Every few weeks, it seems, we hear statistics about an American epidemic of loneliness, the purposelessness of young men, an increase in anxiety and depression in younger generations, and growing political tribalism. But we haven’t identified reliable pathways through the morass.
Meanwhile, our church cultures are not immune to these larger challenges. Although the number of those leaving the church may be stabilizing, Pew reports the “stickiness” of religion is declining. What can account for a disconnect between the gospel the church proclaims and the lives we often lead? What has captured our imaginations?
It’s possible for Christians to hold broadly similar doctrines while differing dramatically in how those doctrines shape their lives and outlooks. Accordingly, Christian leaders who care about discipleship in 21st-century American evangelical churches should be asking not only what we believe but how.
I’ve come to believe that much of our discipleship gap results not from an informational deficit but from an imaginative one. Although we need deep familiarity with theological truths, we first need to form a more robust Christian imagination so we can incorporate these truths into a coherent way of life. This has less to do with knowing facts, important as they are, than with learning to think, dream, and love more Christianly.
Two recent books on beauty and the imagination are helpful starting points. In Judith Wolfe’s The Theological Imagination, based on her lectures at Cambridge University, she describes the imagination as a faculty with which we make sense of the world.
This isn’t a matter of fanciful storytelling but something we use to give narrative shape to the sensory data all around us. When we read someone’s facial expression, experience a work of art, or even tell our life stories, we take differing data points and make them into a coherent whole. That person is unhappy. That artwork is meant to evoke feelings of anger. This spiritual experience is where it all changed for me.
In other words, our imaginations run like operating systems in the background, working below the level of conscious thought. This helps explain why Christians who read the same books, hear the same sermons, and profess the same beliefs might end up following divergent paths, both personally and socially. Given substantially similar rational inputs, our imaginations will make meaning in unpredictable ways that escape our notice.
What does it look like to understand this process theologically? Wolfe reminds us that cultivating a theological imagination isn’t like putting on a new set of glasses. It doesn’t mean superimposing a new worldview atop the existing one, like “a pattern to which to adjust our perceptions.” Instead, a theological imagination incorporates sense data in light of the Christian story and necessitates a particular posture of faith. Christianity, she writes, “makes sense of the world by enabling us to hold open horizons that we always rush to foreclose, and to sustain uncertainty in the light of a divine promise.” To behave and believe Christianly, we need a certain imaginative flexibility, one that can embrace the already-and-not-yet grammar of the gospel.
Yet as Wolfe notes, “Realiz[ing] this capacity requires a deep faith in a God whom we cannot grasp and take full hold of.” A theological imagination looks very much like Hebrews 11, which credited saints like Abraham with faithfulness even as their future was obscure: “For [Abraham] was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10, ESV). A theological imagination, then, is both humble and confident, as its chief mover is not the individual but God.
A second recent book, Matthew Z. Capps’s Drawn by Beauty: Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life, focuses less on imaginative formation. Instead, it reads more like an eager churchman reminding us of a rich heritage of beauty we’ve neglected. Although I gathered a full reading list from Capps’s footnotes, I often wished he would do less compiling and more synthesizing. He quotes a wide range of sources, including the church fathers, Reformed writers like Jonathan Edwards and James K. A. Smith, and Baptist leaders like Albert Mohler and Wayne Grudem. But he doesn’t always go deep in analyzing their thoughts or extending the conversations their works have launched.
Given the diverse perspectives held by the figures Capps cites, it’s unclear whether his argument comes from a particular theological angle. If recovering beauty is indeed a worthy pursuit of many evangelical traditions, perhaps this conglomeration of thinkers through the ages works. But for me as a reader, putting them all together without referencing their very different starting points seems shortsighted. After all, theological and church traditions represent more than scattered positions along a spectrum of Christian thought. On a deeper level, they give us ways of thinking about (or constructing and imagining) the world and what is possible.
If a theological imagination can help us construct reality along the lines of the Christian story and in the manner of Jesus, then each book has a fundamental question to answer: To what end does beauty or a theological imagination point? What is its ultimate goal?
In his 2013 book Imagining the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith gives his own answer, rooted in the weekly Christian liturgy. Each Sunday—as we participate in a call to worship, praise God in song, confess our faith and our sin together, hear the Word preached, and take the Lord’s Supper—we are not simply going through motions but enacting the drama of the gospel; we are inhabiting a Christian imagination. We are enfolded into the Christian story. It becomes ours. We are being built together like “living stones” into the house of God, the body of Christ (1 Pet. 2:5). Wolfe, too, looks to Christian worship as the experience that most profoundly forms a theological imagination.
Capps does gesture to requisite moral action as the outcome of beauty, but he ultimately ends his book by calling readers to experience and appreciate art. These are worthy pursuits, as they point to what Makoto Fujimura, in Art + Faith, calls “the ‘heavenly breaking in’ to the broken earth.” But is artistic appreciation the end goal of beauty? Capps encourages readers to consent to beauty’s pull, and he notes that it participates in the perfect beauty of the triune God. Ultimately, however, the book seems to suggest an individualized response—both to God’s beautiful life and to beautiful experiences and works of art here on earth.
This misses the telos of beauty, which (like any good earthly gift) must always find its resting place with God—in part now and in full on the canvas of eternity. Beauty must also create something. Martin Luther King Jr. had one name for that something—the “beloved community”—while David Brooks, in a recent address, spoke of the “creative minority.” According to Brooks, these communal manifestations of beauty can change culture when they “find a beautiful way to live” and “the rest of us copy.” Beauty needn’t be housed simply in a lovely face; it can live in a community that instantiates goodness and truth.
Although Capps discusses that beauty isn’t meant to be enjoyed in isolation, affirming that the triune God is both community and the source of all beauty, functionally his book ends with an individualized benediction: Go and appreciate art.
While neither book aims to help us practically construct a more Christlike imagination, they both leave us with markers. Capps is at his best when he applies insights on beauty to questions of spiritual formation. Wolfe—through her examples from theater, fiction, and visual art—concludes with an extended quote from C. S. Lewis’s character Reepicheep, the stalwart mouse who appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “When I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.” These are words we feel.
Reading Reepicheep’s words made me tear up and pass the book to my husband, for we have many memories of reading Lewis to our children when they were small. Reepicheep’s trust in Aslan’s country, his insistence upon remaining faithful even if he doesn’t reach the Promised Land, is deeply moving. And like words that are not only beautiful but also good and true, Reepicheep’s demand to be shared.
In this moment of cultural upheaval, we would do well to heed scholars like Wolfe and thoughtful pastors like Capps as they recover beauty’s necessity for lives and communities of deep, transformative faith. Beauty, as lived out, is evangelistic. It adorns truth and goodness as their attractive pull. As beauty leads the way, as it becomes the texture of a community, a person may begin to desire the Christian story before he or she acknowledges its truth claims. Beauty pulls.
As Wolfe acknowledges, a theological imagination does construct “theories and images to guide us.” Even so, she observes, “they are light, tentative, humble, because when we construct theologically, we are not building towers; we are building boats. And we trust the sea.”
Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.
