways of not only remembering, but of also growing into our own holiness.  But I would argue further that certain types of stunningly honest art can be another means by which we rightly reckon our plight.  Films, music, novels can all hold a mirror up to us so that we might behold something of our own deformities and point us back to God.

Flannery O’Connor is one such writer.  As Frederick Buechner writes of her, ” I suppose it is precisely because she has a mystic’s sense of what holiness truly is that she is able to depict in such a wry and sometimes uproarious way the freakish distortions that it suffers at the hands of a mad world.”  In reading her work, with characters like the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, we become keenly aware not only of their freakish distortions as characters, but also of our own twisted selves.  Buechner goes on, “Human life is so grotesquely distorted and distorting that the grace of God is broken to pieces by it like light through a prism and reaches us looking like everything except what it is.”  And so it is.  Because even the best human can only refract and bend the light of grace, we must always look to God himself to behold the depth of holiness and grace.  Indeed, in the person of Jesus Christ, God has fully and finally answered the riddle, How can a holy God dwell with sinful people?  Only a brilliantly creative, story-telling God would answer one mystery with another–the incarnation.

We are elect exiles.  In two words Peter has given us an elegant summation of our life in Christ.  These two words pull against each other, laying before us the whole of the Christian life, and so we must walk it, taut as a tight rope.  To be elect is to be remade, to be fashioned and formed into citizens of a fundamentally different place than the here of the here and now.  And so in election we become exiles, because in election we become new. But ours is not an exile of relocation, but of reorientation. In election the Father foreknows, the Spirit sanctifies, and the Son sprinkles with his blood, so that we are invited to leave the home we have known to venture into the life and community of the Triune God. The Spirit who is the foretaste of our true and better home groans for our true and better homeland, and so do we, longing for the fullness of our life in the Triune God.

And the Creation groans too.  This is how we know that our exile can never mean disengagement from the world.  To live in exile is not a disembodiment, rather it is a re-embodiment that redeems Creation to us.   In that sense elected exile is a homecoming to what we were meant to be.  We enjoy this creation in worshipful gratitude of God’s goodness in the here and now and also in anticipation of the world to come.  We are not exiled from creation.  Instead, our exile means that we are freed from creation as an end in itself.  Elect exile is an invitation to transcendence through embodied worship in the world.  In election we experience a transformation by which we are able to see the world and its trappings as means and not as ends.  All that is is fading.  The rot of the fall is comprehensive–all will decay, all will fail.  And so it groans for resurrection.  Our election tunes our ears to the groan of creation, and we raise our voices too.  The song of the elect exile is the straining sigh for resurrection.

“And the Lord spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Cannan, then you shall drive our all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.  And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it…But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell.  And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.”

As they stand on the cusp of the land, God calls for the cleansing of the land itself.  To maintain the holiness and distinctiveness of his people, God demanded not only the casting down and destruction of idols, but also the driving out of all idolators.  Given Israel’s history with idolatry, this is not surprising. In their worship of Baal at Peor (Num. 25), Israel had proven that in the mere presence of idolatrous people, they would turn their hearts to false gods.  Here we see God’s mercy toward his people.  The command to cast down the idols and to cast out the idolators was meant to protect them and to preserve his relationship with them.

This command also displays the wisdom of God.  He knew that for the people of Israel, it was the idolators, not the idols who posed the greatest threat. But why is this so?  In the old covenant, complete eradication was the only solution for idolatry because the old covenant does not explicitly deal with the heart. If the heart were inherently good, or even neutral, it would have been possible to live among idolatrous people. But the heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9).   And so it is.   It is not the sun or rain or sex or money or power that demand our worship and declare themselves as gods, but the dark alchemy of our heart that distorts creation into deity.  In seeing false worship, the seeds were planted in the hearts of the people of Israel and found purchase in the decaying compost of the human heart.  Idolatry always begins with idolators.  Without false worshippers, the accouterment of false worship are almost meaningless.  Without idolators, idols are simply stone and metal, and high places are simply places.   It was the presence of idolators that would prove to be “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides.”

We can see the destruction in Israel’s failure to obey this command played out again and again in the cycle of the Judges and the parade of wicked kings culminating in the Exile.  Even still, we must ask, does this principle stand for us as new covenant believers?  Certainly, the New Testament has much to say about idols.  Paul exhorts us to, “Flee from idolatry” (1 Cor. 10:14).  John likewise exhorts, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). But neither of them say, “Flee from idolators.” Why is this so?  Because the new covenant is the covenant of the new heart.  The reality of renewed heart arms us with the weapons of grace so that we can live among idolators and still be a holy people.

It is interesting that the promise of a new covenant and a new heart is first made explicit in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, men who stood on both sides of exile (Jer. 31:31-34; Ez. 36:22-31).   These prophets deal explicitly with the problem of the heart and the problem of idols because they know the people of Israel will be flung to the nations where there will be no escape from idolatrous people.  In light of this, these prophets wrestle with the reality of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the midst of turmoil,  But through their toil and suffering they are able to see a new day where God will re-form his people with a new covenant.

And in these promises, God proves both faithful and true to his unfaithful people. In the new covenant, God proves gracious beyond our reckoning because the promise of the new covenant deals both with the heart and with the cleansing of idols:  “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.  And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.  And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:25-26).  As new covenant believers, we are the inheritors of these promises, and so we can live among idolators and proclaim the light of the gospel because our hearts are new.  Though we bend ever towards idols, the blood of Christ has power to expel what we cannot expel, and to cast down what we cannot cast down.