Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome.
My name is Ned Walthall and I'm the chair of the Adult Education Committee at Nassau.
I've been attending church. I'm going to read this because I want to keep myself out of more trouble that I'm likely to get myself into. I've been attending church at Nassau for well over 30 years, and my love for our sanctuary has no bounds.
But I'm reminded every Sunday when I look at those blank, beautiful walls that the Reformed tradition is very much a verbal tradition, one that has historically reflected a certain queasiness about the visual imagination.
Many churches have long and intense debates about what objects of visual art should be displayed in their buildings. At Nassau, we have long and very meaningful conversations about texts we like to read. We like our theology, we like our Barth. We like to talk about our Barth. But when it comes to the visual imagination, to ways of seeing, perhaps we need a little help.
Which is why I jumped at the chance to introduce Dr. Elizabeth Steele this morning. Dr. Steele is. Is currently serving as the Nassau Post doctorate fellow for 2627. For the 2627 year under the Art of Faithfulness Ministry. She earned an undergraduate degree in art History from the University of Virginia, but she was just getting started.
She has completed a Master's of Divinity, a Master's of Christian education, and a PhD in practical theology from the seminary next door that we all know and love.
Her work has focused on the necessity of imagination and faith and the capacity of visual art to cultivate that imagination. I'm going to say that again because I think that's a very important sentence. Her work has focused on the necessity. Strong word. On the necessity of imagination and faith and the capacity of visual art to cultivate that imagination. What is especially exciting for us is that she will be working this year across generations at Nassau to integrate art into faith formation and to foster theological imagination.
Elizabeth is from McLean, Virginia, and before coming to Princeton, owned a small business in Charlottesville. Like myself, she is what Dave would call a cradle Presbyterian. She is a lifelong member of the PCUSA and by her own admission. Your words, not mine. By her own admission, didn't discover until high school that you could be anything other than Presbyterian.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Comes as a great shock, doesn't it?
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Please welcome Elizabeth Steele.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Thank you, Ned. That was a wonderful setup because you have previewed so many of the things that we'll talk about this morning and next week.
But I am just really glad to be here with all of you this morning. Usually I'm attending the first service because I tend to teach church school during the second service and so I'm not able to make it to adult ed very often. So I'm very grateful to be here with you this morning.
And as Ned mentioned, I am serving as a postdoctorate fellow, a one year fellowship here at Nassau Church in partnership with the seminary under the Art of Faithfulness, a ministry. And this ministry explores the creative arts as a pathway to deepening our faith, discovering aspects of God's purpose for our lives, and serving the mission of Nassau Church. So what I will do at Nassau this year supports and is supported by these goals. And I will help enhance the connection between creativity and faith that is already very present in this community. And I'm very grateful to be here. I want to give a disclaimer before we start.
We will be talking about art this week and especially next week. You don't have to like art. You don't have to get what we're looking at. You don't have to like what we're looking at. You might like art now, you might like it less by the time we finish, and that's fine. You might like it more. But I just want to put that disclaimer out there that our intention is not to necessarily learn about art, but learn from art and use art as a catalyst for imagination.
So my hope for these sessions together is that we can learn together, imagine together, and maybe have some fun together. Ingrid told us last week during teacher commissioning that we're allowed to have fun in church.
So over the next two weeks, we are going to dive into a topic that we don't talk about too often in the church. But as Ned mentioned, that I think is essential, imagination.
I'm going to suggest that imagination is an essential part of the life of faith and that art has a unique capacity to cultivate it. So here are a few questions that we will think about together this morning.
What is imagination?
Why is imagination necessary for faith?
And what keeps us from imagining?
What keeps us from imagining?
And we're going to start off by looking at a pair of paintings that will help frame our discussion and set up where we are headed together.
So this is the first work right here and Isabella and Lynn, I think Isabella has copies if you'd like to look at it on a printout.
But take a minute, about a minute to look at this work. And here are some things to think about as you're looking.
Who do you see and where?
What's the story? What's happening here? Do you think? Is something happening here?
And does anything look familiar?
So take about a minute and just think about those questions. Notice what you see, who you see.
Would anybody else like a printout?
Okay. And Isabella, one up front.
Okay. We can just. You can just shout out what you see. So who do you see? Who do you notice in the painting?
Guys in wigs.
Guys in wigs.
Women in the background, children.
It looks like they're dancing or playing a game.
I'm struck by the contrast between the children playing and dancing and the black child who was on these gentlemen, the contrast between the two scenes. Yeah, This one down here.
I'm curious, does anybody recognize this painting?
Did anybody go to Yale or has been to Visited Yale?
No, I'm in the wrong. That's the wrong town. I know to ask that would have killed an Yale.
Here's how I view it. Nothing out of the ordinary to see here. A group of four white men gather around the table to make sure the world keeps turning.
The one in the middle seems to be the most important and somehow exists on a slightly larger scale than the rest of the.
But the others have everything they pipes, Madeira, lace cuffs and power.
The men form an enclave of importance, lined in velvet and imperious to anything that lies outside of it. And you have to look hard to notice anything that does lie outside of it because the light shines mostly on them.
To the upper right of the men is a group of oddly proportioned and seemingly very sullen children. They don't look very happy.
They're playing a game, but all of their attention flows out towards us.
There is one adult that supervises them, but he doesn't seem very fun either with his hand up.
The young female in the yellow dress is most likely Ann Yale, and her father is the large man at the table, this one here. And he is about to sign her marriage contract to betroth her to James Cavendish. To our left, in red. And then the other men are members of the Yale family.
But there's one more thing. There's a black servant boy in the lower right, elbowed into the corner.
He looks at the men, attentive to the level of their Madeira. He wears red and light blue livery, indicating wealth, but not his. His masters.
Which man is his master's master? It doesn't really matter. They all hold power or authority over him.
Around the boy's neck, which is turned towards the men, there is one more detail.
It appears to be a silver embellishment that might be part of his uniform, but then you can barely see. There's a padlock and you realize it does not embellish. It enslaves.
When artist Titus Gauffeur arrived at Yale in the early 2000s to begin his MFA, he came face to face to this work, which is called Elihu Yale, with members of his family and an enslaved child, painted in 1719.
Kafer says he found it challenging that the work was displayed so prominently at the school he was attending.
So instead of demanding for its removal, he decided to change how we see it.
This is Kafer's work called Enough about you.
This is a literal reworking of the Elihu Yale scene. And Kafer repainted the original canvas and then crumpled it up and placed the frame around the black servant boy.
Centuries of white domination and supremacy folding in on itself.
So we can still see a few faces and hands.
And we also have a printout of this if anybody would like to see it in more detail.
So you can still see a few faces and hands of the men, but now they sort of see swim in the sea of wrinkles, unmoored from the safety of their enclave.
What are.
Actually, I'm going to put comparison and we're going to focus on the servant boy like Kafer did. What differences do you notice from the original work to Kafer's work focusing on the servant boy?
He's looking at us.
So in the original, he's facing towards the men. Looking at the men, I should say. And his gaze is now turned out towards us.
It's shining on him now, and his collar is gone. So what once enslaved him is now gone. And Kuffer has seen the scene differently.
So Kafer's work does not dismiss the hegemony of history, but he literally de centers it. And when he does, it disrupts our viewpoint of this story. He says it's not about eradication, but what I'm trying to show you is how to shift your gaze just slightly, just momentarily.
So Enough about you forces us to change our perspective. And suddenly we see nothing out of the ordinary. With completely new eyes and a note of interest. Does anybody recognize the name Titus Kafer?
Titus Kafer is his name.
There is a work of his at the Princeton University Art Museum. So right as you go up the new museum, right as you go up the stairs in the center, you kind of. If you'd kept going, you'd run into it. It slightly to the left, it's called to be sold. And it's a painting of one of the presidents of the university and the bill of sale of slaves that was held at his house. And so they have a Kufir work over there too. So it's a similar thing that he's doing with both of these works.
So I want to suggest that we are in a crisis of imagination.
We are stuck in old, worn out stories for lack of imagining how the world could be different.
These stories center the complacent and the comfortable and push the vulnerable to the margins.
Out of sight and out of conscious.
They accept the inevitable and paint a picture that this is just the way things are.
These narratives reinforce systems that harm and perpetuate a society that increasingly is dehumanizing our neighbor. They are written, told and retold because we do not imagine that another story could ever be.
We accept the world as we see it. In Elihu Yale, with members of his family and an enslaved child.
We accept nothing out of the ordinary. We accept the world as it is.
But I think to be a follower of Christ requires that we learn how to see the world as if the kingdom of God has come.
We are obligated to see how the world could be otherwise. It calls us to tell a different story.
The kingdom of God has not yet come on earth. We must imagine it.
So imagination is a necessary part of the life of faith because it calls us out of old narratives and into new possibilities.
Imagination is the capacity to envision how things could and should be different.
And once you start thinking as if. Once you start imagining the world as if you can never again settle for the world as is.
So before we get too far talking about imagination, I want to clarify what I mean by imagination.
Because when I say the word imagination, there are probably as many different understandings as there are people in this room.
And there are many of those are true and valid. But we're going to stick with one so that we all understand it together and are on the same page.
So I think the best way to distinguish what imagination is is to talk about what it is not.
Imagination, in our terms that we're talking about over the next two weeks, is not imaginary.
The imaginary can imply a component of fantasy and fiction, of make believe and pretend. So think about imaginary friends.
And while imagination can certainly be said to contribute to the imaginary, it is very much real and concrete and something to be believed.
The imaginary signals something pretend. But imagination reveals truth.
So. So if imagination is not imaginary, it's also not just child's play.
And of course, imagination is an integral part of personal development, and it is often most encouraged during our childhood years. But it remains just as, if not more critical, to foster as we Age.
And in a few minutes, we're going to take a look at how the opposite occurs.
So if this is what imagination is not, what might we say imagination is?
For this, we will lean heavily on the definition of imagination offered by one of its greatest cheerleaders, an educational philosopher by the name of Maxine Green.
Maxine Green was the philosopher in residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for Aesthetics, and she was a teacher, a professor of education at the Teachers College at Columbia.
And Ingrid. I had one of her books on my desk, and a few weeks ago, Ingrid came in and saw the book and said, oh, I used to take classes with Maxine Greene. And Maxine Greene used to host salons in her New York apartment with teachers and students. And Ingrid had been to one of those.
Maxine Green died in 2014, and it's important to note that she is not a theologian, and she was not trying to be one. She was actually one of two women to sign the Humanist Manifesto of 1973, along with Betty Friedan.
But I think that Green's work is very generative for faith formation and in terms of thinking of imagination.
So Green just simply defines imagination as the capacity to posit alternative realities.
She says that by imagining we are enabled to look at things, to think about things as if they were otherwise.
So imagination gives us this consciousness of possibility.
She says, I would emphasize the capacity of imagination to move us into the. As if to move beyond the actual and into invented worlds, and to do so within our own experience.
And to enter this created world is to find new perspectives opening on our lived world, often for take it and granted, realities of everyday life.
So I really like her definition of imagination because it's forward thinking, it's prophetic.
She takes imagination very seriously and doesn't spend any time arguing about its worth or validity and just accepts it as a vehicle of revelation and truth.
And Green says when we don't use our imaginations, we are actually caught under these clouds of givenness. And without imagination, our lives become narrow. We tell these same old stories, and our lives become cul de sacs. We just keep circling and circling and stay in crisis.
She says that possibilities are trapped in predictability, and she's worried that we accept justice as immutable and inevitable, and we accept the world as it is. It's just too hard to change.
But when we can clear the clouds, we're able to see the world, ourselves and each other more clearly.
And this is why imagination is so necessary in faith formation. I think it allows us to see the world as. As if the kingdom of God has come on earth as it is in heaven and frees us to take action to make it so.
So if imagination is the ability to envision how things could and should be different, isn't this the call of the Christian life? Isn't this how Jesus teaches us in the parables that the kingdom of God is this alternative reality unlike anything that we have experienced in our life?
The tiniest seed grows into the largest tree enough to shelter all of the birds. The least liked and least likely is the one to show compassion. And the Father welcomes us home despite everything we've done.
So we need this consciousness of possibility, of this alternative reality for what could be in God's kingdom.
So what might happen if Christian formation employed seeing the world as if using our imagination as a theological virtue of. So that Christians of all ages were trained not to succumb to predictability, but to seek possibility?
Okay, I need everybody to find a partner. Just somebody next to you.
You can. If there's a group of three, that's fine.
Okay, I'm going to. One of you is going to be partner A. One of you is going to be partner B. Before you decide, I'll tell you what you're going to do. So you can. If that's helpful, partner A will be closing their eyes.
So only if you're comfortable with that, you can assign partner A and then partner B. You will be describing something to your partner.
So decide who will be A, closing eyes and B.
And everybody. Got it.
Okay.
So partner A, you can close your eyes. Thank you.
And partner B, I'm going to show you an image, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds to describe what you're seeing to your partner.
Okay? But before you start, here's the image. And before you start, you are not allowed to use any of these words.
Okay? So you have 30 seconds to describe what you're seeing to partner A.
Ready? Go.
You can.
Okay. That is your end of 30 seconds. I heard and saw that some people figured it out.
Partner A.
How did it feel to have somebody describe something to you that you couldn't see?
How did it feel, Partner B. To try to describe without using the words that I listed?
Some of you got it. Difficult. Yeah.
So here's the image, and I'm wondering what were the words that you either heard or said to describe this painting?
Blue.
Say it again.
Yellow. Circular things. Here's the list of words I told them they couldn't use.
I thought somebody might say the song. So.
Okay. Lynn.
Swirling blue. SK There's a Don McLean song called Starry Night.
I thought maybe somebody in the audience might know it.
Marcia?
Oh, you're not able to hear. Okay. Okay. Thank you.
Any other words or phrases that you used to describe or heard that were helpful?
Well, swirl, Swirl.
And then obviously, I mean, there's lots of opportunity here. There's a moon, clouds.
There's a lot of opportunity to describe without.
I'm curious, did anybody describe any of the buildings?
Oh, in the back. Isabella.
Oh, there is a town. Okay.
How about the church?
How would you describe it if you were describing it to your partner?
Maybe if you had a minute, not 30 seconds.
So if you notice. So there is a little town under the sky, and the church, it's either really very late at night, either very late at night or very early in the morning with lights turning on.
But the church is one of the only, if not the only, building that's dark, and I think so. The night sky that Van Gogh paints is vibrant and colorful and full of life. And he didn't necessarily paint the starry night with irony, but I think it presents an important paradox for us to think about.
So the sky is vibrant and colorful, swirling, I heard. But the church sits beneath it, dark and still.
The sky moves and pulses, but the church stands beneath it, empty.
There's a dynamism to the sky, and the momentum nearly sweeps everything off the canvas. But the church sits beneath it, passive, like an anchor weighed, while everything else around it is moving.
So, like the dark church in the Starry Night, like Ned mentioned earlier, the modern mainline Protestant church often stands still and shuttered against the rich world of visual art and imagination that it cultivates?
So the question I want to think about is why? Why is this? Why have we shied away from intentionally cultivating imagination in the church? And why have we overlooked the most effective way to do so, which is engaging with the arts?
So I want to suggest that we look at this problem like a prism, because there are many different dimensions to it. So we're going to think about five contributing dimensions, and every time we turn the prism, we're going to look at it from a different angle, from educational, ecclesiological, philosophical, neuroscientific, and theological, and we'll see. It sounds like a lot, but briefly. Briefly.
But we're going to see how there are many resonances and parallels between these things, and that kind of help us explain why we are where we are.
So the first dimension is educational, and I want to tell you a story about my niece, whose name is Austin. She's 12 years old now, she lives in Virginia. And a few years ago we got into this pattern where she would call me in the evenings to talk about her day.
Sometimes she'd be doing her put lotion on to her skincare routine.
And in July of last year, last summer, she texted me about. It was 9:45 or 10:00 clock at night, so it was pretty late.
And she said, are you free? Can I call you? And I said yes. She said, I have a question and it might change a lot of things.
So she called me, and almost immediately, with no context or explanation, she says, do you believe in God?
And she knew that I went to seminary, which I think she at first thought meant that I just went to Sunday school all the time.
And so I answered. I said, usually today I do, but sometimes it's hard. And so we started to have a conversation about God and whether or not she believes in God. And we eventually got to the point where she said, well, it's just that I've decided that I believe in science, so. So I can't believe in God anymore.
So for Austin, it was one or the other, and she didn't have the capacity to imagine that both of those things could be true.
So I think you'll be happy. She did get confirmed in our PC USA church, but her statement of faith this past spring was a giant question mark.
And so she affirmed her faith through the questions she had about her faith, and which I think is wonderful.
And so I think her dilemma illustrates the type of faith that is often formed when we don't prioritize imagination.
So her faith and faith of many others has become rigid and unmoving. So it's a fixed equation, and it needs everything to stay as is. If you put something else, if you put science, dinosaurs, evolution, anything like that, the premise is no longer viable.
So Austin didn't have the capacity to conceive that she might believe in both God and science, and that dissonance did not mean discarding her faith.
Religious educator Meredith Miller offers a very helpful analogy to help us understand this dimension of the problem.
She says that we currently try to build, in most cases, faith by a brick by brick approach. And so we are building these brick walls of faith, which is influenced by how we prioritize reason, which we'll get to in a minute. So first we lay a sturdy foundation of knowledge and facts, and then we build upon that layer by layer of knowledge, and then another, and then another.
So the foundational stones Are things like key doctrinal statements, traits about God. God is loving, God is kind, God is just.
And then we come to church, somebody tells us something, we put another brick, and we just keep building our faith brick by brick, and they pile up like a Jenga tower.
But then Miller says, because this is the not at all simple God we're talking about here, one of those beliefs gets exposed as not being true, or one of the competing themes in the Bible appears, just like maybe creation stories.
And so when we build faith this way, it is not flexible or resilient enough to accommodate an as if imagination. It needs everything, including God, to stay as is.
So you have this new piece of information and there are two options for your wall of faith.
You can try to explain away the new information that doesn't quite fit, sort of a square peg in a round hole, but then you're left with these things that don't fit together.
Or you can take out the stone that no longer fits.
But either way, the wall will eventually fall and with it your foundation, your belief systems, and your faith.
Miller says that the problem with seeing our faith as a wall is that when one of the stones gets exposed as not being true or not being true in the way we thought it was, we think we need to tear the whole thing down and start over again.
So you can see how it happened with my niece, Austin. She had this piece about science. She was trying to fit it into her brick wall, which wasn't flexible or resilient.
And I think she actually made maybe took it out, but either way, the whole thing fell down.
So given the current ways we form faith, we shouldn't be too surprised about what's happening in the church, because the most recent Pew data tells us that the number one reason people leave their childhood religion is because they no longer believe in the religion's teachings.
So there's a fascinating study that I want to share with you that highlights how we are in our education system, how we do not value creativity and imagination in a way that could be helpful. This is a general study, but I think it's going to be generative for us to think about in the 1960s. And maybe some of you have heard about this, NASA came to a scientist named George Land and asked him for a favor.
They needed a way to select NASA.
Lauren Yeh called me this week and there was a message that transcribed NASA as NASA, but this is NASA.
They came to this scientist and said we need to figure out who of our. They're all smart, all of our Employees are smart, but we need to figure out who is creative, who can use their imagination to look at a problem and think about different solutions.
So they asked him to come up with a test. And the test was pretty successful in measuring the existing levels of creativity and the NASA employees.
But Land, George Land, wanted to know more. He wanted to know, are some people just born with creativity and imagination? Is it something we learn? Is it something that comes from experience?
So he decided to turn this study or test from NASA into a study. And he had administered it to 1,600 five year olds. The questions were pretty simple.
So out of 1605 year olds, 98% of them at age five were found to be a creative genius at the test level.
They decided to turn this into a longitudinal study and kept testing the same children.
So the same group of children tested at 10, 30% of them were creative geniuses.
They were tested again at the age of 15 and only 12.
I watched an interview with Land recently and he said that they ended the study there because they were all getting depressed.
But eventually they used this test, creativity test, on over 1 million adults and the average age was 31 years.
Does anybody have a guess of how many geniuses there were at 31 years old? The percentage Ingrid just walked and she knows. I shared this with the Sunday school teachers during orientation.
What do you think, Pat? 0.1%. 0.1. That's a little too pessimistic. A little too pessimistic, but you're not very far off. One closer. So 2% of adults average age 31 tested as geniuses, creative geniuses.
So Land, this sort of confirmed his suspicion that we actually are all born innately creative and imaginative. But we don't grow out of imagination. We are educated out of it.
Okay, the next angle of the prison that we're going to take a look at is the ecclesiological. So this is what in the life and the history of the church is curious from cultivating imagination through the arts. So here's where we get to the John Calvin of it all.
And this is a broad, broad overview or just a snippet of information that's helpful for us. But as many of you know, and as Ned mentioned, the Reformed church and the arts have a very complicated relationship. And this certainly wasn't always the case with Christianity at large. And it isn't always now. And that's another lecture for another time. But the Reformation brought about a significant rupture between the Protestant church and visual representation. And so this lasting effect, the Lasting effect of this split can largely be traced to Calvin's writings.
One author reminds us that Calvin wrote as he did, against images within a context of image misuse and abuse in the late medieval church. So we need to keep that in mind if we want to understand his story. We need to go further back this time to the world of Gothic cathedrals filled with candles and crucifixes, smells and bells, statues of saints, paintings of popes, altars of gold.
So by the start of the 16th century, Christendom had become centered around sensory experience and the supposed veneration.
But the visual arts became not a representation of salvation, but a vehicle for salvation.
So it's no wonder that Calvin had something to say about it. So, of course, there are multitude of reformers who have their own perspectives on this issue.
But Calvin and his views have become pretty decisive in Reformed practice. And it's from his institutes on the Christian religion, where common Protestant thought regarding aesthetics comes from.
And now most of his writing about this has to do with images of God, not about visual art as a whole.
And true to the Reformation ideal of the Word as the medium of God's truth, Calvin asserts that no visual representation of God is appropriate to God's true self.
So he believes that images of God not only violate the law, but they also displease God as something dishonorable.
Images are not viable or valuable as a vehicle for revelation.
He says that whoever therefore desires to be rightly taught must learn what he should know of God from some source other than images.
He worried that images would draw our attention downward rather than upward, where he thought it was meant to. And he saw them as distractions.
And his concern about the use of images is mostly around idolatry and the damage this would do to one's relationship with God. And we'll talk more a little bit next week about why the legacy of Calvin and his thoughts on images may actually be a little misguided. But the damage was done.
Even though his focus is on the visual representation of God in all forms, Calvin's thought laid the groundwork for this strained relationship between the Protestant church and visual arts. He only offered a very restricted place for the visual arts. And we can see the effect of this restriction by looking at the shifts of subject matter in European art from the 13th century to the 16th. So in the 13th century, 100% of European art was religious and subject matter.
By this 17th century, from 100%, it went to 46.4%. And it can't only be attributed to that that was around the time of humanism and the Roman revival. And so there are other artistic influences as well.
But one scholar says it was Calvin who completed the divorce between the art, between art and the church.
So Calvin emphasized words and rationality over images and wonder.
And by doing so, he exiled imaginations to the sidelines.
So, speaking of the Enlightenment, we now turn to the philosophical dimension of imagination.
And throughout history, from its first sort of conception as an actual category of thought, with Aristotle, people have been very suspicious of imagination and very suspicious of what imagination could do to your relationship with, with God, not good things they thought, or what imagining could do. And so by the time we get to the Enlightenment and people like Rene Descartes, imagination does not fare very well during this sort of upheaval of knowledge.
So Descartes dualistic philosophy between the body and the mind defines not only how and why we think, but he also had something to say about the imagination.
So, as many of you know, Descartes set out to figure out, how could we know what is true and trust it. And he started out by doubting everything he knew. So we'll just get to the bottom, get to the base, and then go from there. And he turned to his familiar and rigorous methodology of mathematics to try to reconstruct the truth. So with this method, you start with something that is undoubtable, a proof that you know is certain and true.
And then, and only then, can you build further knowledge piece by piece on top of it, which sounds a lot like the brick wall that Miller described earlier that we thought about.
So he thought, if this mathematic theory of building with a certain proof and then one on top of the other works with math, with numbers, why not with everything else? And so according to him, it does so at the end of the day, at the very least, when everything else is questioned and stripped down to the foundation, there's still somebody doing the questioning.
So that gives us his famous saying, I think, therefore I am.
So the very act of thinking proves that you exist. Thinking is the primary certainty, the original foundational block that you can trust. That's the one undoubtable proof.
So reason and the mind was now the guiding principle, and it would be for a very long time. So, as you can imagine, imagination did not fare very well under this schema.
He says, it seems to me that people who wish to understand these ideas of God and the soul are doing the same, as if in order to hear sounds or smells, they tried to use their eyes.
So in other words, trying to use the imagination to gain sure knowledge, to learn anything about the truth is about as good of an idea as trying to use your eyes to smell the roses.
It's not reliable or effective or a trustworthy vehicle to revelation.
So on one side of the coin, we have Descartes influence of reason on Western thought, his overvaluation of reason, and on the other side, his denigration of imagination. So these two things since the 18th century have sort of set us up in general, but then I think, especially in the Reformed church, and how we form knowledge for denigrating imagination and not trusting it as something that can help us learn about God.
Okay, the neuroscientific. Maybe our brains are to blame. That would be a lot easier too.
Could it be possible that our minds are working against us to keep us from imagining? And this may be the case as we look at this angle. So the key here is to understand that our brains work by making connections.
That's how learning happens, both consciously and unconsciously. So the brain consists of billions of neurons, nerve cells whose job it is to accumulate and transmit information with each other. They jump synapses and make connections. And that's, like I said, how learning happens.
But here is the rub. So these connections between all of these neurons in our brains become strong, stronger as they're used more often, and they become weaker as they're used less often.
So all of that knowledge that has resulted, all those connections from communicating with each other is either reinforced, the same story is told, or they are lessened and possibly even eliminated.
So there's a helpful principle here called Hebb's law that says that what fires together wires together in our brains.
So this is to say that the connection between two neurons is strengthened when they repeatedly activate at the same time. And that can eventually result in a long term bond that is hardwired into our system. And so these are how we learn phone numbers. This is how you learn to drive these things become automatic and unconscious. And so you can think of it like a trickle of water that starts on a small path that becomes a stream, and then with more repetition, the stream becomes larger, a river. And then soon enough, you have an association the size of the Mississippi. And so if you have an association, a connection in your brain that strong, it's going to be pretty hard to think of the world differently or think of something differently. So what we repeatedly think about gets easier to think about. This is a wonderful strategy for learning your times tables. It's a horrible strategy for using our imagination because reinforcement builds habits of mind. But Our brain doesn't judge if these habits are good or bad.
And I think these patterns are in part what is keeping us from reframing our vision and even recognizing the crisis in the first place.
So our brains function on an algorithm, just like social media or the Internet. It notices where those connections light up and then strengthens those thoughts and thinks them again and again and again without you even realizing it.
So just like water, our brains like to take the path of least resistance, no matter that it just leads back to crisis. So remember what Maxine Green said earlier about when we don't imagine our lives become cul de sacs and we keep everything as is because our brains haven't yet made the connection, as if anything could be different.
And there are implications to taking the easy route, which we talked about earlier.
Some scientists say that the thoughts that we entertain on a regular basis go from being our guests in our brain to our lodgers and eventually our masters.
But this isn't an inevitability. But I think it's a crossroads, a juncture where we can choose options forward. Either we take the path that we've always known, the the lit path of least resistance, or we can imagine a new trail.
And I want to end this section briefly with a Cherokee parable that helps us see this choice. It says an old man was telling his grandson about the battle that goes on inside everyone.
The battle, he said, is between two wolves that we have inside of all of us. One is bad. It is greedy, arrogant and full of self pity and resentment.
But the other wolf is good.
It's peaceful, loving and kind.
And then the man was silent. The boy thought for a moment and asked, well, which wolf wins?
The man replied, the one you feed.
Finally and briefly, we will talk about the theological dimension of our crisis of imagination. Is there something sinful that might be keeping us telling the same old stories and. And prevents us from seeing the world as if.
So just like Ned. I don't think I'd get full credit if I didn't mention Carl Barth. I mentioned both Calvin and Barth. So I think that gives me some place in heaven.
So we're going to turn to him now. But he's really helpful because he has suggestion about what might be keeping us stuck. He talks about the concept of the lordless powers when considering the Lord's Prayer, the second petition.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
These lordless powers are forces that work against the righteousness of God and that keep God's kingdom from coming on earth.
So Barth believes that from the very beginning, from creation, the distance of sin that arises between us and God is where these lordless powers live and come from.
And they are corrupting, they're powerful, and they're without God or lordless.
So these powers include ideologies which start as concepts and then they turn into knowledge, and then finally they end up the stories we tell ourselves, which isn't so bad. That's in part how we compiled the story of scripture, of God in scripture. But Barthes says there's a decisive point where numbness, hardening and rigidity arise in the story that we've crafted that leads to this inevitable inertia. And we are no longer free thinking, and the lordless powers think for us.
So this is the snowball effect of these powers. They grow and expand in ways, and we cease to become active. But our thinking is now predestined, which to me also reminds me a lot of the Hebb's Law that we just talked about. They fire and they wire together without us noticing.
So Barthes says, at root, man no longer has anything to say for himself.
When this happens, our thinking becomes automatic, unquestioned, and barely discernible. As a choice, these lordless powers have taken over.
And ironically, Barthes also uses the phrase as if, but in a different way. He says the lordless powers work within a sinful as if. As if they were legitimate, as if God did not have control, as if God was not with us.
And so this is where vision gets skewed. The lordless powers make us see the world as if these harmful stories we tell are true. And he says they must be spoken about because in all of their strangeness, they are real and damaging.
Refusing to name them is refusing to recognize their hold over us.
And I think, again, it's a matter of which wolf to feed.
So we've taken a look at these different dimensions of why we get stuck in this crisis of accepting the world as is.
By way of preview for next week, how do we move forward to imagining the world as if.
And so for this, we're going to return to Maxine Green and this phrase that she says.
She says, I want to suggest that works of art have a potential for evoking an intimation of a better order of things.
She believes that art is the most effective way to release the imagination because it possibilizes it shocks us into what she calls wide awakeness and expands our perspective. And then suddenly, my world is not the world, and we can see from another person's perspective.
So we're going to explore this claim more deeply next week. But I want to leave you with this thought again. She says, I want to suggest that works of art have a potential for evoking an intimation of a better order of things.
But I think it's our call as Christians to use our imagination to not evoke the intimation of a better order of things, but to act, to work to make the reality of a better order of things in the kingdom of God.
And next week we will explore more deeply how art can help us do that.
So here are the questions that we took a look at at the beginning. What is imagination?
The capacity to posit an alternative reality.
Why is imagination necessary for faith? Because it allows us to see the world as if the kingdom of God has come on earth. And what keeps us from imagining? We looked at the problem as a prism education. Prism education, ecclesiology, philosophy, neuroscience and theology.
And here are just a few questions to think about.
And I think we might have a minute or two. I can hear some people in the hall. But what's something that you accept as is right now?
What keeps you from imagining?
And what does imagination look like in community? For the most part, I've been talking individually individual faith formation, but I think there is a communal and societal social aspect of imagination as well, especially as we think about it in the context of a congregation.
So should we have a minute for questions?
Yes, You can save them for next week. I'll be here next week.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Everybody should come back next week for part two, which is is going to be wonderful.
