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AR 30:1 - Bringing imagination to apologetics
In this issue:
APOLOGETICS - "make it lovable" to awaken hope
WORLDVIEW - Jordan Peterson and subjectivism, "the fatal sickness of the age"
Apologia Report 30:1 (1,690)
January 9, 2025
APOLOGETICS
The pitch, and its challenge. Ted Turnau teaches a comparative religions class at a university in Prague, Czech Republic. His pitch: "Once More with Feeling," his essays for The Gospel Coalition (Nov 19 '24), which also includes the challenge: "Bring Imagination to Apologetics".
Turnau opens by describing an encounter with a pupil in his class, "an American exchange student." In this case, "relativism made sense for him, and therefore, whatever its logically fatal flaws, it was still true - for him." Sound familiar?
"People seem harder to convince nowadays; they think with their passions. However, this isn't to suggest evidence and arguments are useless - consider how closely people pay attention to research around the climate crisis and the pandemic and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. ...
"[W]e need to rethink the narrow bandwidth that apologetics generally employs. Most Christians define apologetics (if they even know what it means) as 'rationally persuading someone of the truth of the Christian faith through arguments and evidence.' That approach is too blinkered, for it fails to account for the wider context where people are persuaded and beliefs are formed. ...
"It isn't enough for the gospel to be seen as true; it must be seen and felt by our conversation partners as deeply good, a vision of reality that's life-giving and beautiful and provides hope. Our apologetics, in other words, needs imagination."
Turnau confidently explains that "imagination, this linchpin of apologetics, [is] a human power that orientates us - mind and body - in the world, through which we perceive and create. It orientates us both individually and collectively, so we can speak of a 'collective imagination' or 'imaginary landscape.' The imagination inspires us to create, and it colours our experience of the world and our assumptions about reality. The imagination mediates: we shape our world through it, and through it our world shapes us.
"The imagination is what Paul alludes to in his beautiful prayer in Ephesians 1 as 'the eyes of [the heart]' (v. 18), the lens through which we see and feel the world and from which we create out into the world. ...
"One symptom of an emaciated imagination is a lack of hope, which is in especially short supply these days."
Turnau describes the need: "People, particularly young people, need hope. But it must be a credible hope that connects with our non-Christian friends not only as true but as answering their deepest desires."
He follows up with the solution: "Sixteenth-century mathematician and apologist Blaise Pascal famously said, 'Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true.'"
He finishes with the objective: We "must make it lovable. ...
"Our goal should be for our conversation partners to connect so strongly with what we share that they think deep down, Man, would I love to experience the world through this person's eyes."
Suggesting ways to reach this goal, he urges that we "include more imaginative aspects such as art and poetry. Try this definition on for size: Apologetics is the art of presenting a vision of reality rooted in the God of the Bible..." adding that "the line between apologetics and imaginative, artistic, and poetic creativity is fuzzy - because it needs to be. ... It presents a vision of the world that resonates" with what you've found in Christ. "To do this well takes [creative] imagination."
For Turnau, "First, we must abandon our obsession with the culture wars....
"Second, apologetics must recover the doctrine of common grace....
"Third, realize that engaging non-Christian culture isn't enough."
No way can we do justice to this with the space limitations of Apologia Report. It's a good thing Turnau has written it all up in his book (issued Aug 24 '23): Oasis of Imagination: Engaging our World through a Better Creativity <www.tinyurl.com/ype4zuvb>
He concludes with this: "Practically, this might look like hosting movie discussion nights, talking with friends about what's creating buzz in popular culture, or encouraging budding artists in the church. ... Once more ... with feeling." <www.tinyurl.com/576pefyt>
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WORLDVIEW
"Dare to wrestle" urges Jordan B. Peterson's latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, <www.tinyurl.com/2kpyptu3> released Nov 19th -- In his review, "Jordan Peterson's Prophecies," (New Statesman, Nov 19 '24), philosopher John Gray <www.tinyurl.com/yc7rk8w2> reveals that he has trouble "reading" Peterson in general. Most of us do, but unlike Gray, we are more often enjoying the ride.
Gray begins: "Peterson tells the reader that [We Who Wrestle] is a 'response to the brilliant Nietzsche'. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation. The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order - the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism." In disdain, Gray asks: "But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?"
From the first, Gray steps back with his observation that "In the introduction, or 'Foreshadowing', Peterson tells us: 'The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated - the foundation of the West, plain and simple.'"
Just before this, Gray calls attention to an interpretive observation by Peterson in reference to the Israelites "worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: 'The narrative here… indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order.'"
Gray soon concludes that "When you consider Peterson's troubled life, his search for meaning makes perfect sense." This is tied to Gray's perspective on Peterson's rise to fame, including: "A two-hour conversation with Elon Musk shown in July of this year on X (formerly Twitter) garnered not far from 40 million views within two days.
"Yet it is wrong to portray Peterson as a publicity-seeker, as do his many enemies and detractors. His celebrity has been a curse on him, driving him to psychological breakdown and almost ending his life...."
Gray includes another telling interpretation by way of Peterson's activity in "denouncing the woke assault on Western traditions and imparting his views on gender, identity politics and climate science. (It is hard to know whether we should take literally Peterson's apparent denial of the existence of climate change - he is not, in fact, a scientist, after all.)"
Building a dam that is ready to burst, Gray piles it on: "He has been regularly cancelled, deplatformed and disinvited, with Cambridge University joining the campaign against him by rescinding an offer of a visiting fellowship in 2019."
Peterson "believes he has a mission: 'the scientist or thinker is impelled to evangelise the results of their quest. He does so by speaking and by writing, attempting to spread the doctrine of the newly revealed truth.' His message is that Western civilisation is in mortal danger because people have turned to false gods. The West's crisis comes from severing its roots in Jewish and Christian religion and reverting to paganism. ...
"But like many on the right today, he believes there can be no recovery of liberal freedoms without a revival of Christian faith."
Gray explains that "a link between Christianity and liberalism exists only in branches of the religion. Eastern Orthodoxy has never promoted freedom of conscience in the manner of post-Reformation Christendom. ... Toleration emerged in countries that rejected the authority of the Catholic Church over the inner life. Tellingly, it is in these countries - particularly in the Anglosphere - that woke movements have become most powerful. Woke - or, as it is more accurately described, hyper-liberalism - is a radical secular avatar of Christianity, in which the Protestant affirmation of personal autonomy in matters of belief has morphed into the assertion that truth is subjective.
"Beginning as a peculiarly American ideology, it is recognisably a throwback to the frenzy of witch-hunting Puritans in colonial-era New England. ... The cult of the self-defining individual, creating themselves as they wish, is a Christian heresy, desacralised and emptied of transcendence. ...
"At the end of the book, Peterson asks if God is real, and replies: 'This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis - and therefore, of faith. [The divine] is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay; and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order.'
"Rather than surrendering to a higher power, Peterson seems to be engaged in fashioning a higher self. ... Peterson's self-made God is a symptom of the modern Western malady, rather than a cure for it." Regarding Nietzsche, the "atheist prophet," Gray scolds, was "the son of a Lutheran pastor, let us not forget."
Gray concludes: "Jordan Peterson has confronted Nietzsche's challenge, at some personal cost. Against all odds, he persists in asking the deepest questions. For this he deserves respect and admiration, even if - like Nietzsche - he does not in the end avoid the subjectivism that is the fatal sickness of the age." <www.archive.is/dsMDr>
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