Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 402 Justin Ariel Bailey Returns - Discipling the Diseased Imagination
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Justin Ariel Bailey joins me to talk about his book Discipling the Diseased Imagination and why imagination plays a crucial role in spiritual formation. We explore how the stories, habits, and media that capture our attention quietly shape our discipleship, and why following Jesus requires learning to behold what is good, beautiful, and true. We also discuss hope, idolatry, attachment, and how the imagination can be healed as we live more deeply in the story of God.
Justin Ariel Bailey (PhD, Fuller Seminary) is dean of chapel and professor of theology at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church and has served as a pastor in diverse settings. Bailey is the author of Reimagining Apologetics and Interpreting Your World, and he is a sought-after speaker. His new book is Discipling the Diseased Imagination.
Justin's Book:
Discipling the Diseased Imagination
Justin's Recommendations:
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com
Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.
Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube
Consider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below
The End of The Hobbit, you know, there's been this great quest, this great mission. And at the very end, Gandalf says something to Bilbo, like you didn't think that all of this was just about you and just about your own benefit. He says, You are a very fine fellow, Mr. Baggins, but you are quite a little fellow in the world after all. And Bilbo laughs, and he says, Thank goodness. And I think that's biblical hope, right? It's this idea that you you do what God has called you to do to the best of your ability, but you realize that at the end of the day, you are quite a little fellow in the world, after all, thank goodness. Right? That the world does not rise and fall on our effort alone.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we could make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, in many of the great stories, we love, the dragon represents evil, something dangerous that must be resisted and defeated. But there's another kind of Dragon story, the kind where the real danger is not just the dragon out there, but the dragon growing inside us, our imaginations are constantly being formed by the stories we live in. The headlines we read, the content we consume, the narratives our culture repeats day after day and over time, those stories shape how we see the world. What we believe is possible and even what we believe is good, which raises an uncomfortable question, if discipleship is meant to form us into the likeness of Jesus, what happens when our imaginations are being formed somewhere else? In this episode, I'm joined by Justin Ariel Bailey to talk about his book discipling, the diseased imagination. We explore why imagination is central to spiritual formation, why attention matters and why following Jesus might begin with learning to behold something more beautiful than the stories competing for our allegiance. So join us. Here is my conversation with Justin. Ariel Bailey, Justin, welcome back to shifting culture. So excited
Unknown:to have you back on yes, good to be back with you again. Joshua, we're gonna be talking
Joshua Johnson:about discipling, the diseased imagination today. Your new book. We're talking through both imagination and discipleship. In the lens of imagination in discipleship, why do you think that's important that we talk through imagination when it comes to our discipleship paradigms?
Justin A. Bailey:That's a great question. I think maybe to answer it, I could sort of get it my own experience in ministry, working primarily with young adults, emerging adults, high school students, college students, and as I sought to disciple them, using, I guess, the models that I had been given, I felt like something was missing, and the primary models that I had been given were wonderful, as far as they went in terms of giving people the truth, right, things to know, and then practices to exercise their faith, right? So teach them to read the Bible, teach them to pray, teach them to go to church, teach them to serve their neighbor, things like that, you know, sort of just staples of discipleship or spiritual formation that you're taught. And yet, all of those things take place in a larger context in which you see the world in a particular way, or the world impresses itself on you in a particular way. You share in the stories of a culture in which you live, and maybe multiple overlapping and sometimes conflicting stories. And all of these are the context for our discipleship in the same way that my earlier book on apologetics and Christian witness dealt with the imaginative context of sharing your faith with someone and this and confronting objections or resistance to Christian faith. This one now takes a look at discipleship and the process of of following Jesus to become like Jesus, and the imaginative dimension of that that is sometimes neglected.
Joshua Johnson:You jump into your introduction and talking about great myths of our day, usually the 20th century, so Tolkien, CS Lewis, Narnia and talk about dragons. So just speak to me about dragons, the pull of Dragon stories for us and how that plays into our imagination.
Justin A. Bailey:Dragon stories are pretty ancient. You know, you find them in lots of different cultures, and dragons have come to represent a lot of things, but one of the things that dragons have come to represent, at least in Western culture, is kind of the symbolism of evil, and that there is evil that needs to be resisted and needs to be defeated. Right? You think of St George and the Dragon, or you think of in Tolkien Smaug, the great. Dragon that they have to defeat in order to complete the quest. And dragons represent this. Imagine if intuition that we have that there is good in the world there is evil in the world, and evil needs to be resisted. But then there's also this more subtle story about dragons, in which people become like dragons, right? So Eustace scrub, in The Chronicles of Narnia, falls asleep on a dragon's hoard thinking greedy dragon ish thoughts, and wakes up to realize that he has become a dragon. So his outside matches the inside. And so this is a bit more subtle in terms of asking the question, not just is there evil out there to be resisted, but there's also evil in here, right in which we can begin to behave in dragonish ways. Now, obviously, both of these themes can be found clearly in Scripture, you know, in which we have the great serpent, the dragon named in Revelation as the great enemy of the people of God, the great enemy of the saints, and the insidious ways in which the enemy both is someone that we resist, sort of externally, but also the internal ways in which we are confronting evil in ourselves as we seek to follow Christ.
Joshua Johnson:Yesterday, I was interviewing the mythologist, storyteller Martin Shaw, and he talked about Greek mythology and when in their dragon stories, if they looked at the Dragon Face to face, they would be drawn in that there they would be seduced by the evil that the only way to defeat the dragon is to see the dragon as a reflection on their shield, and then they could get a glimpse of, you know, how to fight and how to defeat the dragon, but they couldn't look at it straight on. I found that kind of interesting as as a concept of when we're using our imagination like we want to defeat the evil inside of us, we want to defeat the evil out there. And you know, I believe that the way that that happens is we become more like Christ, that we have Christ with us and in us and working through us so that evil can be defeated, both in us and out of us. I think looking at it slants, or looking at it through a reflection, and it does something to hold us in the imagination of Jesus, more than being seduced by evil. How do you think that then the imagination of Jesus and our discipleship to him can confront some of these evil dragons in ourselves and in the world?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so I'm thinking of, and this is I'm trying to remember where I first heard it, but what you're saying makes me think of something that I heard in terms of the myth of the sirens, right, which you have in the Odyssey, and in the Odyssey, what Odysseus does to keep him from the sirens is he binds himself. He has the men tie into a mass so that he can't fall after them. And then they put wax in the ears of the sailors so that they can't hear it. And that's a way of imaginative resistance. I talk about that in the book a bit. But then whoever I'm trying to think of who it was, who I heard this from, talked about Orpheus. When Orpheus went by the sirens, that it was not by tying himself to a mass, but by singing a more beautiful song. And and the sirens are singing their song, but Orpheus, you know, is able to sing a more beautiful song than the sirens to keep his crew and his sailors from being seduced. And I think that's sort of what you're saying is there are different ways in which we have when we might say a direct resistance, imaginative resistance, you know, looking away from evil, not being seduced by it. But that's only half of it. The other part of it is making sure that there's a more beautiful song that we're hearing, that we're being shaped more deeply by more more beautiful stories and and the more that I spend time looking at Jesus, trying to learn from Jesus how to be like Jesus, being around other people that are in love with Jesus, trying to embody the life of Jesus as well, the more that I, sort of my heart, is weaned away from those siren songs, you know, those dragonish songs, we might say, that are very subtle and powerful. And so I always tell my students, you know, I teach classes here on pop culture and and students always want to know, sort of, where's the line? You know, where's the line of what we can watch or what we can't watch? You know, how much is too much? And I say that's an important discussion for us to have. But a more important discussion to have is, what are the beautiful things that you're filling your life with. What are the things that are excellent and good and noble and that have dignity and then inspire you to become everything that God's called you to be? Because without those things, without those more beautiful songs, without, you know, to use your language, the thing to look away from, to look at, you know. We don't have the strength of ourselves to resist the insidious voices of temptation that we hear.
Joshua Johnson:A lot of people, when they think of discipleship, they think about information transfer that leads to some some change and we get the right information. How does imagination play into the discipleship? What is imagination for you, some people will say, well, imagination is just us imagining, or, you know, it's God's imagination. How does this work?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so that's a big question. Let me try to take the different parts of it. So first of all, the idea of discipleship and training. I think training is a major part of what discipleship is, or what spiritual formation is, but it's very important what sort of mental model we have when we think of training. You know, many of us train for to run a 5k or a 10k or a marathon or half marathon, and we think of ultra marathon runners in training like we think of ourselves almost as elite athletes training, and that's one model of what discipleship is. But it seems to me like our situation that is much more like a person who's been in a terrible accident and is having to relearn how to walk because we've been we've been twisted by sin. And so our discipleship is as much a matter of healing as it is a matter of training. It is still training, but it's a training that's involved with with healing. And so when we talk about healing, healing is something that happens over the course of time, as you are exposed to things that can actually bring health to your body, to your soul. And so I talk about with the imagination, that what really heals us, what really heals the imagination, is encounters with holiness. In fact, encounters with holiness consistently over the course of time with God's people, you know, for a lifetime. This is, this is actually what heals us. And that's not something that we can conjure, right? So training is something that we can sort of come up with a technique, and we can sort of control it. We can manage it. But because of the nature of Christian faith, it is irreducibly responsive to God's prior action. It is relational. So it's not managed by technique. And then it also is cruciform, right? It? It is a matter of not becoming better and greater and stronger, but in many ways, becoming weaker and and humbler and and dying to ourselves. And so that requires quite an intervention of holiness that we have to have encounters with with Christ by this so that's the answer to the first part of the question. When it comes to imagination, the way that I've sort of framed it is sort of like the way that you might have an encounter with a great piece of art or a great piece of music. It's as much a matter of attention as it is a matter of action. There is action required, but it's first a matter of sort of being captivated and being absorbed by something that is greater than you, something that is other than you. That's this idea of holiness, right? So we, we are captivated by works of art and music, not because they give us more of ourselves, but because they give us something besides ourselves. You know, I spent so much time thinking about myself, and what I need most of all is something to break me out of that, right, something to something bigger and better and more beautiful and more interesting than than just me, which is the great thing about, you know, worshiping together, because it, it interrupts our self absorption. And so what we really need. And when, when we think about discipling, the imagination or healing, the imagination is to put ourselves in a place where an encounter might happen, an encounter with holiness might happen, and it also means a training of the attention. Now, there's a story that I relate. It was passed on by somebody else in the book, and it was in the monastery, and these monks were saying, you know how spiritual experiences are, are really accidental, meaning we don't control them, but we can't manufacture them. So one monk asks the the lead monk, they say, Well, why? Why? If these things are accidental, are we doing all these practices? And he says, well, we want to be as accident prone as possible. And I love that, you know, I love that, that idea of being accident prone right, of having a posture towards the world in which you are more likely to have encounters with the sort of holiness that can heal the eyes of your heart.
Joshua Johnson:So how do we heal the eyes of our hearts then to have those encounters. If you look at Matthew 1315, so it says, For the hearts of these people are hardened. Their ears cannot hear. They have closed their eyes so their eyes cannot see, their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand. They cannot turn to me and let them. Let me heal them. So I think a lot of us live in that place, right? We live in a place where we can't see, we can't hear, and we're we try to let our imagination open ourselves up so that we can do it ourselves to open our eyes and open our hearts. How does turning to Jesus? Jesus and having him heal. What does that process of discipleship look like? So that our hearts can be healed, we can start to see again?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so the passage you read, Matthew 13 is in some ways referencing a motif that's in the Old Testament about idolatry. You know, which is this idea that the idols that were worshiped in the Old Testament. You see this in Psalm 115 for example. You see it in Isaiah, where it says, you know all of these, these statues. They have eyes, but they don't see. They have ears, but they don't hear, and neither can they make a sound of their mouth. And then Psalm 115 says, and all those who make them shall be like them. So Will all those who put their trust in them. And the idea there is the idea of becoming like, whatever it is that you worship, whatever you look to, you begin to look like. And so the first intervention that we have to have is an intervention that confronts our idolatry, because we always will begin to resemble the thing that we cherish most, the thing that we give our our attention to, the thing that we give our allegiance to, we begin to resemble it. That's the natural thing. And so if you're giving your allegiance and attention to something that cannot give you life, you will become more numb. You will become less alive. You too will have eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear, and a mouth that does not that does not speak, an imagination that does not imagine better futures for for your community, that cannot hope for how tomorrow could be better than today, that cannot, cannot see the God that is unseen, right, that cannot, that cannot see Even my neighbor, in order to love him as I love myself. So. So this is the idea that idolatry is a big part of the first part of it, and the way that idolatry is displaced is, first of all, by being confronted, but second of all by having something that is more beautiful to look at. Right? It's the same, the same idea that we had. This is the Puritans idea of the expulsive power of a greater affection, right? If you have a crush on someone, the only way that you get rid of that crush is to have a crush on someone else, right? Like it gets displaced. And these, these idols that have captured, Captivate of our heart again, there's only so much that you can do by sort of resisting and renouncing them. There must be something better and more beautiful that is captivating you, which is the reason why I think getting a sense of the beauty of Jesus, the beauty of God as revealed in Jesus, the greatness and the grandeur and the majesty of God, and yet the fact that he also is the one who pursues us, and the one who the gods of the nations have to be carried, but our God carries us, and God lives in this high and holy place, but also with the one, the person who is a country right heart, who trembles at his word. So I think, I think there's all of this. Imagine the fodder in Scripture to draw our attention away from the things that have captivated us and towards, towards the only one who can actually bring us to life as we as we gaze on him.
Joshua Johnson:One of the things that you just mentioned there and said there, basically we become what we behold, and we want to give our attention to the good, beautiful stories and Jesus, I have stories, I have culture. I have all these things bombarding me constantly, and things are vying for my attention all the time. How can we start to discern what we need to behold, what we need to pay attention to in the midst of everything coming at us constantly. And you know, we have so much bad news coming at us all the time, and bad stories and stories of how the world is is horrible. And you know we then, if we behold something more beautiful. We may have an imagination that the world can be better and more beautiful, and it could, we could actually work towards that. So what does the discernment process look like, of the of where we give our attention to?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so I say there's three levels of imaginative discipleship, we might think of seeing, sensing and shaping. This is sort of related to something I wrote in a previous book, seeing is our perception of the world. Sensing is, we might say, our esthetic experience of the world. So if seeing is like the way we project out, sensing is the way that the world sort of impresses itself on us, and then shaping is our own creative making, making sense of things, but also perhaps even making things that are beautiful. And we have to think of all three levels when we think about discipling the imagination. And I think we disciple our seeing through stories, primarily the story of Scripture, that has to be the deepest story that we that we live and breathe out. But. Also stories that also share it to testify to that kind of costly hope, which I'll say more about that in just a second. But just to complete the triad, we disciple our sensing, which is more what you're asking through attention to our habits of sort of doing an audit of what are the things that actually have captivated my attention, as demonstrated by the habitual ways that I live in the world, right? So, if I'm spent, if the first thing I do every morning when I wake up is, you know, spend 30 minutes Doom scrolling on my phone, it's the last thing I do when I go to sleep, right? That's, that's the sort of thing that I can tell how my imagination is being formed by what I've allowed to captivate my attention. You know, I I talk in the book about how if an alien sort of came and observed us, that they would think that our phones were little idols that we pray to when we wake up and we pray to when we go to sleep, and we pray to throughout the day because of how we gaze at them. And so we have to do sort of an audit of our habits and begin to develop better habits of attention, of attentiveness, for sensing and then shaping is a matter of creative making, rather than just consuming all the time. We also have to be making things that are beautiful. That's the primary way we exercise the imagination, is by actually making and creating things. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the story piece, because I think it's really important that we are living in Scripture. Because if you live in Scripture, scripture has a place for all of those, for the darkness and the sadness. It names it, and it acknowledges the confusion, acknowledges the feelings of desperation, acknowledges the despair, but it does not allow it to have the final word. It always presses us through, you know, and yet, and yet, there is hope because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, right? And so scripture is so textured. You know, you think about we've been going through the Psalms in chapel here. And you know, we've been on a long journey, 15 week journey, through 150 Psalms, and just to see the changing, the ups and the downs, right? And to name the fact that sometimes we are in Book Three of the Psalms, where there's all of these laments and there doesn't seem like there's a lot of hope. And yet that's not where the book of Psalms and it's trying to take us somewhere. It's trying to take us to this place of Hallelujah, which is how the book of Psalms ends, that we can sort of worship through worship, our way through the darkness, which is again, a matter of imaginative formation when we go to worship together with other believers, that is imaginative formation to remind us of the true story of the world. Because, you know, we hear all these little stories that are also true, but they're not the truest story, they're not the deepest story of the world. And if we look at those little stories, we will lose hope, but we have to always emplace them within this larger, this larger story that we are caught up in, which is the story of God and His people and and all that he has done and will do to renew all things.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, if we want to be seeped in the story of Scripture, it actually means that we might have to read some things. Have you found as you're like, college students are coming through? How's reading going with college students is, is it are we losing our ability to read and actually pay attention to these stories?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so I'll say it's the best of times and the worst of times. In some way, I think there is a profound loss of a literary culture and a literary sensibility. Students who say, I never read a book, you know, like, well, I signed a bunch of books for class. Did you not read it? You know, so and so. I mean, some of them, that means that they are primarily consuming content, like audio books. There's a lot, there's a move towards more of an oral culture in that sense, they're listening a lot of podcasts. Are listening to a lot of audio books. They're, they're scanning the written word into AI, you know, voice voice reading software. And we can, you know, talk about, there's pluses and minuses of kind of that shift, but it also, I think, because there has been a superficiality that has come from a turn away from the literary culture I'm seeing, you know, maybe a bit less but very encouraging, sort of this hunger, this kind of counterbalancing movement of students who are really desiring to cultivate depth and contemplation and looking for the ways that long books you know that take a long time to read and and spending time reading and just reading, not multitasking, is actually really formative. So like I said, best of times, the worst of times, but worst of times, because it's absolutely true that our our attention is under assault by all the short form content and other things. And I think because of that, in the same way that we've seen a bit of positive movement, I would say in terms of devices in schools and awareness of the deleterious effects of screen time. I. Um, so that people are trying to come up with counter formation, I see the same thing happening when it
Joshua Johnson:comes to reading as we move on in discipling the diseased imagination, one of the things you talk about is attachment, and attachment to God could be really important for a healthy imagination. If we have a disjointed attachment, we're going to have an imagination that is actually not moving towards God. It's moving towards something else. When you talk about something like therapeutic language, I think there's a lot of therapeutic language in our discipleship. Now we're bringing something in and a lot of it looks to the self. How do we reckon with some some of that, and how attachment plays out and how important it is to the imagination?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so that was certainly a concern of mine when I started, because this book is trying to be conversant with psychological science. Some of my primary conversations are psychological scientists like Tanya lohrman, and I'm quite aware of, you know, one of the dangers of that, there's lots of benefits to it, but one of the dangers, as you said, is within a sort of therapist, therapeutic frame, we primarily are interested in feeling good, and that means that we perhaps are looking for again, techniques to feel good, right? So we might commend meditation because of the positive health benefits, right? So that you can feel good. And it becomes more, to use an old Larry crab phrase, it becomes more about feeling good than finding God, right, which that doesn't always feel great, you know, because he calls you to repent, among other things. And so that was a big emphasis that I was wanting to make you know, and I referenced earlier that when you are having an esthetic encounter or a religious encounter, what you don't want is to think that I am just having an encounter with myself, right? In fact, what great art does, and what we believe that's happening in a religious encounter is we're encountering someone who is not us, right? And precisely because they are not us, they can tell us things that we would never have told ourselves and and they can tell us what we don't already know, right? And so if you only look within and your only resources are yourself. I'm not sure that there's a lot of salvation there. If anything, there's more desolation. There's more anxiety and despair, because you realize that your resources aren't enough. But part of opening the imagination up to the possibility of an encounter with God is the fact that God is not us, right? And so God can tell us some things, both in terms of things that are challenging, but also things that are really comforting. It's not the same to hear, you know, from me, just to tell myself, Oh, I'm okay, I'm enough, I'm okay, versus hearing that I am justified because of what Christ has done for me. Those are not the same thing, right? One is me justifying myself on the basis of my own positive self record. And the other one is a word coming from the outside, the word I most long to hear, which actually has the power to bring me to life. So I've lost track of the second half of the question. But the therapeutic piece there is that fact that the purpose when we talk about healing is, in order for there to be healing, there has to be an outside intervention from somebody who actually can heal a diseased imagination.
Joshua Johnson:So then, if it's not just about us and the control that we have over our own self, self worth, or just justifying ourselves, then what does it look like then to receive something from the outside, to open ourselves up? Yeah, I'm
Justin A. Bailey:just remembering now that the question was about attachment. So we can go back to that, back to that one, but I think it feels a lot like a real relationship of of love and vulnerability. Right? In which To love is to make yourself vulnerable, but it's also to make yourself vulnerable in the context in which that vulnerability is received with grace, not we cannot be vulnerable with every single person we meet, right? We are only vulnerable when we know that that the most fragile and and weak parts parts of us will be welcomed with some sort of recognition and love. And I think that's what it means to open it up. Is, is that sense that the only way that we can find security is not through securing ourselves, however we try to do that is through being secured by finding someone who is trustworthy and and that's the way that works on any real relationship, is that you entrust yourself to someone else who you believe will care for you. And maybe this is the connection back to attachment, right? Because a lot of us have models that. Um, relationships will not go well, either because there's something wrong with other people, or there's something wrong with us, or there's something wrong with both right other people and with us. And then we kind of carry that imaginative model of how the world will be over into our relationship with God, so that we think, how does God deal with my vulnerability? How does God deal with my weakness? How does God deal with my sin, with my shame? Well, there's something wrong with me, and so I'm going to relate to God that way. Or there's something wrong with God. He's not fully trustworthy and and the hope is that through hearing the real story of the gospel and that Jesus shows us the Father right when he has, by His nature, he gives to us as a gift of grace, which is the right to call godfather and and the status as his sons and daughters. And that is supposed to sort of replace us in terms of the way we think about the world and relationships and how safe we are in it. And it's only really to the degree that we know that we are safe, that we can really be brave. If you know that you are safe, then you're able to be courageous, because you know that no matter what happens, I will never leave you or forsake you, right? As we read in Scripture.
Joshua Johnson:Well, I think there's so many people that they believe that the safety is going to like. So if we go Lord of the Rings, like it's the safety is going to be, let's stay in the Shire. Frodo is there in the Shire, like, I'm not going to go to Mount Doom, like I'm not going to take that journey. Like, why would I do that? I want to stay in the safety of this easy, comfortable life. I mean, It's a Wonderful Life in the Shire. Like, yeah, it's, it's great. So then, if we're, we're safe, how does that get us to imagine what God is calling us into discipleship, where we're going headed, taking this ring whatever, to go on this journey, to say, hey, we need to take a risk in there. I can imagine that this risk is worth it.
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, so there's a kind of safety that comes from never having to face anything challenging or difficult. You know, I always talk about this with my own children, because I have a 15 year old and a 17 year old, and they both started driving. And, you know, it's sort of like I want them to be safe, right? But I also want them to be brave. And I know that in my life, it's been the difficult things, the challenging things, that have shaped me most profoundly. And I want them to be people of courage and character who face difficult things. So there's a kind of safety that comes from not ever facing anything difficult and challenging, as if you could just wrap yourself in bubble wrap. And sometimes we try to do that, but I think deep down, we know that that's not a way to live, and that's not the kind of safety that God offers to us. And there's another kind of safety that comes from going out into the world knowing that God has promised to be with you. So think about Joshua chapter one, where, you know, God says to to Joshua, hey, Moses, has it coming back? You know, it's you now, right? And then he says, three times, Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous. But then before he says that, and after he says that, He says, as I was with Moses, I will be with you. Then he says, I will be with you wherever you go. And that's the kind of safety that we're offered in Scripture, the safety that comes from companionship with God, which does not mean that we will not face difficulty and challenge and adversity, which does not mean that we might, you know, we might be asked to give much. We might be asked to give everything we have, and none of that means that we're not safe, right? Ultimately, if, if it is true that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that because he lives, we will live also. So that's where that ultimate safety is found, that ultimate safety that's that's found in trusting his sovereignty and trusting his goodness, even when the things that we're called to face are are so much, so much more than us. You had mentioned Lord of the Rings, and it's sort of on my mind because I'm listening, not reading, but listening to the two towers right now, the Andy circus version. It's so, so good. There's all these scenes, you know, you speak about failures of imagination, the characters that we are not meant to follow in The Lord of the Rings, are the ones who believe that they know what's going to happen. And because they believe they know what's going to happen, they sort of give up or make peace with evil, right? So you think of Saruman, for example, who's this wizard, and he's very wise. He knows a lot of things, but he begins, he he begins to believe that he knows what's going to happen. Or Denethor, you know, is another character, sorry if we're going too deep in Lord of the Rings right now, just geeking out for a moment like he believes he knows what's going to happen. So it's a failure of imagination. He cannot imagine any way that things could get better. And so he makes peace with evil and sort of gives into it. And at the same time, you also. Have these characters who also cannot imagine how things could be better, and yet they still do the right thing. They still do the next right thing, because they believe that they live in a world in which there are other forces at work. And when we have done all that we have can do, when we have given all that we can give, those other forces have another move. And that's the difference between virtue and vice, right? And Tolkien, it's an imaginative sense of hope or despair, and I can't see how this could get better. And yet, I know what I'm called to do. I know that I'm called to do the
Joshua Johnson:right thing. How do you think apprenticeship looks like with that of bringing people into a place where, hey, we can't see, we don't know what's going on, but we're going to do the right thing. We know that, hey, God is with me in the midst of this. He says, I will be with you wherever you go, and we're here. But how do you think others play a part in bringing people along this discipleship journey and imagination?
Justin A. Bailey:One of the best things about being a Christian is to know that the Christian faith did not start when I was born. Didn't start with me, but I have been ushered into this grand stream of of saints, of of people with beautiful lives, who have made beautiful lives in response to the beautiful God. And so there is the sense in which knowing that any one of us, our faith is pretty puny, our imagination is pretty insignificant. But when it's linked up with the church, when it's linked up with other believers, it becomes formidable. And so I say that having an apprenticeship with others, especially older believers, that's why I say I say to my students, find somebody with gray hair, you know, who has walked with the Lord for for 50 years, who can tell you all that life can give and all that death can take, and still says Jesus is worth following. Those are the people you need to spend time with. You know, it doesn't it? Not the influence. Maybe there's a place for those influencers as well, but a much smaller one, right, than a flesh and blood Saint you know, who has actually lived life and can testify on the basis of that. So that's the first thing I'd say. And then I also say just reading church history, honestly, studying church history and learning from the stories of great saints throughout history who are not perfect people by any stretch of the imagination, but we're faithful in the time and the place where God called them to be, or at least sought to be faithful. And then the third thing I'd say is there's also an apprenticeship that is literary, right? We reference Tolkien a lot, a lot of times when I talk about finding these great stories, I mean, those are the stories that form our moral imagination, so that we can kind of imagine ourselves also seeking to do that. And there's something about, you know, during this time of such political fracture, I always go back to the Lord of the Rings during it happened during covid too. When it was covid year, I read The Lord of the Rings again, because there's something about the lord of the rings that helps me to remember that I also am living in this great story and and just as others lived in that story and were able to do the right thing and sort of left the results to someone else that I can do that as well.
Joshua Johnson:So how do we say, Okay, I'm living in this great story. I could see and study the history. How do we take history and not transform it into what we want it to be. But take the actual stories to give us hope so that we could walk forward, like give us new imagination so that we could walk forward. We like to distort history when we read history, that's just human nature. So what does it look like to grab a hold of it as it really is. Yeah, so
Justin A. Bailey:actually, I have a whole chapter about this, this idea of of history and the way that history funds our imagination. So history and hope are these two things, history looks back, hope looks forward. And both require imagination, and we can, as you said, sort of reimagine history so that we are just the heroes always and and flatten it and fail to see the truth of it. And I think that looking at history, we can tell the truth about it, because we know that our justification does not come from always being on the right side of history, but our justification comes from Jesus Christ. And so we can admit all of the ways in which Christians have failed to to embody their faith, failed badly and had a diseased imagination and the way that they related to to others at the same time, I think that every time you read history, you can always find sort of testimonies of like, you know, the ancestors of our faith, who who make faith breathe for us, right? Like people who were faithful, who did give a faithful witness and and so, rather than painting all of history with a broad brush, we look for the story. Of God's work in small ways and in small places. So here's an example from Scripture. The Book of Judges is arguably the darkest book of the Bible. By the end of it, you know, you have no king in the land, and everybody does what's right in their own eyes. And you have judges who come intermittently to deliver the people, but they get worse and worse as they go throughout the book. And yet, during the time of the judges, there is this Moabite widow named Ruth, and arguably the most important figure to come out of the period of the Judges is Ruth. And what does Ruth do is she demonstrates hesed. She demonstrates loyal love in the midst of one of the darkest times in the history of Israel, and out of her story of ordinary faithfulness to her mother in law. And then Boaz, you know, Boaz is in there as well. And then they have a child. And then David is born in Bethlehem because of that. And then, you know, 28 generations later, Jesus is born in Bethlehem. That's an example of what I'm talking about. You talk about the period itself, and it's a dark period, right? And we have periods of history as well that are pretty dark, if we were to describe them, and we can describe them honestly, because the Bible describes honestly the darkness among the people of God, and yet it never leaves us without hope. It tells us so what's God doing during this time all his people are being unfaithful to him and to each other. There's Civil War. There's the tribes are fracturing. And yet, what God is doing is going outside of Israel to get a moabitis name Ruth, to show us what loyal love looks like, so that he can raise a David and and then ultimately, through through this line to bring Jesus. And I think any period of history that you look at, you can find a similar pattern, which even even in the midst of the darkness, there are voices that God has never left himself without a witness, there are always voices that testify to the beautiful and the good and the true, even if they are not the dominant voices
Joshua Johnson:in the midst of that darkness, a lot of what that brings about is self entitlement. I'm entitled to the good things, and so darkness comes when everybody thinks that they're entitled, and then, like we only work for ourselves, we're not working for the good of our community or others, how does the imagination wipe clean our self entitlement?
Justin A. Bailey:Entitlement is one of the diseases of imagination that I talk about in the chapter about emotion. And I think that part of this is, you know, what we're looking for when we're looking for imaginative healing is some form of catharsis. You know, you think about how often a worship service might move a person to tears or to feel some sort of emotional overload, emotional override, and we we look for those. Because when we feel spontaneous emotion, it feels like someone is acting on us, and it's not just ourselves, right? So if we conjure it, if we kind of make ourselves feel a certain way, then it doesn't feel real. But if it, if it happens spontaneously, if your tears come to your eyes, then you feel like God is actually working your life. And that's very valuable and very important. And I tend to be quite, quite an emotional person myself. But the danger, of course, is that we begin to demand that of God, right? So that I begin to demand good feelings all the time. And the only way that I know that God is a work in my life is if I feel this way, right? That's the only way that I know. And in fact, I see this with my students, is that so many times because they're during a season of their life where it's very important to them that they experience faith for themselves, right? So it's not just what someone has told me or my parents have taught me to believe, but I am experiencing this as true for myself, which is really good, but it can be mean that they become addicted to a certain kind of religious experience where they're they're trying every sermon, every worship time, every quiet time, they're ringing it, trying to find that emotional high right, which, which is a sense of entitlement. And so I think part of that is, part of the antidote to that is the recognition of how scripture meets us and testifies to both times of emptiness and times of fullness. If you read again the Psalms, you see how often you have the psalmist in a in a dry and thirsty land, or in the desert experience in the time when he's not getting what he wants, even while you also find times where it's very clear that the psalmist is doing that. And if we allow the Psalms to tune our hearts in terms of the way that we approach God, then it can give us a much more realistic sense of what it means to live life with God that it isn't always going to be us getting what we want. It isn't always going to be good feelings, but it is going to be this promise that we have, that God's loyal love goes before us, walks beside us and chases after us, whether we feel it or not, and so much of breaking the power of entitlement is being able. To rest our confidence, not on our perception of God's presence, but on on the promises that he's given to us, which, again, both perception and trust in a promise require some sort of imaginative participation. This sort of imaginatively in placing yourself in a story in which you're living between what God has done already and what God has promised to do, but you haven't got there yet. And so what does it mean to be faithful in the middle, rather than demanding that you speed up, you know, speed up the clock to get to the the place that that you know you're journeying towards, but then you're not there yet.
Joshua Johnson:As we're on the journey, we're faithful in this middle, where does true hope come in? How do we land with real hope? Yeah, I was
Justin A. Bailey:reflecting on this yesterday. You know, during times of tragedy, there's always this push back against thoughts and prayers. And I feel it both ways. On one hand, I totally get it. And I get that there is a pushback against thoughts and prayers when it's like, well, this is all we can do. You know, especially when it comes from a person who's powerful, that you feel like they could do more than that. And so it's a sort of maybe cheap hope that's being rejected when we reject thoughts and prayers. But I also want to say praying is a real thing that you that you do. You know, if we believe that God is really at work, then prayer is a significant intervention. But yeah, just to say that, I think that it's really important that we say that it's not a cheap hope that results in cliches, but it's a costly hope that we actually are trying to cultivate, which, again, acknowledges the presence of desolation, it acknowledges the presence of of darkness. It acknowledges the it acknowledges the tears. And so the hope comes from outside the walls of the world. It's not a hope that is based on predictive power, right? Oh, it seems like things are going to get better. This is the Tolkien thing again, right? I look at the world and there's no way that we're going to win this battle, right? And then all of a sudden, here comes Aragorn on the ships right and and it's this sense, it's not based on prediction. It's based on promise, because of the kind of world we're living in, a world that is broken by sin, but still loved by God and therefore not abandoned, and that God is working behind the scenes to make all things new. And we don't know the timeframe. We don't know the timing of that, but we do know what we've been called to do, and the only way you can do that is if you have some kind of hope. This actually reminds me of to connect to our reading conversation earlier. I think this is in the book. A friend of mine shared this Flannery O'Connor quote with me where she said, people without hope don't write novels, and they don't read them either. And her point in saying that is to read, to write a novel, or to read a novel, requires you to develop the capacity to take the long way around and to spend a lot of time in the ups and the downs of human experience, which can be a really harrowing experience. You know, to read, to read a long story that explores all of the sort of nooks and crannies, it requires a kind of hope that there's a reason why you would do that, that something good could come out of that. And so I think that a big part of getting people to read, or getting people to slow down and be contemplative and to pay attention, or to stand in front of a work of art for 10 minutes, all of these sorts of things. What we're doing is we're cultivating hope, a kind of waiting right, a recognition that we are actually not the ones who move the world forward. Ultimately, there's much we can do, but the world does not rise and fall on our shoulders. So the Hobbit, the end of The Hobbit, you know, there's been this great quest, this great mission. And at the very end, Gandalf says something to Bilbo, like you didn't think that all of this was just about you and just about your own benefit. He says, You are a very fine fellow, Mr. Baggins, but you are quite a little fellow in the world, after all. And Bilbo laughs, and he says, Thank goodness. And I think that's biblical hope, right? It's this idea that you you do what God has called you to do to the best of your ability, but you realize that at the end of the day, you are quite a little fellow in the world after all, thank goodness. Right? That the world does not rise and fall on our effort alone. Yeah.
Joshua Johnson:Briefly, what hope do you have for discipling, the disease imagination? What do you hope people get?
Justin A. Bailey:Yeah, I hope that they Well, I hope they buy it, and I hope that some of them read it or eventually listen to it. But yeah, more than anything. I think that my burden is to draw people's attention to the importance of the imagination, and that this is a neglected area, I think, of formation. And all of us have imaginations. All of us have discipled imaginations. But the question is, what is it being discipled by? And what are the ways that paying greater attention to the things that are forming our imagination can help us to live with greater integrity and fidelity
Joshua Johnson:as as we live in the story of God? Yeah, well, we've been talking a lot about about stories and some novels and stuff, but I'd love to get a recommendation or two from you. So anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend.
Justin A. Bailey:Well, the novel that I always have been recommending lately is pure nisi by Susanna Clark,
Joshua Johnson:yeah, you recommended that last time I did.
Justin A. Bailey:Okay, that's always the first one that I the first one I recommend to people. Because I sort of think if, if there was, like, a it's so it's very Louis, Louisiana, I guess. And then on that, I just read that hideous strength by by CS Lewis, which I found really compelling as well. There's a novel written by Amy matrovati called broken bonds. It's she writes, it's his historical novel about the Reformation. So she's writing about Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. And it's sort of, you know, it puts flesh on some of these figures. It makes them feel more human. And she does a lot of research. And so it was, it was just very, you know, as a person who studied the Reformation quite a bit. It was, is very enjoyable to to to encounter Philip Melanchthon as a character in a book, and to sort of think about, yeah, what was his marriage like, and how did he feel about his kids and and what was his correspondence with Erasmus, you know? So it's a very you don't have to know much about the Reformation to enjoy it. But I really enjoyed, really enjoyed reading that book, more formally, the book that I'm reading two books right now. One is on Ecclesiastes, called Everything is never enough, by Bobby Jameson. Really appreciated that book. And then I'm reading a book by Judith Wolfe called the theological imagination, which is a bit more technical. I sort of purposely delayed reading it until my book was out because I was afraid I was gonna have to rewrite my whole book after she after she wrote it. And I don't think I have to rewrite it, but I sort of feel like she's making the points I was trying to make in a much nobler language, in like, you know, in a much better way, someone who's much smarter than me, you know, saying it much better than me, but I still have. Am very much enjoying that book as well.
Joshua Johnson:Justin, well, the discipling, the diseased imagination, will be available anywhere books are sold. You could go in order. You could start to read. The Imagination is so important. How can people go and connect with you in what you're doing? Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to,
Justin A. Bailey:yeah, P justin.com, is my website. You could just search, but you could just Google, Google My full name, and you'd find my website, which has sermons I preach and things I've written, and all my books are there. I've also started a sub stack. Well, I mean, I had the newsletter before, but I've moved it to sub stack. It's called Stronger spells the moment. I think you only have two two pieces, but hopefully there'll be more as time continues. So those are probably the best places to look excellent.
Joshua Johnson:Well, Justin, thank you for walking us through the imagination discipleship, what that looks like. It was fantastic. So really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you so much. Yeah, it's been such a pleasure. Joshua, thank you. You.
