What role does the imagination play in helping people understand and appreciate the gospel of Jesus Christ? That's the question that Justin Ariel Bailey asks in his book Reimagining Apologetics. We discuss how Christians can share their faith in what has been dubbed the "Age of Authenticity," when a person's individual experience is seen as the best source of truth. Also in this episode: We geek out about Tolkien.
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What role does the imagination play in helping people understand and appreciate the gospel of Jesus Christ? That's the question that Justin Ariel Bailey asks in his book Reimagining Apologetics. We discuss how Christians can share their faith in what has been dubbed the "Age of Authenticity," when a person's individual experience is seen as the best source of truth. Also in this episode: We geek out about Tolkien.
Purchase the Book
Justin's Website
Facebook
Twitter
Tolkien Tuesdays Video Series
In All Things Podcast
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Amy Mantravadi:Hello and welcome to another episode of the(A)Millennial podcast. My name is Amy Mantravadi and I'll be your host until such time as I pack everything up and moved to Bora Bora. Today, I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Justin Ariel Bailey about his book Re-imagining Apologetics. The imagination doesn't get mentioned often in the Bible. Psalm 73:7 warns us about the wicked, saying,"The imaginations of their heart run riot," while Jeremiah 23:16 says of false prophets that"they speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord." In both cases, imagination seems to be a negative thing that draws us away from God's truth, causing us to chase after and believe in things he has not revealed. However, this isn't the kind of imagination Justin is generally talking about in his book. The closer biblical term for this concept of imagination is heart. In scripture, it is the heart that is the seat of emotions and desires, whether righteous or unrighteous. While the mind provides our rational faculty, our decisions are always impacted by our hearts. This is why God commands us to love him with all our mind and heart. The apostle Paul writes in Romans 10:9-10 that"if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved, for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation." St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the great Fathers of the Church, is remembered for his writings about human love and desire. The goal for a Christian, he argued, was to have rightly ordered loves, which is to say desires that are in line with God's will. When God draws us to himself, our hearts are turned to him and captured by his love, which causes us to love and desire him in turn. While Augustine was not opposed to the use of reason and its importance to the development of faith, he also knew that human beings are forever animated by their desires. The goal of apologetics then is not only to convince someone of the truth of Christian propositions, thus capturing their mind, but to draw them to the very experience of being a Christian: to make them desire the things of God. Our desires drive our beliefs and are therefore intimately connected with faith. The challenge is that those who do not know Christ are still driven by sinful desires. As Augustine wrote in The City of God,"In order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love." Justin will offer some suggestions for how we can capture the imaginations of our friends and neighbors and place them in the path of God's love. Before ado is furthered any further, let's head to the interview.
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Amy Mantravadi:And I am here with Justin Ariel Bailey, who is the associate professor of theology at Dordt University. He received his bachelor's degree at Moody Bible Institute, his MDiv and ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and his PhD from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is ordained in the Christian Reformed Church and has served in multiple and diverse ministry capacities, most recently as assistant pastor for teaching and discipleship at Grace Pasadena from 2013 to 2017. He has published peer reviewed articles in the International Journal of Public Theology and the Christian Scholars Review in addition to several other articles, book chapters, and book reviews, and he hosts the In All Things podcast sponsored by the Andreas Center at Dordt University. His published works include the book we're going to talk about today, Re-imagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age, and also a forthcoming book, which I understand will be called Your Interpretation Is Your Life. And you can find him on Facebook@drjustinbailey and on Twitter@jarielbailey. So Dr. Bailey, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's my pleasure, Amy. Thanks. Yeah. And I'm excited to discuss this book. I know it's been out for a little while, but I was glad to finally get the chance to read it and just really appreciated what you had to say there. Now I warned you, we're going to start out with a couple fun questions. So now I will reveal that the questions have to do with a topic I understand you're somewhat interested in, which is J.R.R. Tolkien. In the past year or so, you've been doing a series of YouTube videos called"Tolkien Tuesdays." And so, as you likely know, there are a few ongoing controversies or issues of debate within the world of Tolkien fandom. So I thought I would just ask you your opinion and whatever answers you give me we'll consider to be the definitive answers on these...
Justin Ariel Bailey:The canonical answer. Ok, sounds good.
Amy Mantravadi:...until such time as I have another guest who I ask the same questions.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Ok, sounds great.
Amy Mantravadi:So my first question for you is, do balrogs have wings?
Justin Ariel Bailey:No, they do not have wings.
Amy Mantravadi:Despite the fact that they have wings in the Peter Jackson films, you're going to go with they don't?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Well, I mean, Peter Jackson is sort of like a Message translation of- well, not even the Message translation, because I actually quite liked the Message translation. Let's just say there are liberties that are taken, and I think it works in that version, but I don't think that they are meant to have wings. Similarly, dragons don't have wings other than Smaug. Smaug certainly has wings, but most of the early dragons in Tolkien's work didn't have wings either.
Amy Mantravadi:Glaurung did not have wings. However, in the last battle when the host of the Valar came, I believe then Morgoth unleashed the winged dragons at that time. So yes, you were correct that most of them did not have wings.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah. So I guess it's possible in the way that Morgoth could have perverted or taken natural things and made them even worse. Maybe balrogs could have wings, but I prefer to say no, they don't have wings. That's a deep cut. Wow.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. Well, I think you're probably correct about that. I think that there's some compelling evidence that they did not have wings, so very good there. We've settled that question forever. Now the other question I have is do you have any opinion on what type of being Tom Bombadil is and what his origin is?
Justin Ariel Bailey:I mean, it makes the most sense to say that he is one of the Maiar, similar to Gandalf or other lesser- lesser than the Valar, but greater than the Children. I think that part of Tom Bombadil- I mean, Tom Bombadil's like Melchizedek in some sense in the Bible: the mystery of his character wrapped up as it is in Middle-earth itself is part of what makes him who he is. And so in some sense to name, to answer that question is almost to kind of betray it, but I guess he doesn't come from nothing or come from nowhere. He's part of the created world, and so it makes the most sense, I think, to classify him as one of the Maiar. I'm not convinced by people who say that he is Aule or someone in disguise. I guess I understand that in some sense, but I think that he's just one of the Maiar whose life is wrapped up in Middle-earth itself.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. I think that makes sense as well. Well, I think we've probably by this point lost any listeners who weren't Tolkien fans, but I'm glad we could get those controversies settled. Okay. Moving on to discuss your book, which is at this time a more important topic, you note that we live in what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called an"Age of Authenticity," in which one of the greatest societal values is following one's heart or being true to oneself. This means that traditional apologetic methods that seek to prove the objective truth of Christian claims can fall flat if they do not appeal to the hearer individually. In light of this, you argue that,"What is needed is a provocation of possibilities, a vicarious vision of what it feels like to live with Christian faith, a sense of the beauty of faith that is felt before fully embraced. For this, the imagination is essential." What do you mean by imagination here, and how does it differ from standard logical reasoning?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Sure. Yeah. I always start answering this question by saying what I don't mean, and what I don't mean is the imagination as escapist: merely escapist, something that you go to the movie theater just to have the special effects wash over you, lose yourself, get away from the real world. I think there's a place for that as well, but that's not what I mean. I also don't mean imaginary, so that you only use the imagination to engage things that aren't real, in which case- Obviously I think the resurrection happened and these things are real things, and so to talk about the need for imagination and faith wouldn't make sense if I use the imagination that way. What I mean by imagination really is simply the faculty that God has given to us to interrogate possibilities, and it's part of being made in God's image that as we seek to cultivate and unleash the potentiality of God's good creation that we have to ask questions like,"What would it be like if we did this? What if we sort of move in a subjunctive mood and ask what's possible? Within the limits that I have, what can I do? What can I hope for?" Imagination is the faculty with which we hope. And so I really believe, and I say this in my book, is that though we use the imagination perhaps to detach from what is actual, we ultimately are doing that so we can grip reality more firmly. So I read Tolkien not because I'm trying to escape, but because I actually think that it makes me live better in this world: that it actually allows me to live more capaciously. And we're always using our imagination. Our imagination though can be captive to cynicism and fear and despair, or it can be captive to faith and love and hope, which is what comes out of the story that we get in scripture and that's supremely told to us through Jesus Christ. That's basically what I mean. Now for the second part of your question, I think you asked what's the relationship with the intellect or with reasoning.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, how does our capacity for imagining things differ from our capacity for just reasoning through them analytically, because in your book, you contrasted that a little in the styles of apologetics and what they're appealing to.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah, and I'll just also say that I'm not trying to do away with classical or traditional ways that apologetics has been practiced. I'm hoping to supplement it with a more holistic approach. So C.S. Lewis says that the intellect takes things apart and the imagination puts things together, and so we're always doing both all the time. We're taking ideas apart, we're taking worldviews apart, pictures that we have of the way that things are and seeing,"Is this true? Does this actually correspond to reality?" And then we take all of those things and put them back together, and that happens all simultaneously and reciprocally. So another person that I rely on is George MacDonald, and MacDonald says that the intellect is like the laborer and the imagination is like the architect or the imagination is like the visionary guy who sweeps across the borders in search of new land, but then she has to guide her plotting brother intellect behind. So you hear a noise at night in your house and your imagination, whether you want it or not, is going to supply you with possibilities of what is happening, right?"What is that noise?" And then the intellect has to now go and test all of those things to see what is actually actual- what is real. And so we're always using them together, the imagination and the intellect, but I'm trying to say the imagination almost always comes first. We very rarely start with ideas. Ideas and the exploration of ideas always comes after we've had some sort of imaginative engagement or glimpse of something or felt sense of the way that the world is. And so in the same way that scripture is not presented to us as bullet points just for our intellect to absorb but is presented to us in all of these different genres- ultimately story, right? True story, but also poetry and parable and apocalyptic, which is trying to engage our imagination and actually reshape the way we see the world. Not just, say,"Here are 501 facts about God for you to memorize." Because what scripture is really trying to do is to engage our full humanity, which includes our imagination.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, thank you for that. And I have to tell you, as I was reading your book, something kept coming back to my mind. It comes from sort of a past life of mine when I was studying international security and security studies. And I'm remembering back when the 9/11 Commission released its report- the 9/11 Commission that the U.S. Government put together to examine what had gone wrong with 9/11- and the quote I'll always remember was they said that it came down to"a failure of imagination," and what they meant by that was that the intelligence services- they had all kinds of data. They were looking at all the facts, but they were unable to imagine how someone nefarious could take what they were seeing and put it to a bad use. So that's a negative case of sort of getting into someone else's brain through imagination, but I think you also described in your book how imagination is very key to empathy and being able to imagine how someone else might view the world is definitely a key part of apologetics. So maybe a random reference there, but it was just something that kept popping into my head as I was reading your book.
Justin Ariel Bailey:That phrase-"failure of imagination"- I think it's very important, because I think that there are so many things that if we understand it as a failure of imagination rather than a failure of facts or a failure of logical reasoning, we also have lots of failures of that, you know. But Thomas Kuhn in his book Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued for this idea of paradigm shifts that happened in the world of science. And really when you're asking somebody to move from a place of unbelief to a place of faith, that really requires a paradigm shift, doesn't it? And so one of the great struggles is that there are certain things about Christian faith that can only be understood from the inside: from a position of commitment. So how do you help somebody who's on the outside from a position of sort of critical appraisal feel what it's like on the inside? It's those inside things that actually make faith most compelling. And so I think that what you just said, the power of empathy and the ability to- for example, when you hear somebody's testimony, see the world through their eyes, see the world through the eyes of faith is actually one of the ways that we can sort of bridge this gap of seeing,"Okay, this is what it would be like." And what that does is provides a new paradigm that a person can look at the world through and maybe correct some of the failures of imagination.
Amy Mantravadi:Thank you for that. Obviously an important part of apologetics- It gets down to how we know what we know and how do we discern what the truth is. Drawing again upon the work of Charles Taylor, you discussed in your book how Western culture has changed over the past few hundred years in ways that have produced the Age of Authenticity. The contrast between the Enlightenment and Romantic movements- two very important intellectual movements in the past few hundred years- is particularly important to this story. How do you see our present cultural moment being impacted by each of these movements, particularly in our differing notions of truth? This is something that you got at in the early chapters of your book, and I think it's important.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah, and I just commend people- anytime you start to talk about history, there's always so many complexities, so please forgive this brief summary and go to my book if you want to see a little bit more.
Amy Mantravadi:Yes, please summarize the last half millennium.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Exactly. So one of the reasons I rely on Charles Taylor so much, as lots of others have been doing recently, is because he has done a really good job at critiquing what he calls the"subtraction story," which is that we needed faith and religion and belief in God, but now we have science, and so we've sort of subtracted all of the things that we used to need. And what he does is tell us the opposite stories. He tells more of an addition story or a construction story. And so I sort of compare it to the difference between emerging from the cave of superstition into the light- That's the subtraction story."Now we're in the light. We've been enlightened. We can see the world the way it really is."- To building a castle over yourself and then thinking that the castle is the entire world, just sort of like what happens in The Silver Chair, if you've read the Narnia Chronicles. And so what you have as the Reformation happens is this shift in gravity from the Church to the wider world, where the Reformers really want to take the world seriously as the theater of God's glory. And so the attention really turns outward so that they want all places to be holy places rather than just some places, all people to be holy people rather than just some people. It's sort of this discipling of every sphere of life, which is really, really wonderful and one of the reasons why I'm Reformed. But what then happens with that shift towards the wider world with the Enlightenment is that there begins to be a shrinking of scope in which Enlightenment thinkers are interested in the world as a closed system. And this is what I mean: you build this sort of cathedral over yourself and then think that the cathedral is the whole world, and you've just kind of shut out the sun. You can't actually see it, but it's still there. You just enclosed yourself in imminence. And so they say the world is a closed system. It's designed for it. Maybe God still did it. You know, you have deism: God still is the one who put it all there, but it's this closed system designed for human flourishing. There's no possibility of miracles, because then that would mean that God made a mistake in the perfect system that he made, and we need to figure everything out. That's, that's the goal of the human vocation is to leave no mystery, no places uncharted, and really to kind of figure out the castle. Now, the problem with that, of course- one of many problems- is that you have cut yourself off from that deep sense of meaning where meaning is not found inside the castle, but outside the castle in the wider world. And so what happens with the Romanticism, Taylor argues, is that what they're trying to do is to compensate for all of that meaning and depth that has been lost through cutting off the transcendent. And so rather than turning outward, they turn inward and say that we have these unseen depths in our souls, in the human person, which need to be explored. And this is where you kind of get in popular forms this idea of following your heart and maybe the analogy of now we have created some artificial lights for the castle that approximate the light of the sun, and we're the ones who turn on the lights. We're the ones who are sort of the source of the lights. And this is where we're kind of going now towards the shift of authenticity, where all of the meaning is whatever quest for meaning that we're on. It's going to always be starting by going inward and feeling our way in towards the world. And so that means the triumph of authenticity or really the triumph of the Romantic perspective is the sense in which the only way that something is true is if you find it resonant: you feel your way in, and it's felt before it's known. So that's the situation that Taylor argues, and I follow it and I agree with him on it. And so if you're in that situation, then you have a couple of different options of- what do you do? Do you try to turn back the clock and say,"No, we went wrong with Romanticism, the revolutions of the Sixties that kind of took authenticity culture wide. We've got to go back and discover this enchanted world," or do you start where people are and say,"Okay, what happens when you follow your heart?" And then they need to feel that thinness- the thinness of that approach from the inside rather than narrating from the outside and saying,"Everything's wrong." And so what I've tried to do is to take that second approach and to say, if authenticity has become a non-negotiable of the way that we know truth, how can we still do apologetics within those parameters? And ultimately it might lead us to reject authenticity as the ultimate value, but we don't need to start by rejecting it, but we can start by actually saying,"Okay, let's follow this path and see where it leads us."
Amy Mantravadi:Thank you. I think that was actually a pretty good brief summary, so I appreciate it. Because of the fallen nature of humanity, many Christians will understandably be a little skeptical about the power or value of the imagination in leading people to God, and getting back again to what we talked about just in our little fun intro, you appeal in your book to an argument made by Tolkien in his poem Mythopoeia, and I'll just read a little bit of it here, and apologies to all the listeners if I'm not the best at reading poetry. In Mythopoeia, which was a poem he actually wrote for C.S. Lewis before Lewis became a Christian arguing about the value of myth, Tolkien says that,"The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only wise,"- that's a capital'W' on wise-"and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not h oly lost nor h oly c hanged." And I'll just skip down a little to where he says," Though all the crannies of the world we filled with elves and goblins, though we dared to build g ods in their houses out of dark and light and sow the s eed of dragons,'twas o ur right. Used or misused, the right h as n ot decayed. We make s till by the law in which w e're made." This gets a little t o his idea about us being sub-creators, which actually he used that term in the part I skipped over. So could you elaborate on the meaning of this passage and this argument from Tolkien and how it supports the argument you make in favor of a re-imagined apologetics? And just a little f ollow u p to that, if you can answer: as a Roman Catholic, is Tolkien's view here at all at odds with Calvinist theology or a more evangelical theology?
Justin Ariel Bailey:You know, that's a great question and it's not one I've been asked yet. So thank you for that.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, as a fellow Tolkien nerd, you knew I was going to go to it.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yes. As you mentioned, Tolkien wrote that poem in response to then atheist C.S. Lewis, who told him that poems and myths, which Lewis loved- you know, he says in Surprised by Joy that it's like he had to tell two different stories, where everything that he loved was false and everything that he thought was true was empty and meaningless. And so he's talking to Tolkien and he says,"Yeah, myths and poems are lies, but breathed through silver." So they're beautiful lies: beautiful, but untrue. And Tolkien's response is basically to say,"But where does the wish come from? Where does the power to dream come from?" And what he means by that is that certainly humans do lie, as he says in the poem, and we make terrible things and we fill the nooks and crannies with dragons. And you think of all of the things that are in Middle-earth. But when he says that we are not wholly lost or wholly changed, what I take that to mean is that we are not irredeemable and that there is still something remaining. So total depravity- for those of us who believe in it, and I do- it does not mean that we are as bad as we could possibly be. What it means is that we are pervasively depraved, which means that sin has affected every single part of us. And so while the idea of being wholly lost might make someone think that Tolkien is arguing for some less than total corruption, and maybe he is- maybe that's what he had in mind when he wrote it. I think there are other ways to read that and other ways to get the basic thing that Tolkien wants, and what he wanted Lewis to see. So as a Calvinist, the way that I would say it is that though we have pursued fallen directions, the creational structure is good: sort of a Kuyperian way of saying that the created structure remains because it's made by God. It belongs to God and humans have taken it in all of these fallen directions and filled the earth with dragons, and yet we still cannot escape this creational mandate. We cannot escape the cultural mandate to imagine and to make and to tell stories and to dream and to hope, and that's going to be twisted, but there's something that is primally good underneath it because of its creativeness and because of its reflection of the image of God. So creation- and in this case, the image of God in humanity that imagines and makes things- does not need to be replaced. It needs to be healed. So grace does not replace creation or nature. Grace heals and restores nature, because the creative structure itself is good. At least, that's how I interpret that passage as a Calvinist. And you certainly don't need to be a Roman Catholic to believe that. Now Tolkien certainly was a very committed Roman Catholic and didn't like a lot of the things that Lewis would write later. But I think that the basic point that I'm trying to make, the work I'm trying to do by using that quote is to say that the created structure of imagination is good even if our imaginings have become vain: that there's something there that God's spirit can redeem, that God's spirit can work within and redirect and bring completion to sort of the hopes that humans have.
Amy Mantravadi:And obviously there are some important differences between Roman Catholic theology and Reformed or even broadly Protestant theology, but the more you dig into it, I think people might be a little bit surprised over how much similarity there is in some of these areas. There can be an impression that Roman Catholics have no concept of, for instance, what in reformed theology, the creator creature distinction, or, you know, the need for grace and salvation things of that nature, the need for regeneration by the spirit. I think sometimes there can be a sense that, you know, that's not part of Catholic theology and while they do have different emphases and some important differences on theological points, I think in this area, there actually is a lot of overlap. So that's something useful we can draw on, um, sort of building on that last question. Every apologetic method is ultimately dependent on the work of the holy spirit. You make a good case in this book that our beliefs tend to be driven by our desires. So for Amanda find a Christian vision of the world appealing, he needs to have his desires changed by the holy spirit. This leads to an important theological question and really kind of gets at what we were just talking about in the last one. To what extent is the holy spirit active in this way, among those who do not belong to Christ. And you addressed this a bit from the Calvinist perspective in the book. And I was waiting to see if you had mentioned him that Neo with this ideas of Abraham Kuyper also seemed to be relevant in this area. So if you could just talk about that a little more.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah. One of the things that I call the Calvinist imagination in the book is the conviction that any goodness or truth or beauty that we find must have to God's presence and action in the fallen world. Now there's a whole thing. And I talk about this in my book, you know, the Protestants can't have good imaginations and they can't make good art because they don't have a sack, a good enough sacramental view of there's too much distance between creator and creation for, for there to be any sort of meaningful, meaningful work. But what Calvinists really do is fill that space with a spirit so that the holy spirit is the one who's at work drawing creation towards consummation. So the work of the holy spirit outside the walls of the church, I mean, it is mysterious. So I think we should be really hesitant and careful to identify too quickly what we take to be positive developments as, oh, that's the work of the holy spirit. And we have to be tentative and provisional because we don't have any revelation in the same way that we do for something that happened within the church where we know that God has promised to meet us, God has promised to show up. If you think about Carl Bart, for example, this is what he's reacting to because the Nazi regime basically was unopposed by the majority of German churches, because they basically said all of the progress we've had in Germany. That's the holy spirit, the flourishing of our country right now, you know, prior to the war that's because of God, God is the one who has done that, the holy spirit, and they couldn't distinguish between the human spirit and the holy spirit. So I take that as a very important caution. Nevertheless, if we believe that God has not abandoned creation to corruption, but is continuing to work through the spirit to renew and heal, then that means that we shouldn't be surprised to find the holy spirit at work among those outside the walls of the church and in especially their longings and losses. And, you know, Bobby has this wonderful quote that I share in the book about the holy spirit being at work and common grace being at work in artists and philosophers and politicians outside, outside the walls of the church, wherever we find these sort of signs of the kingdom, we have to attribute that to God's work. So that's the first part of the question. The second part may be with, I think you mentioned something about desire is that if we start with desire, so I start with desire because that's where people are. And I think almost always we start with either wanting something to be true or not wanting something to be true now, wanting something to be true. It doesn't have any bearing on whether or not it is true, but it does have bearing on the way I go about the quest to find out if it is true. And so that doesn't mean that we need to give our desires the final word or the final authority, because ultimately our desires have to be subjected to scripture and to the cross, which is something that none of us would have imagined. If we only take desire on its own, then we end up with a theology of glory and we never have a theology of the cross because we would never imagine the situation where we would actually need to suffer. But I am convinced that when we interrogate human desire and we are willing to stay with people and ask questions and work with desire and allow people to dream. And imagine that ultimately what we find is that God is not less than we imagine or desire, but that God is better than we imagined or desire. And so that's why I feel quite comfortable working within the imagination, the imagined the realm, because I know that whatever somebody thinks God's better than that. Yeah. And so that's where I maybe I've lost the train of the question now, but that's where I sort of, I'm quite hopeful. The imagination has fallen, but it's not more fallen than the intellect it's as fallen is the intellect. And so that means that if we find ourselves in a culture where the imagination has been given some sort of primacy, yes, we will need to critique that. But we also are able to start there, start wherever people are, which is just a basic principle of this theology is that you start with the facts on the ground. You don't immediately bring in a whole different category, a whole different way of approaching the world. If this is where people are, what resources do we have for addressing it?
Amy Mantravadi:And I think about the, perhaps the three images that we really have with the holy spirit and the Bible are wind fire and a dove. And all of those things give me the idea of movement of constant motion. And when I think about what Jesus said to Nicodemus in John chapter three, where he described the spirit, basically as this wind, that you could kind of sense that as blowing, but you don't really know ultimate direction. And I think that does get, like he said to the mystery of how the spirit is working. We kind of feel sometimes like we're seeing the spirit at work, but we oftentimes don't know what direction it's going to take, or it comes at us in surprising ways. So I think that that's a good way of looking at it. You spend the second half of the book focusing chiefly on the works of George McDonald and Marilyn Robinson. And you argue that both serve an apologetic purpose by allowing the reader to enter a world where Christian principles and the beauty of God are on display. Why did you select these two particular offers and have they had an effect on your own life?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah. So when I started working on this project, I was reading a lot of philosophy and theology, you know, thinking through theories of imagination, how belief works, what makes belief believable. That was a question I asked a lot and it finally occurred to me that the best way to explore the value of imagination is actually to learn from people who are experts at using their imagination. I meaning poets and writers and artists and culture makers. Those are the ones who are kind of skilled in that area. And so I started with this fundamental conviction that we can learn a lot from grounded artists, as we seek to kind of do apologetics artistically or to live in a way that is beautiful. Um, so I can't even MacDonald who's a 19th century writer through CS Lewis and Lewis famously said that George McDonald, reading George MacDonald baptized his imagination long before his actual conversion. And I thought that's really interesting. So what Magalia did was gave him this taste for goodness, his vision of what goodness and hope he said, he calls it holiness and surprised by joy. And when you read the McDonald, that it really is what you encounter is there's this holiness that is present. I think, in, in Tolkien as well though, there's not a lot of explicit like religious things. The whole thing is religious. It's just characterized by this deep, uh, holiness. Uh, and so I began to read McDonald because I wanted to understand Lewis. And the more I read him, the more that I saw that when he was doing was addressing the crisis of faith, which during his time is the first time in the English speaking world, in the modern English world, where it becomes socially acceptable to be an atheist. You had atheist before, but it was always socially unacceptable. And they had to kind of be really careful and couch what they said in particular ways. And so in the 19th century, you're seeing all of these, there's this whole body of literature, autobiographies of, deconversion not unlike sort of the ex evangelical thing that we're seeing now where lots and lots of people were writing these autobiographies of walking away from Christian faith. And so during this time apologetics and the kind of more traditional sense Springs up where you have public debates and defenders of the faith, and you have William Paley's design arguments about the watch. And so George MacDonald goes a completely different direction and what he does instead of giving facts for the intellect, he really looks for food for the imagination. And so you can read in what it's called is realistic novels. So he wrote all of these kinds of fairytales. Then you also wrote realistic novels and one trilogy in particular deals with crises of faith, the windfall trilogy, which I focus on in my book. And yeah, and it just really this beautiful exploration of different characters along the road of deconversion reconversion deconstruction reconstruction. And he's addressing those things imaginatively. The second author Marilynne Robinson was the result of me asking, okay, Donald did that, that was the 19th century. Is there anyone doing that now in a way that has having a wide purchase on not just within the Christian community, but in the wider public. And so Marilyn Robinson was the person that I found after reading. There is this New York times review of the book Gilliad, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2004. And that book is about an elderly preacher who lives in Iowa and, uh, looking at the world through these kinds of grace drenched eyes. And the book was reviewed in the New York times by a person who said, I'm an atheist, but Robinson helps me imagine a world that is fallen yet deeply loved by its creator, suffused, the divine grace. And I was like, that's exactly what I'm looking for is an author who can do that. So both of these authors have had this incredible impact on me. As I tried to read everything I could McDonald wrote so much that I have not been able to read all of his, his body of work, but I tried to read as much as I could by them and just immerse myself in them as anyone don't always agree with everything they say, but they do share this common approach of taking the imagination extremely seriously. And so I interact with, you know, what I agree or don't agree with one of the chapters of the book, but, um, I think with them in the back of my mind, almost every single day. Yeah,
Amy Mantravadi:Well, yeah, it was enjoyable to read about them because I had read surprised by joy by CS Lewis. So I had read about how George McDonald was very important to him, but I actually haven't gotten into either Rick Giles' work or Robinson's work personally. So you kind of made me want to go out and read, although now you sort of spoiled the ending, so sorry,
Justin Ariel Bailey:Both are acquired tastes. And, um, you know, Robinson writes books where nothing happens because it's all about perception and seeing the world in a particular way and MacDonald combined spiritual formation with storytelling. So a lot of people find his writing to be kind of moralistic because he's always kind of, he stops in the middle of the narrates, like for a long time, but that's kind of like the pastoral heart that he has. So you can read his fairytales. He doesn't do that in this fairytales that much, but his realistic novels, sometimes people don't like, so I'll say he's an acquired taste, but so is coffee so
Amy Mantravadi:Well, you know, if Tolstoy can give you his political opinions for our chapter pod chapter, that Georgia battle should be able to do now is I think when you're really good, you can get away with that kind of thing. So in light of your argument, that novels and other works of art can serve as powerful apologetic tools, how would you assess the art and literature being produced by the evangelical report and world particularly here in north America are Christian universities and seminaries doing a sufficient job of training students to produce works of excellence, or have we essentially seated this ground to the secular world?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Wow, that's a really great question. And a tricky question. I mean, as a person who is employed by a Christian university, I mean, I think the obvious answer is no, we failed and we've had a failure of imagination to use that phrase again. I think in some ways it is precisely because we've been unwilling to embrace the shift to authenticity and we tend to process or engage works with culture primarily in terms of worldview compatibility rather than empathy. So in other words, we process culture and say, well, do I agree with this? Is this exactly the way I see the world rather than seeing, okay, this is my neighbor who I've been called to love this people who made this and the people who resonate with it. And maybe I resonate with it that tells me something about the conditions, the cultural conditions in which I find myself in which the church has called to now go and present the gospel. So I think that, no, we haven't done a good job. There are things that give me hope. There are always outliers and people, artists like Makoto Fujimura is a, is a great hero of mine. Uh, contemporary non-representational artists. Who's doing amazing, amazing work and writing about it from a Christian and from a reform perspective. And there are bright spots like that. You know, I think of Pete doctor, um, other people like that, who've worked on Pixar films from a place of faith. And so there's bright spots. And sometimes, honestly you don't always know. Uh, when I lived in Los Angeles, I was quite surprised to find out as I grew up in the Midwest and then moved to Los Angeles, I was quite surprised to find out how many Christians there were in the industry. And, you know, there may be not always the AA list stars that you hear about, but they're working on films and they're working in production. And there, we had lots of them in our church and just really trying to be faithful in what they're doing in the part of the world where God has called them. So there are reasons for hope, but I think there definitely need to be, um, some paradigm shifts in the way that we think about cultural engagement. This is part of the book that I'm writing right now is really looking for a non anxious approach to culture that isn't really reactionary, but that is patient with cultural works.
Amy Mantravadi:And non-anxious reproach that isn't reactionary. That would definitely be in a minority approach, I think, evangelicals today. And I'm wondering if, part of what you mentioned there that you were kind of surprised coming from the Midwest to get to LA and define that there were, you know, faithful Christians and the film industry. And I wonder if that isn't part of the problem that we just assume that, oh, the only people who would work on Broadway or who would do art or whatever, are all people who are anti-Christian and just, you know, completely give it into the sexual revolution. And there's some truth there. I mean, I have a report Fred, who actually spent some time on Broadway and told me at the time that, you know, yeah, pretty much everyone I worked with was, I mean, she didn't have anyone she worked with who she thought was a faithful Christian in those days. But I wonder if, so, you know, maybe our assumption that particularly if you live in the Midwest, you can kind of assume that New York and LA, you know, the big cities, they're kind of dens of iniquity. I wonder if that keeps us from being willing to engage and get involved. And it will become potentially increasingly difficult for Christians to engage in, in certain professions. But I think that sometimes we sabotage ourselves a little bit in those efforts as well. So if a person isn't capable of producing great works of art or taking up apologetics as a full-time career, how might they make use of the principles in your book for their everyday encounters, with those who need to hear the good news of Christ?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah. So I'll say a couple of things on that. Yeah. First of all, I always have, I teach a class called aesthetics on faith, imagination, beauty, and art. And I have a lot of students who take it and say, well, I'm not creative. And I think what they is, they're not artistic, but everyone is creative because that's what it means to be made in the image of God, is that you have this creative birthright and, uh, yeah. To take a situation that you've been given and to seek, to make it better and more beautiful is a natural aesthetic impulse that humans have. It's an imaginative impulse. If you're in a situation that is difficult to imagine how it could be better, that's a natural thing that you do. So again, I'll just say that even if you're not artistic and you're not a person who spends time writing or spends time making art or dancing or whatever, whatever it is, then you can still live a beautiful life, a life that is characterized by excellence and elegance. And even what I'd call electricity, you know, a life that when people encounter you, they're like, wow, there is something that is really different about that person. And so I would just say that it means a living a life that provokes questions. So Peter talks about be ready to give an answer for those who, who ask about the hope that is in you. And so when was the last time you were asked, um, and so have we lived the life that provoke the question? It's like, wow, that's, that's interesting. Why, why do you live that way? So, um, I tell a story at the end of the book about my wife, who, when she was working in LA, I worked at a company where somebody asked her the question, why are you going to raise your kids as Christians? Why are you going to kind of indoctrinate them with faith rather than let them choose what they want to believe? And, you know, most of us, if we have faith and if we have kids especially feel really defensive at that idea, because it suggests that I'm harming my children in some way. And yet Melissa, my wife was not defensive or anxious, but what she did realize was that there is a particular imaginative construal of what it means to live with faith that this person has. And that's the thing that needs to change. And so she said, well, you know, actually we don't really think about it that way. So what's she doing there? She's giving a different picture. So you're thinking of it one way, but let me give you, let me paint another picture for you. And then she said, you know, for us, faith is the most liberating thing we've ever experienced, and we can imagine a greater gift to give to our kids. So now what she's done is she has framed faith in a particular way that is resonant with the thing that this person wants, which is freedom, right? And that's, that's very much part of the age of authenticity, but to say, well, what if the freedom you're looking for is not found outside of commitment, but actually within it. So it's reframing somebody's imagination of what faith is and that friend or that person was like, Hey, I have never heard that before. Tell me more about, you know, tell me more about your faith. And that's just a very simple example of what I think it means to do an imaginative apologetic. It's inviting an outsider. Well, first it's, it's being willing to know some, to sit with someone, to know them well enough to understand what would be good news to them. And that doesn't mean changing the good news to fit them necessarily. But it does mean in the same way that the gospel writers do telling the gospel in a particular way, that fits the audience that resonates with the audience. So, you know, Matthew's written to a Jewish audience. And so it's, Matthew is framed in a way that answers the questions they're asking. So what does that mean when you meet somebody? What are the questions they're asking and will it be good news to them? And then as I said, like giving them a glimpse of what it's like from the inside. So when I look at the world, here's what I see here are my reasons for hope. Yeah. There's all these reasons for despair, but let me tell you why I have hope. So that's again, inviting empathy and also demonstrating empathy. And that's why testimonies, I think have so much power and they will always have power because they engage you not with the critic at the critical intellect, but with the imagination. So if I said, oh, let me tell you a story. Almost like inside your psyche, something shifts, right? Because you shift from like, when you listen to a story you're not usually being really critical. You're trying to enter into the story. It's called the willing suspension of disbelief. You know, like when you see a movie. So I think it's those, those are the pieces, the basic pieces of what sort of everyday conversation looks like the wise apologists have always known this and I've always done it this way, you know, which is why Pascal Pascal said already in 17th century, you know, you make people wish it were true. And then you show that it is. Um, and so I think that one of the critiques I have of the way we've done apologetics is that we're kind of standing on the street corner as it were shouting. It's true. It's true. It's true. But the people to whom we are speaking don't care if it's true and it don't understand why would this even be good for the world if this was true. So I think that's the ground we need to plow. That's the work we need to do, you know, just in our everyday conversations and the way we live our lives, make somebody say, well, I can't, I mean, Tim Keller also says things like this. I can't believe that, but I wish I could believe that when you've engaged somebody on that level, the way they go about the quest for truth is completely different.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. And there are some questions that if you don't have the right, I guess you could say philosophical foundation and groundwork already laid. Then when you give some, you know, you make a statement like Jesus Christ rose from the dead. I think about when Paul spoke, uh, on Mars hill and he gave that great little short survey where he appealed to lots of things that his audience would understand. And then he got to this part where he said, Jesus rose from the dead. And they're like, oh, okay, hold on. We don't know what, what is this crazy thing you're talking about? Their philosophical assumptions were such that they just couldn't even comprehend or come close to accepting what he was telling about. And I don't know that that was an error that Paul made because sometimes, you know, it takes a lot of tries and one person has to lay the seed and one person has to water it. And it takes a long time to reset people's assumptions, but that's perhaps even a good case in scriptures or detailing what you're saying. So I mentioned that you have a new book scheduled for release next year, called your interpretation is your life. Could you provide a brief preview of that and discuss how it is or is not related to this one?
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah, I think it's related to, it's not, it's not so much a book about apologetics though. It is a book about the way the church and theology relates to culture. So that's my basic project is I'm interested in the ways that culture shapes, theology and the way that theology prepares us to care for culture and to bear witness to culture. So I'm always writing at that intersection of the two. And, uh, your interpretation is your life is a book about theology and culture, putting them in conversation and saying that this is a very complex conversation. And so what I try to do is go through five different layers. So meaning than power, then ethics, then religion, and then aesthetics, and talk about how all of these layers are. You could just spend a lot of time talking about the religious aspects of culture. You could spend a lot of time talking about morality and the way that sort of moral frameworks are implicit and cultural judgements and kind of going through all of these things. And ultimately what I'm trying to do is to articulate a approach to cultural engagement that is non reductive, non dismissive, and non-anxious. And I think that that follows from faith and love and hope. So non reductive because of faith, because we believe that we live in a world that belongs to God, the world in which it's filled with complexity, but all things hold together in Christ. And so we don't, yeah, it's a disservice to, to reduce things. And a big problem is, is reductionism, right? And we, that happens on all sides and people reducing things down to something, something very beautiful and complex and reducing it down to something simplistic. And then second non dismissive, which is born out of love for neighbor. So we should not dismiss our neighbors because we are called to love them. And then finally non anxious. And that's born out of the theological virtue of hope. So there's lots of reasons for anxiety. There's lots of reasons to worry, but ultimately if Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, you don't have to worry as, as a Christian. And, uh, and so that means that you don't have to fear culture as if it could somehow undo the resurrection or as if it could undo God's work in the world or as if the church is going to sort of just like disappear and go out of business because of whatever the latest threat to the churches, the church has this beautiful, broken work of God across time and space and in all across all different challenges. And so I'm just trying to articulate an approach that is trying to get a sense of the complexity of the conversation, and yet give hope that we can actually make a difference in the way that we engage it. And to say that your interpretation of culture and your interpretation of scripture is not just what you think about it, but it's actually, when you do like the way that you live your life, that's your interpretation. Finally, the way that you put it all together and make a life that is either resonant with scripture or not resonant with scripture. So that's the basic, that's the basic idea. I'm still working on the elevator pitch, uh, you know, 32nd version, but that's what I'm trying to do.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, I liked the many times you mentioned reducing anxiety because in this time of COVID, I think if one thing we all need is to step to reduce our anxiety and our contentiousness. So I appreciate that. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I think it's been a very beneficial discussion.
Justin Ariel Bailey:Yeah. Thanks so much, really great questions. And thank you.
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Jon Guerra:[inaudible]
Amy Mantravadi:It was a pleasure to speak with Justin today about his book re-imagining apologetics. Next week, I'll be talking to Dr. Alex sang about the at times uneasy relationship between Christianity and philosophy. I hope you can join us as we take a deep dive into church history. This podcast is written and produced by yours. Truly please send all complaints by mail to 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, DC. The music you've been listening to is from the song citizens by Christian recording artists, John Guerra, off his album, Keeper of Days. Reviews and ratings are important and helping people discover new shows. If you have a moment, please leave an honest rating or review for this podcast, wherever you listen to it. Also consider mentioning it to friends or sharing episodes on social media. I know your time is valuable and thank you in advance for any help you can provide now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory. Blameless with great joy to the only God, our savior through Jesus Christ. Our Lord be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Have a great week.
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