Beeson podcast, Episode 422 Laura A. Smit December 11, 2018 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today, we have the privilege of listening to the reverend, Dr. Laura A. Smit as she speaks here at Beeson Divinity School during our preaching lectures. Actually, this is the second in a two-part series that dr. Laura Smit gave in our school on the whole question of reason and imagination in preaching. If you want to listen to the first lecture, which is well worth your time, in case you missed it you can find it on the Beeson website at BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. Just go to the archives and look under Laura Smit, S-M-I-T, and there you will see her lecture on The Appeal to Reason, Proclaiming the Truth: The Appeal to Reason. Timothy George: In this lecture we're going to hear today she takes the other side of the street and talks about imagination. It's a wonderful, enlivening lecture on the role of imagination and I think we're going to play at the very end of the lecture the Q&A, very interesting as she interacts with our Beeson students and faculty on this theme of imagination, what the dangers of it are, how to use it, how to be wary of it. This is a wonderful lecture by a great scholar, a great preacher herself, Dr. Laura A. Smit speaking at Beeson Divinity School on the role of imagination in preaching. Let's listen. Laura Smit: Well friends, day three, and I foolishly promised you yesterday that today would be really interesting. If you were here yesterday, I hope you remember that we started out with a quotation from C.S. Lewis in which he said, "Reason is the organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning." And so yesterday we talked about reason and truth and today we're talking about imagination and meaning. How that truth that's up here, in the head, moves into the heart, moves into a place where it has traction in your life, becomes something that matters and transforms you. Laura Smit: That, I think, is the question for any preacher. We don't just want to teach, we want to teach in a way that has meaning, we want to be conveying the living, active word of God. So Lewis is suggesting that maybe the imagination can help with that. Those of you who were here on Tuesday may remember that in that, not lecture, but sermon I talked about a different passage from C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man where he says that we have reason that tries to govern the appetites. Our head tries to govern our belly, but without success. Our appetites dominate us. Our appetites run the show. Our appetites control our lives unless we have the quality of magnanimity, a great soul, great love for great goods, and not an impulsive love, but disciplined, ordered, stable love for the highest possible goods. Laura Smit: Now, I'd like to bring those two ideas together today and ask, how is it that imagination helps us to love what's good? Once we've been told about what's good, once we have the idea of what's good, how does imagination help us love what is good? Or to put it in the language of my own tradition, my Presbyterian tradition, we talk about loving the highest good as the goal of our life, the highest good being God, but the way we tend to talk about it is we've been made in order to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Laura Smit: Now, that's a way of talking about God that clearly has some traction in your life. If you're spending your life and you see the purpose of your life as glorifying God and enjoying him, that's not just an abstract, cold affirmation about who God is. That's reason and truth that has moved into another place. How do we help people do that in our preaching? Well, I think most of us, when we hear the idea that we're going to talk about imagination and preaching, we think about that great illustration that we found once as preachers or the great illustration that we heard once in a sermon that helped us understand something, the illustration that kind of produced a light bulb moment where we saw something clearly. Laura Smit: So we think of imagination in terms of stories or poems or metaphors that trigger a moment of understanding, and certainly imagination works well through those sorts of strategies. I teach introductory theology to first and second year students mostly. Once in a while a senior student wanders in who has been afraid of the class and delaying the class for a while, but usually they're pretty early in their college career, trying to figure out what they believe about things. Laura Smit: Early in the semester we talk about our language for God and when we're having that conversation, I always use a poem by C.S. Lewis. It's a poem called Footnote to All Prayers. If you don't know this poem I commend it to you. I love Lewis' poetry in general. It's poetry that has substance and meaning and it's beautiful poetry. This particular poem he starts out saying, "Whenever I pray, I'm an idolater because I'm not really praying to God, I'm praying to some image of God that I've made up." And not only that, but this is true of everybody who prays. I'm not alone. We are all doing this. We're all praying to an image of God because we don't really get to see God in himself. We just don't have that vision. Laura Smit: So we're all praying to a kind of made-up God and we're all blaspheming even as we pray all the time unless, and then he starts to address god with a plea. He says, "God, the only way we're going to be able to address you correctly is if you translate our inadequate prayers into your own great language." And then he uses this image. He says, "In your magnetic mercy draw our prayers, which have been aimed unskillfully in the wrong direction. Draw those prayers to you beyond our deserving." So the picture is God's this gripping magnet. Laura Smit: I'm firing my prayers off in completely the wrong direction. I'm thinking about the wrong idea entirely and that prayer gets pulled to God himself. He receives it as a real prayer because of his magnetic mercy. Now, that's a wonderful image. And I continue to use it because it touches students every semester and they think about their prayers in a new way. And they think, "Wow, my sense that I don't really know who God is when I pray, that I'm sort of praying into the dark." C.S. Lewis felt that way too. He says everybody felt that way and apparently everybody else in the class feels that way. And we pray relying on God's mercy to draw our prayers to himself. Laura Smit: I don't think that anyone leaves that class without remembering the image of the magnet. That's an image that makes truth meaningful. It gives truth traction. And so it's doing exactly what an imaginative metaphor should do. But much of the time, I think, especially in preaching, I know I do this, I hear other people doing this, we use imaginative little stories and often jokes, not in order to further the meaning of anything we have to say, but to make ourselves feel a little better about what we're doing. How many sermons have you heard that start with a story, usually a story that ends with a punchline, a story that gets a laugh, that has very little to do with the substance of the sermon? Why do we do this? Laura Smit: And we're squandering the imaginative potential of the sermon because you know that that's what people remember when they leave. They remember the little joke and they don't remember the great truth of the gospel that you spoke later. So why are we doing this? I think we do it because it's terrifying to stand up in front of a congregation sometimes and speak the gospel and we want to know that they like us first. We want to get them to laugh. We want to feel affection coming at us and then we may be dare to step out in the next step. We do it because we're needy and we're preaching them from a place of neediness and desperation and looking for affirmation, and that's not likely to be a place from which we can proclaim the gospel with any confidence or authority. Laura Smit: The confidence of the preacher should not be located in your ability to tell a good joke. You are not an entertainer and you are not meant to be the most popular speaker these people know. Some of the most powerful preachers I've ever experienced are not very good speakers as a matter of fact, but when they stand up in the pulpit, they speak exactly the way they do when they're helping you through a pastoral crisis and they have power in that pulpit and with that congregation because everyone knows them and everyone knows that the voice of that pastor is completely authentic, is completely true and that when he is saying, and I say he because the pastor I'm thinking of is my friend from grad school, when he says, "This is what God will do for you," I always knew, everyone in the church always knew that he was speaking from experience. Laura Smit: It was the same word of comfort he would give me if he came to see me when I was sick or if he talked to me when I was in the time of despair. He was always the same person. If you were a visitor in that church, I don't think he had a lot of power as a pastor. You had no idea who he was and you just thought, who is this person is kind of stammering up there? But for the people in his church, he had great power and his authority did not come from his ability to entertain. Laura Smit: We want to have the love and acceptance of everybody in the room and the way to get that, we think, is to be entertaining. But remember that Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "We are the fragrance of Christ to God, both among those being saved and among those who are perishing. Among those who are perishing we are the fragrance from death to death and among those who are saved where the fragrance from life to life. There will always be people who hear you dor whom you are the fragrance of death if you are really speaking the gospel. If everyone loves your sermons, if no one finds you to be the fragrance of death, then it may not be actually the presence of Christ that you are bringing into that pulpit." Laura Smit: So the appeal to imagination always needs to be subservient to the truth. Lewis says, "Don't send your imagination out looking for truth on its own. Reason finds the truth, you proclaim the truth and then the imagination serves the truth." And when he's talking about the head and the chest, he says the chest is the vice region. The chest is like the assistant to the head, never in charge. The truth governs how we think about the use of imagination and how we use our imagination, which means there are times we shouldn't use it. Laura Smit: Now, one place where I think we do find imagination often very helpful is when we're reading a text of Scripture and we're trying to think, what does this mean? Especially, I think, this is helpful when we're reading stories, narratives. There's a long Christian tradition of imagining the story, entering into the story. Now, that can be done very well and that can be done very badly. Again, the imagination has to be subject to the truth. So if you are speculating and adding and imagining in ways that embroider the story, that's not subservient to the truth, but I think there are ways that can be subservient to the truth. Laura Smit: Many years ago I was working on a sermon on the crossing of the Red Sea. I was a pastor at the time. I had a little more time to spend on my preparation than I sometimes do now. I took time to try to write a poem about that passage. I'm not a great poet. It was not a great poem. But that really doesn't matter because just thinking about the passage that way made me notice things. I noticed something that I had not noticed when I was coming into the passage in a different way, that the pillar of cloud had gone behind the people of Israel to separate them from Pharaoh's Army and that at the night it was a pillar of fire and it had lit up the night. Laura Smit: So that as they're there on the shores of the sea, as the wind starts to blow, there's this divine light illumining everything. And I started to realize what we have in this story is a mighty wind, so mighty it can separate the sea and you've got to walk through that, and a mighty fire, and water. And it occurred to me that there are other stories where I see those images together and because I was approaching the text in a more imaginative way I started to think about connections between the crossing of the Red Sea and Pentecost where we also have wind and fire that leads us into a baptism. Laura Smit: Now, I don't think I would have seen those connections, which I think are real connections. I don't think they're accidental connections. I think they're real connections. I don't think I would have seen those connections without approaching the text more imaginatively than at first came naturally to me. A purely reasoned reading of the text would not have gotten me to the place of seeing those connections. And often I think, especially in the Old Testament, when we're trying to understand, what did this language mean to the first hearers of it? How did they understand the symbol system of the tabernacle? How did they understand the symbol system that's clearly operating in the Old Testament that's so foreign so often to us? Laura Smit: Imagination can be a very helpful way to enter into the text. And if you can ignite the imagination of the people to whom you're preaching about the text so that they join you in enter in the text that way, then you have helped them to love the good of this book and maybe inspired them to say, "I should spend more time in this text. I should spend more time reading this Bible. I shouldn't just hear other people read it on Sunday because it's an exciting book that lights up my imagination." Laura Smit: It seems to me that the most powerful way I've found to use the imagination in preaching and in teaching is to help people see moral goodness. I started to learn this especially when I was a young pastor and I had a man show up at my church kind of curious about Christianity. He started to attend fairly regularly, and he came to me one day and asked me some questions about Jesus. So I did what any good young evangelical pastor would do. I handed him Mere Christianity and said, "Come back and talk to me about it." And he left and I thought what have I just done? Laura Smit: I just gave this man Mere Christianity which has that great portion at the beginning about Jesus that's fantastic. But there's stuff in Mere Christianity about sex. I don't know if you remember that, but there's a whole chapter on sexual morality followed by a chapter on Christian marriage. This man was living a wildly promiscuous life. He had children by several women. He was not really divorced, but he'd been separated for a long time. I had made the strategic decision I thought not to bring any of that up with him yet. I thought we don't want to lead with sexual ethics. We want to lead with Jesus and then once he gets excited about Jesus, I'll break the news to him that his whole life has to change now and this is going to be a little hard. Laura Smit: But I hadn't planned to hand him a book about it. That was not really my idea. So I was a little nervous when he came back and told me he'd read the whole thing. I said, "What did you think?" "Oh the part about Jesus, that was interesting. But you know, I really liked that part about sex," he said. I was stunned, "Why?" "I never knew it could be so clean." I started to realize as I got to know this man better that that's what he was at our church for. He didn't know enough to want Jesus. He just knew that the people in this church were living a different kind of life than he was living and he wanted that kind of Life. Whatever that was, he was puzzled by it. But they had lives that looked clean to him and he was trying to figure it out. Laura Smit: And this book by C.S. Lewis helped to explain that. Now, Lewis does use some nice images in those two chapters, not very many compared to what he does some places, but he uses a few. For instance, he's talking about divorce. And he says, "Sometimes non-Christians are puzzled that all Christians don't agree about this. There's some Christians who say, never, ever, ever do we allow divorce. And other Christians sometimes and how can you not agree?" He said, "Well, we don't always agree about that, but we do agree about this, we all think that getting a divorce is more like cutting up a body then it is dissolving a business partnership. And some of us think that that surgery is so violent it should never be attempted and others think they're maybe emergency situations where it's worth the risk. But we're all saying it's much more like cutting off your legs than it is like ending a business." Laura Smit: That's a pretty powerful image and I suspect that that made an impression on this man, but from my conversation with him I think the bigger thing that made an impression was just the whole laying out in a straightforward way of the goodness, of chastity, purity, fidelity, holding those things up as attractive and I was embarrassed to think that actually if he had sat down with any member of my congregation for a sustained conversation, any member of the congregation who had been in a long marriage or who had been single and faithful and chaste for a long time, who knew what it was to practice self-control. If he had had any of that kind of communication from us, he wouldn't really have needed this book. Laura Smit: We could have ignited his imagination just as readily by sharing our lives with him, but we were all afraid to do that. We thought it would frighten him. Just like the preacher who starts with a joke, see, we didn't want to say anything that might be the fragrance of death. But when we are proclaiming the gospel, we have to proclaim the truth and we have to trust that the good is attractive to those who are being saved. Those that God is preparing, those that God wants to draw to himself through your preaching will be attracted if you hold the good up and you proclaim it faithfully and say, "This is the life that God wants us to live." And of course, if you yourself are living that life, and if you yourself have come to a place where you see its beauty, where you are drawn to it, where you love it, you can pass that on to other people. Laura Smit: So very often in our culture, especially right now in our conversations about sex, when we do have the courage to talk about it in our congregations and from our pulpits, it's all very scolding, isn't it? It's all about the things you mustn't do. But it seems to me that if we're going to capture people's imaginations, if we're going to make them love a life of holiness, we have to hold up this alternative way of living as something beautiful, as something desirable, as something that is shining in its goodness. It's not just true about sexual morality, but that happens to be one of the great countercultural moments for us as Christians today. Laura Smit: Every culture has things that collide with the gospel and in our culture sexual morality is a big point of collision, but there are other things too that we could hold up as beautiful, as shining, as good without constantly scolding people into right behavior, attracting people into right behavior. And what is happening when that occurs is the capturing of the imagination, because what is happening when that occurs is we are saying to people, "There is another way that you could live. You don't have to live the way you're living now because you know that's not working. Here's another path." Laura Smit: See, this is the primary use of imagination for us in our everyday life. We need imagination to explore what is not yet actual. We need imagination to think about the things that are only potential for us. And it's a good thing. Sometimes we get all hung up in living in an imaginary world. That's not such a good thing, when we use imagination to avoid reality, but most of the time we use imagination to explore, what should my next step be? If you're dating someone, of course you spend time imagining, and what would it be like? What would it be like to wake up every morning and see this person as the first person I see, to come home from work and this is the person who greets me. Laura Smit: Is that a good thought or not so good? Can I imagine what that might be like? Can I imagine how this person might parent children? Is this someone I would actually trust to raise my kids. Those are questions that require imagination. And every time we're making a move in our lives, a change in our lives, a decision in our lives imagination comes into play as we think about this new step, what will that be like? What will that involve? What steps have to happen between here and there to make it occur? And so the Christian life is all about imagination because what we are constantly doing is realizing that where we are is not where we ought to be, and then being drawn to a vision of what a life of holiness might look like. Laura Smit: In my preaching I find myself saying this over and over, imagine what it would be like. Imagine what it would be like to go to bed at night with nothing you felt guilty about from the whole day. Imagine what it would be like to spend a whole day and realize you had not hurt anyone's feelings, you had not been selfish, you had not passed by anyone in need, you had not been oblivious to someone who is calling out for help. You had been consistently kind and loving all day. I've never had that experience. I mean, there are people who go to bed without guilt because they're so unaware of their own life. That's not what we're talking about. Laura Smit: Not mentioning any names, but we did just hear a politician who told us that although he is a Presbyterian, he never confesses his sins. So apparently this is possible, to feel no sense of guilt. This is hard for me to imagine, but for most of us, the guilt is pretty prevalent. The guilt is pretty real. We know that we're messing up. We know our life is not what it should be. What would it be like? Can you imagine what it would be like to live a life in which you are doing the right thing consistently? In which you're actually obeying God at every step. And doesn't that seem pretty desirable to you? Doesn't that seem like something that you would like? Laura Smit: So I think imagination is not just about telling those stories. Imagination is about holding up a potential future and saying, "This path is open to you. Jesus Christ has opened this door. The holy spirit is waiting to empower you to live a new life. You don't have to be stuck in the life you're living right now. You don't have to be stuck in the patterns that you're in right now. You can see right here a different way of living." Imagination is involved whenever we hold up some great saint and say, "You could live this way." Laura Smit: Living Like Jesus, of course, we hold up Jesus as the perfect human. I tend not to be terribly convinced that I can live like Jesus, but I'm more convinced that maybe I could someday live like Paul. Maybe I could live more like Paul every day. In your preaching, are you calling people to a new kind of life? Are you engaging them so that they see this truth is not some abstract reality. It has implications. And if you really live into it, it's going to change everything about you. It's going to change the kind of person you are. It's going to change your relationship. It's going to transform your relationship with God. Laura Smit: Now, because imagination is primarily about what's potential I think we have to be very careful in applying imagination to God. There's no potential in God. God is all act, all actual. Everything God can be, he is maximally. He's not going to become a little more loving tomorrow. He's all love. He's not going to become a little more sovereign at some point in the future. He doesn't fade away from sovereignty and then get sovereign again. So all the kinds of changing that we experience, that's not how God functions, that's not how God, it's not how God exists. God is maximally himself always. Laura Smit: So imagination and God, that's, I think, a little tricky. To start imagining what God is like invites us into projecting our own experience onto God. And I think that we should be very, very careful about bringing too much imagination into our thinking about what God is like. If, for instance, you start engaging in thought experiments about what might it be like to be an eternal being I think it would be like this, you're very likely to be led into error. And it seems to me that an awful lot of the heretical problems of Christian history have come by trusting our imagination a little too much when it comes to God. Laura Smit: This is why in the early church, the church keeps telling you, "This is what you're not allowed to say about God. Don't say these things and then stand in that place of mystery that is carved out by all the things you're not allowed to say and the door, but don't talk too much." That's not what you're there to do. You stand in a place of mystery and you avoid all the errors, you don't talk about God is three Gods, you don't talk about God is one with three roles, all the things you're not supposed to say. There's very little in the early church about how you do say things, just a really simple one being, three persons, let's not go beyond that, okay? Just praise him. Laura Smit: Don't try to come up with new, fancy language. It will just betray you into error. Don't try to come up with new cool metaphors. In fact, the only metaphor I know, the only image I know that works pretty well in talking about God, again, from C.S. Lewis, is one that tells us that we really can't understand God at all. Again, in Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis very intelligently I think uses the example of Flatland by Abbott, and I think the Avid actually intended his book to be used in this way. So Lewis isn't making this up. I think this was Abbott's intention. Laura Smit: If you've ever taken a math class you may have run into the idea of flatland. It's a two-dimensional world. This early 20th century mathematician wrote a book about what would it be like to live in a two-dimensional world. How would the squares and the triangles tell each other apart? How would they function? What would that be like? So it's a little imaginative exercise and then he imagines that a sphere appears in flatland, a sphere that moves up and down through the plane. So flatland is a flat plane and the sphere, sometimes it's a point, sometimes it's a big circle. This is very confusing to a two-dimensional being. Laura Smit: And then Lewis says, "Okay, the difference between two and three dimensions is small compared to the difference between our life and God's life." We know from Scripture that God is one being and that God is three persons and instead of saying, "That doesn't make sense." Let's just say, "We don't know why that makes sense." Just like a two dimensional being would not understand that in our three-dimensional world we have an object called a cube which is six squares and one object. A two-dimensional being would say, "Nonsense, six squares are six objects. They're not one object." But of course, for us, it makes perfect sense to put six squares together as one cube and it's really one object. Laura Smit: So he says, "We have an even bigger distance from God. So we just need to accept it when we're told God is one being, three persons." See, that I think is about the only kind of metaphor we can use for God, a metaphor that says, "This is why you don't get to say anything more." A metaphor that says, "This is why we have to be careful and quiet when talking about God's nature." The other thing I think imagination has to help us do and that we must be doing when we preach is we need to be shattering people's imprisonment in the natural world as if the natural world is all there is. We have to be opening up their minds and their hearts to the supernatural, to the fact that the world is bigger than what you think it is. Laura Smit: And I think we do that in lots of ways. We do that through the experience of worship, but we also do that through the proclamation of the truth, the proclamation of the truth that you as a human person are not the same as an animal, that you have a dimension to you, the breath of God has been breathed into you. When God made humanity, he made us from the dust of the earth and we do have that in common with all the animals and all of the rest of creation, but he also breathed his own breath into us and we have a role to play of standing between God and the world, a role to play of being mediators, a role to play that extends above and beyond what is natural, because we are not just natural beings. Laura Smit: We are beings who are far more than that. We are beings who are already now being transformed from one degree of glory to another, into the likeness of Jesus, into a participation in his ascended reality, his resurrection body, his new glorified life. That's our future. We're already experiencing that future breaking in now, and we need to proclaim that to people, that our life is not just a horizontal life. Our life has this whole dimension, which is the most important part of who we are. And we neglect it at our peril. When we neglect it, we are drifting back into being much less than were called to be. Laura Smit: How can you preach in a way that inspires people to imagine that possibility? We're not all going to do that in the same way because we're speaking in different contexts to different, but we'll all be given some word to use to open that door for folks if that's something that has been opened for us. You can only give what you've received, right? You can't give people this imaginative awareness of who they are and imaginative awareness of the call to holiness and an imaginative awareness of what God is offering unless you are living with that awareness, unless you have received that awareness, and I think we find that by the careful immersion in the Scriptures. Laura Smit: So I think that's most of what I have to say, but I'd like to end with one passage of Scripture, which I think is for me the most imaginatively challenging piece of writing that I know. And I referred to it yesterday. It's Hebrews chapter 12, verses 18-28. Now, just listen to this and think about how this great preacher, this preacher whose name we do not know, who preached this fantastic sermon, The Book of Hebrews, is appealing to the imagination. Laura Smit: "You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the heroes beg that not another word be spoken to them for they could not endure the order that was given. If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death. Indeed, so terrifying was a sight that Moses said, 'I tremble with fear.' But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to innumerable angels and festal gathering and to the assembly of the first born who are enrolled in heaven and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a New Covenant and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Laura Smit: See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking for they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth. How much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven? At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heaven. This phrase yet once more indicates the removal of what is shaken, that is created things, so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe for indeed our God is a consuming fire, the word of the Lord." Laura Smit: I'm happy to take questions or comments or corrections or thoughts. Ending with Hebrews, that sort of puts a stop around everybody's talking. Doesn't it? Oh, we have one? Okay. Speaker 4: Laura, thank you very much. Can you help us think about how imagination differs from the power of positive thinking, if you will? If you see where I'm going there. Laura Smit: Sure. Well, I think imagination can be the power of positive thinking. I don't think imagination is always a good thing. Imagination is a faculty that we have as human beings that can be used for good or for evil. And so certainly there are some people for whom imagination is nothing more than the power of positive thinking. I'm going to talk my way into this. I'm going to convince myself that this is true. Imagination can be destructive in lots of ways. In my book on romance I talk a lot about the destructive power of imagination. Laura Smit: When someone is imagining a relationship with you and you're kind of unaware of that and how in the world do you respond. Someone comes up to you and says, "God has told me that we should be married." And you think, who are you exactly? Clearly the first person's living in an imaginary world, not in reality. So I think there are lots of ways that imagination can distract us from the real and the true. We use imagination as a retreat or an escape, but when we're using imagination in a Godly way, an imagination has to be subservient to truth. Laura Smit: So the truth about your life is not positive thinking. The truth about your life is you're a sinner. You're inclined to evil as the sparks fly upward. That's who you are. Your best works are as filthy rags. That's the truth. I am a Calvinist. Okay, so some of you perfectionists in the room don't agree with that. But anyway, that's what I think. So if that's the truth, then the power of positive thinking doesn't come out of that truth. Laura Smit: Then when you imagine in subservience to that truth, you come to a place of, I need help, right? And behold, help is being offered, help is being given and the help is that I get to escape myself, I get to stop being this horrible person that I am and become someone better. I get to step closer and closer to holiness throughout my life. But the only reason that that's different from the power of positive thinking is that it's subservient to the truth revealed to us by God in Scripture. Whereas positive thinking is ignoring the truth of a Scripture. Does that answer the question? Speaker 5: Yes, thank you very much. That was most of the answer to what I'm going to ask, I think. It seems to me like it's a useful distinction to say that imagination is crossed over into fantasy if we need another word, but it's not helping us imagine what's real and possible and godly and what's already been potentially actualized. I think a lot of people don't draw a distinction between imagination and fantasy. So I thought what looked you were saying is very useful along those lines. So I just wondered if that is the kind of ... Laura Smit: Yeah, I think that's helpful. Fantasy, I would think of as a kind of subset of imagination, as a way of talking about that bad imagination usually, that's taken to an extreme where it becomes a whole world that you can inhabit. There's a good kind of fantasy when you get immersed in a story for instance. You're reading a book and that expands your horizon, it expands your awareness of human nature. You begin to be able to enter imaginatively into the way other people think, but when you forget, I guess, that that was a story and you start to think it is your reality. And I think a lot of us do live there. Laura Smit: I'm rather fond of Simone Weil. I don't know if she's someone that that folks at Beeson read, but Weil says, "We all think of ourselves as the most important person in our own story. We put ourselves in the middle of our life. We think that everyone else around us is really revolving around us and then we try to script the lives of everybody around us and we get annoyed with them when they don't follow our scripts." Now, that's a fantasy life that we all live in, all the time. And she says, "That fantasy is constantly being exploded by the reality of these people who refused to follow the script." Laura Smit: And so then you're brought back from a place of bad imagination the truth. So the truth is constantly confronting us. Lewis says that that's what God does all the time. He's the great iconoclast, Lewis says in a Grief Observed. I have these false ideas of God. I have false ideas about my place in the world and then I come up against the reality of God's presence and the reality of the world in which he's placed me and then all of those ideas come down and I have to start thinking anew. Laura Smit: So I think that imagination can be very dangerous and it can lead us into completely delusional places, but it's also a necessary tool for thinking about any kind of change in life. You cannot make a change in your life without the use of the imagination. So it's not an all-bad or all-good faculty. Speaker 6: You read a lot of C.S. Lewis obviously in your- Laura Smit: I do. Not as much as you, I suspect. Speaker 6: No, I'm learning from you. Lewis read through the entire psalter every month. He read through the whole counsel of Scripture often. He wore Bibles out in Greek and in English. To what extent you think, even some of the imaginative literature he's used, his imagination is sanctified by being steeped in Scripture and the imagination isn't shaped by Scripture or if we're very superficial Christians, we might come up with images and illustrations that could actually be harmful and misleading. Could you speak to that a little bit? Laura Smit: I think that's very important. And of course, Lewis had a remarkable memory. So everything he read he remembered. This is not my situation. So he really did have an incredible memory for Scripture, but also for the Christian tradition. He read an amazing amount of Christian teaching throughout history. And because he was a medievalist, he was aware of this stretching back kind of history that the way we think about Christianity right now is not the only way to think about it. And that's always a helpful corrective against the blind spots of your time. Laura Smit: I think that definitely does produce a sanctified imagination. It reminds me of a couple of great aunts I had. When I was a little kid my great-aunts, Helen and Henrietta never married, lived together, traveled the world, they were both teachers. They were quite eccentric in my view and they talked funny. And I didn't know why they talked funny till I got a little older and I realized they were quoting the Bible all the time, and when they were quoting the Bible, they were quoting the Hymn Book, and not in an intentional way even. It's just that that language was so much a part of their life that they quoted that kind of language the way some of my friends quote The Simpsons. Laura Smit: It was just the language that structured their thought. And I think that Lewis is very much immersed in Scripture that way, but also in the great Christian tradition that way. I don't think Lewis just wanders thoughtlessly into a heretical idea. He's aware of those parameters. He's aware of the limits of what language is allowed to do, and I think many of us don't always know. So we thoughtlessly and innocently in a way say things that are completely contrary to Scripture. If you knew your Bible a little better, you wouldn't say such a thing, but Lewis doesn't make those kinds of mistakes because it's so deep inside him and that's impressive since he started kind of late in that discipline. Laura Smit: Yeah. Thank you for that. I think there's someone in the back. Oh, someone in the front, Okay. We'll start in the front since you're holding a microphone. Speaker 7: Yesterday someone asked the question for those of us who are more imaginatively-minded, how do you suggest we cultivate the reason part of our teaching. And I want to look at the other side of the coin and ask, for those of us who are more minded towards reason, how would you encourage us to properly cultivate imagination particularly in our preaching and teaching? Laura Smit: Right. I do think that one way is to expand what you count as imaginative, which is what I've just been trying to do that. That you're actually using your imagination all the time every day. When you stand in the grocery store and you're making a decision about what you're going to eat for dinner, there's a little moment of imagination where you imagine eating that, you imagine eating this and you choose this. I mean, every day you are imagining things all the time. So there's really no one who doesn't have a good imagination. We all imagine. Laura Smit: So don't sell yourself short to start with. If you are more naturally inclined to reason, there's imagination happening in you and you can, if you become aware of that, I think you can find ways to talk to the imagination of your people by talking about change and transformation. Even if you don't have great images, but if you talk about the transformation, the change, the new possibilities that are open to you, that is imaginative language. And if you talk about that from your own conviction and experience, then you will do that with some passion, I think and you can ignite their imagination. Laura Smit: But you can also get better at using poetic language and language that has a little more power, finding the right image, the right illustration and I think you get good at that by reading widely, by reading good things, but even bad things can sometimes yield good illustrations. It just gets embarrassing if you have to stand up and say, "Well, I've got an illustration today from the Lego movie or something." And you don't want to get yourself stuck in positions that some people are in where you have to tell this whole long movie story in order for your illustration to work. Laura Smit: So I don't think that we should consider ourselves slaves to popular culture where we have this obligation to frame everything in the gospel in terms of illustrations and pop culture. Sometimes we talk as though we have to do that to be relevant and I think that that's a mistake. The gospel has power. It doesn't need to be given power by connecting it to Spider-Man or something. That's not really a necessary thing, but you should speak out of the things that nurture you. Laura Smit: When I was a young pastor, Saturday nights, my sister was living with me. We had a little routine. I was being kind of idealistically messianic at the time. We would light Sabbath candles, we would eat our takeout Chinese and we would watch Star Trek: The Next Generation Saturday night and was Star Trek: Next Generation was over then it was time for me to add to my sermon. By that time I had the sermon all outlined, but I didn't have my illustrations and I would wander my house looking at bookshelves, trying to think of any story. But the truth is about the third of the time, illustrations came from Star Trek: Next Generation. Laura Smit: So my congregation all became really very well acquainted with Star Trek and many of them started watching it for the first time and it was an odd mixture of Star Trek and Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. Those were my three big sources of illustrations. Now that I'm an older, more experienced pastor, I guess I just don't feel the same need always to have a little story or an illustration, and part of that is too that I went through a time where I was preaching in our chapel program, and I would have 12 minutes. Laura Smit: If you have to preach your sermon in 12 minutes, okay, you're not going to use a 3-minute story unless it really, really does further the point that you're making and make it better than you could make it if you were just talking for those three minutes, and I think that's a pretty good test for illustrations. I don't think you should feel obliged to always have a cool story in order to think that you've got a good sermon. If you are presenting the truth of the gospel and opening up the possibility of a new life to people, you are engaging their imagination. In the back. Speaker 8: Yes, what you think the benefits are of living in a visual culture and what the hindrances are of living in a visual culture? Laura Smit: Yeah, that's a good question. I come from a pretty iconoclastic tradition. And so I'm not a fan of a lot of pictures, certainly not pictures of God. I don't like pictures of Jesus either. Some years ago, when I was dean of chapel, we were planning a chapel series on the person and work of Christ and everybody brought ... We were planning the poster everybody brought in their favorite pictures of Jesus and we were going to make a poster and my assistant at the time who was Orthodox Presbyterian. It was kind of my big reformed alarm bell over ... The only person on the campus who was to my right on these things. Laura Smit: Just got so angry and she said, "You do know we're not supposed to have pictures of Jesus as reformed people." And I said, "Oh, you're just denying the reality of the incarnation and you don't really think he's truly embodied." She said, "Of course I think he's embodied. He's embodied right now. He's ascended in the body. He's got a real human face and it's none of those faces." It was such a conversion moment for me to say, yeah, we want to dream up Jesus however we like, but he's a particular human being right now. He has a real face. He has a particular height. This is also a poem by C.S. Lewis instantly where he talks about the particularity of Jesus. His voice is a particular pitch. I don't just get to make him up. Laura Smit: So I'm uncomfortable with capitulating to the visual nature of our culture. I had an interesting conversation once with a pastor from India and he told me that the culture in India is even more crazily visual, of course, than ours and has been forever. He said, "The reaction of the Protestant church is no image is everything." That they think the obvious reaction to a culture that's saturated with images is we won't do that here. We're somehow we think the obvious reaction to a culture that saturated with images is we should be saturated with images, too. And I'm just not sure about the logic of that reaction. Why do we think that because our culture is visually driven, we should be visually driven. Laura Smit: We're people of the word. The word comes first, we're saved through hearing, not through seeing and we are not left with a picture of Jesus. We're left with the word. He is the word. So I think that we have to be people who at least allow the word to dominate. How much time have we got? Time for one more? Okay. Speaker 9: As a medievalist, I was curious if you knew of ways that Christian imagination was done better in that period than we do now? Laura Smit: Well, I would say done differently. I think in the medieval period you do find the rise of this imaginative entering into the text, which can be done very well and can be done very badly. And I think both those things happen in the Middle Ages. So you can say, "Okay, I'm reading this story in which Jesus heals a blind person. I imagine myself as the blind person, imagine the words of Jesus to me. There's an appropriate way to do that and there's a way in which you go too far down that path you've suddenly distorted the story into something that's all about me and my experience and it's not about the messianic work of Jesus and what is actually being proclaimed in this story." Laura Smit: So I think that's introduced in the Middle Ages and sometimes it's introduced very well in sometimes not so well. I think that there is a lot of interest in imagery from the Old Testament and bringing it into the new and making the connections. So a lot of typological work with the Old Testament and understanding the Old Testament as kind of a collection of images that all point to Jesus and trying to figure that out. I'm a little more sympathetic to that, the many evangelicals are today. I think it can be overdone. It can be stretched too far. Laura Smit: But I am inclined to say that a way of reading Scripture that was helpful to most Christians throughout history shouldn't be completely dismissed as never good. So I think that there are good and bad things in the Middle Ages, perhaps the most interesting is the rise of the Eucharist, and not just the Eucharist, but the consecrated host as something that gets venerated. So this piece of bread is venerated in a way that starts out I think in a very pious way, but becomes kind of oddly domesticating of God, that we can carry God around in a box, so that by the time of the reformation that's kind of become twisted. Laura Smit: I think the original impulse there to venerating the host was a pretty positive one and I think it becomes something that's not so great by the end of the Middle Ages. Is that the kind of question you had? Thank you. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.