Save Them From Secularism

Last year, I did a series called Pre-Evangelism For Your Children. I compiled those posts, re-worked them, and added some material on manners and education. The result is this booklet, aimed at parents and pastors, to think through how we create a Christian ‘thinking-grid’ or worldview in our children. While trusting entirely to the decisive work of the Spirit in bringing regeneration, we must not fail to use all means possible to instil in children an imagination shaped by Christian categories, to prepare for and support the gospel and orthodox doctrine.

As a pastor and parent, I’m concerned at how oblivious we seem to be at the many ways that we inculcate a secular imagination. This book is an attempt to point out some of the possible gaps in our thinking and practice.

It’s free for five days at Amazon. If you find it helpful, promote it to other parents, grandparents, pastors, etc.

Cheap Thrills – 7 – Escape to Never Never Land

Popular art is accused of being escapist. Kaplan agrees and disagrees. He argues that popular art seeks to escape the ugliness or troubles of this world, but it does so differently to serious art. Art may give us an idealized depiction of the world, but it seeks to transform the reality of the world. Real art may show us the world that is, or even the world as it might be. Popular art simply shows us the world as we would have it.

It does this not through its use of symbolism, for all art makes use of the symbolic. Instead, popular art attractively packages the world by glossing and varnishing it. It prettifies, delighting with sound, shape and colour in overpoweringly sweet doses. The escape comes through shutting out the reality, and then envisaging a world in which we are the heroes, the overcomers, the desired lovers, the powerful, beautiful people. It is a world of our own making, where everything is selected and placed in our own interest. Defects are polished and characters flattened, lest they evoke pity instead of soothing sentimentality. We quickly recognise the stereotypes, and fill them with the feelings we know we are supposed to have.

Once again, popular art is an exercise in narcissism. It assures us that our prejudged values are correct, and our very narrow perspectives are the correct ones. All art is illusory, but serious art aims to return us to reality, being illusory without being deceptive. Pop art is a tissue of falsehoods, in Kaplan’s words.

Just as in the discussion of sentimentality, the problem may not be too much, but too little. Popular art may be said to suffer from too little fantasy as too much: it simply does not do enough with its materials. Instead of working far enough to confer reality on its products, it stops short, letting its prettified depictions of life-as-we’d-like-it-to-be substitute for the real.

Real art helps us to escape: not from reality itself but from our own unimaginative experience of it. We are returned more aware, more alive to the profundity of life in God’s world. Popular art simply pleasures us with the illusion of true imagination. We do not escape to reality, for no reality is even depicted. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred. It is, as Kaplan puts it, the difference between masturbation and a mature love that reaches outside the self.

Real art gives us a kind of objectification, in which we are able to see ourselves in perspective. The self and the world are understood rightly. We see people as God sees them, with divine objectivity. Popular art is all too human, and ultimately childish. We want pleasure without change, an escape from pain and ugliness without altering a thing within. And so we escape into non-existent worlds where we are already pleasured and beautiful. Popular art turns its back on a world it has never known.

***

Here are three imaginative depictions of King David’s experience of losing a child (2 Samuel 18:33). Each calls us to escape. Where do we escape to, in each one? Which returns us with a deepened sense of what such anguished grief feels like? Which actually prettifies the pain?

Cheap Thrills – 5 – Affective Anaesthesia

You can recognise popular art not only through its form (or formlessness), but through the feelings it evokes, according to Kaplan. He disagrees with the common objection that popular art is mere entertainment. All art, Kaplan argues, has intrinsic interest and intrinsic value, giving joy to the beholder without regard to more serious interests. That popular art does so is not reason enough to disqualify it as serious art. Only a kind of perverted puritanism would imagine good art to be boring, or bad art to be interesting and enjoyable.

Kaplan sounds like G.K. Chesterton as he turns commonly accepted ideas on their head. Popular art is not, as many think, an exercise in diversion, diverting our attention to other objects. Instead, it is mere reinforcement. Popular art entertains by trading in familiarity, and by trafficking in familiar emotion. Popular art does not need to be excellent in itself, it simply needs to be effective in bringing certain feelings to mind, evoking past satisfactions, producing nostalgia, and in providing occasions for reliving experiences. In other words, the emotions we feel with popular art are not expressed by the particular song, painting or poem, they are merely associated with them. In popular art, we lose ourselves, not in the work itself, but in pools of memory.

This goes back to its formlessness. The form is so schematized as to be the equivalent of cue cards for a public speaker. The form does not have substance enough to broaden our feelings. Kaplan says, “Popular art wallows in emotion while art transcends it, giving us understanding and thereby mastery of our feelings.” Popular art is, once again, narcissistic, making our own feelings the subject matter, and indeed the goal of the aesthetic experience. We are not drawn out of ourselves, but driven deeper into loneliness.

The deep and sad irony is that as we idolise our own feelings, we become anaesthetised to them. Like the addict who experiences the law of diminishing returns, as we wallow in our passions, they affect us less. Instead of growing into people whose affections are vigorous, we become somnambulant.

What might be the effects of the use of this affective sedative in worship? What might be the effects on us as affective beings, if we live on these sedatives? Is this generation one that feels too much or too little?

***

Consider these three hymns. Which of these trades in nostalgia, pools of memory, or mere association? Which is nothing more than a cue to wallow in feelings we think we ought to have?
Which calls us to investigate the poetry for itself – for its images, descriptions, language, rhymes, meter, tone? Which trades in clichés that are mere symbols for familiar responses? Which affects us but gives us mastery of our feelings? Which leaves our feelings unchanged, merely invoking what we already feel (or think we ought to feel) about the supposed subject matter?

‘Tis the Christ
Stricken, smitten, and afflicted,
See Him dying on the tree!
’Tis the Christ by man rejected;
Yes, my soul, ’tis He, ’tis He!
’Tis the long expected prophet,
David’s Son, yet David’s Lord;
Proofs I see sufficient of it:
’Tis a true and faithful Word.

Tell me, ye who hear Him groaning,
Was there ever grief like His?
Friends through fear His cause disowning,
Foes insulting his distress:
Many hands were raised to wound Him,
None would interpose to save;
But the deepest stroke that pierced Him
Was the stroke that Justice gave.

Ye who think of sin but lightly,
Nor suppose the evil great,
Here may view its nature rightly,
Here its guilt may estimate.
Mark the Sacrifice appointed!
See Who bears the awful load!
’Tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed,
Son of Man, and Son of God.

The Old Rugged Cross
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame;
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
Refrain

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.

O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.

In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me.

To the old rugged cross I will ever be true;
Its shame and reproach gladly bear;
Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.

How Deep the Father’s Love for Us
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that left Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom

Why “Subjective” Doesn’t Get You Out of Jail Free

I was one of those who used the word ‘subjective’ to defend my own prejudices. My approach was to enter into debate with someone on the merits or failings of some music, book, poem or film. If at some point I felt that something I loved was in danger of being judged inferior, ugly, banal or otherwise in poor taste, I resorted to the “Well, it’s all very subjective” defence. And it worked. Subjective is the control+alt+delete word for conversations about beauty that are locked; it is the ref’s whistle for arguments about fitting worship; it’s the bugle call for all parties to retreat to the culturally acceptable position of tolerating all tastes. Remind people that the judgement of the arts is a subjective judgement, and you are sending them the cultural cue that only snobs and elitist bullies would argue that a man’s personal preference could be an example of bad taste. After all, that’s intolerant.

I didn’t see how using the word subjective to ward off attacks on my tastes was an incoherent use of the term. It was rather like saying, “Well, that’s what you think.”

Yes. And? Anything intelligent to say about what I think?

On closer inspection, we see that no one should get away with using the word subjective this way.

First, all knowing is subjective in some sense. All the knowledge you have is held by a knowing subject: you. Your education was a repeated process of one mind communicating knowledge to another mind – yours. This doesn’t make the knowledge fanciful or illusory, it simply means all we know is subjective to us. No one can step outside himself as a perceiving subject, render a perfectly objective judgement, and then return with that purely objective judgement into himself as a subject. This is the foolish and conceited thinking of some Enlightenment thinkers.

Second, some things are known only subjectively. The knowledge of persons is such knowledge. To treat a person as an object to be studied violates his personhood. We must know people subjectively to know them truly – in a relationship of trust and commitment. Knowledge of ethics, and knowledge of beauty is much more like this kind of knowledge than the knowledge of arithmetic or physics. This doesn’t mean that truth in these areas is unobtainable. It means that truth in these areas is not gained through the scientific method, but through the process of subjective judgement.

Third, humans still seek consensus on matters obtained through subjective judgement. Witness people debating over the merits of certain music. Observe people disagreeing on history’s verdict on a person’s life. See how people argue over ethical issues. Debate (when carried out by rational gentlefolk) is an attempt to reach consensus. And the elephant in the room is the question, why work so hard to reach consensus, if subjective judgements cannot be held to a standard outside of themselves? Why seek consensus, if a subjective judgement reflects nothing more than a subject’s state of mind? We should by now be content to let every man be right in his own eyes. That the debates continue show that as much as we like to use subjective to defend our prejudices, we do not fully accept the argument ourselves. We long for others to agree that our tastes are good, even if it be by their silent acquiescence. Culture is itself a form of moral and aesthetic consensus, without which man is blind and naked in the dark.

Fourth, the whole use of subjective avoids the point:  what if a subjective judgement is true? Are we excused from believing or submitting to what is true simply because someone holds it as a  subjective preference?

Certainly, some facts can be more easily seen than others. An object that exists or an event that happens is easier to regard as objective than a judgement about morality or beauty. However, even these facts go through a subjective grid. That we notice some facts, and filter others out, demonstrates that a form of subjective judgement is taking place all the time. Yes, some things are easier to agree upon. Nevertheless, the fact that some knowledge requires a more difficult, critical, careful judgement does not render that knowledge unreliable or unstable. To think this way is to parrot the naive scientism of our day, with its blind belief in its own supposedly objective empirical observations (which are actually judgements).

Indeed, if the knowledge of persons, of good and evil and of beauty is knowledge obtained through subjective judgement, then it turns out that this is the most important kind of knowledge, and these judgements are the most important – and difficult – kind we can make.

To the remark, “Well, that’s a very subjective judgement,” I now might reply, “Yes. It is. And I, as a subject, am attempting to judge reality correctly, using the truth God supplies in His Word or His world. I desire to get better at this judgement (Heb 5:14), so that I (the subject) can approve the things that are, in objective reality, excellent (Phil 1:10).”

Ten Ways To Raise a Secularist

Webster’s defines secularism as “indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations.” Judging by the expressions on the faces of young people during worship in many churches, we are doing quite well at raising a generation of robust secularists. To help parents along in this task, here are ten suggestions:

1) Attend a church where God rests lightly upon the worshippers. If the church does not know the difference between worship and entertainment, then this is sure to happen, and you should make such a church your spiritual home. Make sure that the programs (and there should be many of these) and ministries mostly emphasise fun as the supreme good. After Sunday School, ask your children, “Did you have fun?” Make sure the level of fun-making becomes more sophisticated as the children get older. During church, shrug off any efforts by the pastors to involve you in reflection, repentance, humility or adoration. Let your children see your impatience and restlessness with that kind of thing. If it continues, speak to the leadership and inform them of the wrong direction they are going with worship.

2) Treat the Lord’s Day as a tiresome chore. Arrive at church, proceed with the formalities, and then get home for the good stuff: lunch, computer games, and ideally, some TV or movies. Don’t mention the sermon at home, and definitely avoid any display of emotion in speaking of how the revelation of God affected you.

3) Fill the home, and the car, and the schedule with noise. That is, fill your children’s lives with continual distraction: cartoons, lightweight sitcoms and movies, sports, computer games and the like. Keep everyone entertained from moment to moment, and keep meditation, silence and reflection far from your home.

4) Let your child’s peers be his cultural mentors. Let other children define for him what is to be prized, valued, loved and treasured. Do this by making sure the bulk of his time is not spent with you, and when it is, don’t bother to tell him what you think is true and good and beautiful. When he appears to be taking on the sullen, sceptical, and cynical attitude of his peers, you know you’re making progress.

5) Fill his mind and his life with pop culture: pop music, movies, and TV. Let him be shaped by songs that trivialise the human condition, stories that evoke good feelings but forbid reflection, and generally art that the child enjoys without having to to reflect, learn or struggle to understand. Make sure his whimsical feelings direct and form his tastes, and don’t ever, ever, force him to listen to serious music, learn an instrument, read good poetry and literature or go to an art gallery. Remember, you want to keep central to him his love of himself; therefore, anything that challenges him to enter into another person’s world is bad. If he doesn’t like something, let him know that it is bad, and if he likes it, it is good.

6) Don’t teach him to compare and criticise things for their goodness, truth or beauty. If he develops any ability in this area, he will be developing the tools for worship, and that’s not what you want. Ideally, find some nicely mixed-up forms – pop music posing as worship, juvenile poems posing as worship, cartoons and movies posing as Christian, and kitsch religious artwork. Once worship and self-gratifying entertainment are mixed up, he’ll never be able to pull them apart, and will default to entertainment.

7) Celebrate the idols of our culture: sports, cars, technology, toys, brand-name clothes, great meals, and popular entertainments. Talk about these with enthusiasm and excitement, spend your money on them liberally, and let your children see that here is where your soul takes repose and finds delight. Rejoice together in your material acquisitions, reserve your highest words of praise for sports stars, and drool over catalogues, car shows and coming attractions. Involve your children in a pursuit of these things from their earliest years, so that they know that these are the things that truly matter. Set it up so the highlight of the week is ‘movie night’, speak of it with anticipation, visibly show your delight when it comes, and surround it with all kinds of comfort ceremonies.

8) Keep his eyes glued to a screen of sorts: phone, iPad, computer, TV – it doesn’t matter what kind. This will keep him away from seeing the works of God’s hands, particularly the sky or the intricacy of growing and living things. Ideally, don’t travel, but if you must, make sure that your car has a TV, the destination has satellite TV, and that he brings his screen with him.

9) Let him be careless about words and language. Clear ideas require clear thought, which requires precise language. You don’t want this; you want your child to live in a vague, blurry world of contradictory notions and ideas. Vocabulary and diction are some of the techne of worship, so make sure he uses incoherent grammar, rejects clear definition, prefers slang, and never learns to write his thoughts out coherently.

10) Avoid all forms of manners, etiquette or everyday beauty in the home. These kinds of things teach him to think of appropriateness, order and decency (which belong to worship), to say nothing of the fact that they elevate his existence from the merely physical and material. Let informality seem natural and ‘real’, and let all custom, ritual and form seem like hypocrisy and phoniness. In fact, tell him it is so.

Do this consistently for around, say, twenty years, and I can nearly guarantee you that by that time, your children will be thorough-going secularists. Best of all, they’ll have been with you in church all that time. You can say that they were raised in a Christian home, and their irreligious ways are their own fault.

Amidst the Ruins

“And this place would be packed on a Sunday?” said the boy, deliberately raising his voice a little, to hear the ghostly echo.

“Hm?” His father turned around from inspecting the wood carvings on a piece of fixed furniture. “Oh, yes. Standing-room only, sometimes.”

The boy’s footsteps along some stonework along the sides gave a rich, sonorous klop-klop. He enjoyed accenting his steps, and then craned his head up to see where a sandstone pillar met the arches above. “How long did it take them to build?”

“Well, that depends on who you mean by them. The builders? It took around 120 years for several generations to build it.” He gently slid his finger across the top of an ancient window sill and rubbed off the dust. “But they could not have built it in 120 years without many more hundreds of years of thought and work that went before them. You don’t just decide to build this in a generation or two.”

He went silent and hoped his son would dwell on that. Instead, the boy had found a squeaky pew, and was grinning as he got a rhythm of squeaks out of it by rocking back and forth.

Father sighed and went on looking, hands behind his back, gently strolling.

“So what’s it used for today?” the boy called out.

A gentle mumbling at the entrance gave the answer, and father motioned towards it. A tour group with brochures, cameras, and a soft-spoken guide had shuffled in, but their chattiness had become strangely muted as they came under the great vaulted ceiling.

“Unbelievers with a love of beauty, church history buffs, and the occasional eccentrics like me come here. Mostly just to admire.” And then, almost under his breath, “not to worship.”

His son had caught that. He was pretending to remain uninterested, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. “So why don’t we come here any more? I mean, if they were so popular, why did they stop using them?”

Father hated trying to answer a question like that to a fifteen-year-old’s attention span. He prayed. He paused. “One reason is that most people in the countries in which these were built began to believe a terrible lie about reality that made a place like this seem less real, and eventually, unreal. Places like this became an oddity.”

“And those who used to worship here?”

“They believed a different lie. They believed that popularity was more important than the meaning of this kind of thing. Eventually, since most of the surrounding unbelieving people thought of this kind of place as odd and unreal, the believers took the same view, to appear relevant. They abandoned these places, because otherwise they might have risked appearing odd and irrelevant.” He grimaced at his over-simplification.

“That’s why we go to a theatre with comfy seats every Sunday, right?” the boy said, trying to be funny. Dad didn’t laugh. He turned away and gazed at the Stations of the Cross pictured on the windows. The boy sensed his father’s sadness.

“It can’t be that hard to build something like this with the technology we have today. What took them 120 years could be done in less than five.”

The father sat on one of the pews, and motioned to his son to join him.

“Son, the point is not whether we can duplicate something like this. Sure we can. We might even be able to do it with more precision than they could have.” He pursed his lips and formed his thoughts.

“The point is: even if we did, who would come here? Do you think we could interest even half the worshippers in our local church to meet in a place like this?” His son said nothing.

“When this was built, grandfather told father who told son what this place meant. They had made it, and they understood it. They loved it not as a badge of refinement, or as a museum piece. It was the expression of what they and their great-grandfathers loved and cherished.

“It is not that we have lost the ability to make these things. We’ve lost the ability to love them. We’ve lost the ability to understand them and allow them to shape us. That ability doesn’t come to us because the church down the road decides to move from a shop-front to here. It comes because generation after generation believe and love the same things. After centuries of loving the same things, they develop better and better ways of expressing those loves and beliefs, and you end up with something like this, ” he said, looking up, and motioning in a circle.

He tried to pause to let all this percolate, but his thoughts were coming faster than he could wait. His tone became more intense.

“See, there’s a reason we meet in the buildings we do on Sundays. There’s a reason the churches that still hold to the apostles’ doctrine won’t be coming back here. Those lies that the culture believed and the lies that the church believed have irreparably broken our link to this. We can’t come back.”

An uncomfortable pause followed. His son swallowed and averted his eyes. “But…we’re here, aren’t we? You love it, and so do some others. That’s got to count for something, right?”

The father’s expression softened, detecting his son’s desire to comfort. They got up and walked slowly past the tour group towards the entrance. “Son, a few oddballs here and there don’t create things like this place. We might appreciate it, and learn to better love it. We can let it have a sanctifying effect on us. But it is no longer ours, like it was our forefathers’.”

At the entrance, they turned around one more time to take in the whole place. The secular tourists with their pointing and snapping were conspicuous in a place of worship.

Father finished his thought. “We know this, because most of those who call themselves the descendants of the builders of this place have no desire to return here.”

Towards Conservative Christian Churches – 27 – Form and Meaning

Christians’ affections are greatly shaped by the moral imagination. The moral imagination is largely shaped by the meaning of the various media it encounters. This meaning is largely contained in the form of such things. If a pastor is serious about meaning, then he must be serious about form.

Form, in its simplest sense, is shape. Everything in life, from a horse to a cake, from an essay to a minuet, from a sonnet to a computer program, has shape. The shape of a thing is essential to your understanding of a thing. When it comes particularly to those areas which affect the moral imagination, and therefore shape the affections, form is central to our understanding of meaning. To despise or neglect form is to be dismissive of meaning altogether.

Whether it be architecture, poetry, music, belletristic literature, the plastic arts or theatre, these all communicate ideas. The form of these things is the way that the idea is communicated, restated, developed, contrasted and explained. When we are largely unaware of the forms that the composer, poet, author or architect is using, we miss much of the meaning of what is being communicated.

This returns us to our earlier exhortation for pastors to invest time in understanding the meaning of music, poetry, literature, architecture or the plastic arts. The best place to go is to those authors who spend time explaining the forms and their functions. Once aware of the forms used in those areas which shape the moral imagination, the pastor can do several things.

First, he can seek to use those forms that convey the truths of Christianity without trivializing, sentimentalizing or otherwise falsifying them. He can seek forms which are consonant with Christian worship and affections by understanding those forms. For the sake of space, let’s restrict our examples to form within poetry. A pastor may know what a hymn set to iambic tetrameter will achieve as opposed to one set to anapestic meter. As he grows in his own understanding of form, he will seek to use forms which do not demean or trivialize the truth of God. He will also try to avoid the error of those who do not understand form: mixing forms which clash. To sing one hymn set to the serious iambic pentameter of a sonnet, followed by a hymn set to the comical amphibrachic meter of a limerick is to create cognitive dissonance in one’s people, and collapse distinctions that ought to be clear. Instead of sharpening the moral imagination, this ends up putting opposing ideas into one blender, and feeds people the pulpy mush as ‘balanced worship’. When leaders unwittingly mix forms, discernment becomes nigh impossible for the average church attender.

Second, given his role of something of an intermediary between experts and laypeople, a pastor should seek to use forms which do not demean the truth, and yet are not indecipherable. Given the bankrupt state of our culture, this is a difficult task. If the pastor defaults to forms which are immediately accessible or popular to his people, he is probably enlisting forms which mislead and rob by their banality and ephemeral nature. On the other hand, that musically simple form – the metrical hymn – is regarded by many today as ‘high’ and ‘too deep’! Woe to us!

Here the pastor has to walk a difficult line of exposure, explanation and repetition. There is little point in feeding the appetite for banal or sentimental forms. Such appetites only grow with each concession. Rather, people must be exposed to forms that are excellent (Phil 1:9-11). Such forms may need to be explained, and then the whole process repeated. In doing so, the pastor will have to balance accessibility and elevation. All Christians need exposure to forms which better capture the truth, and yet all Christians need a point of entry.

It may be helpful to run the occasional class on form, particularly for those cultural phenomena that affect worship: music and poetry. A study of a helpful book, or perhaps a lecture series from one of the companies mentioned in a previous post might be helpful. Realistically, a pastor can only do so much. Teaching forms, and their meanings, is what a culture is supposed to do. However, when your culture is apostate, some catch-ups will be necessary.

Christians are commanded to ‘test all things, and hold fast to that which is good” (1 Thes 5:21) The church that wants to conserve Christianity is committed to understanding the meaning of the world, so as to rightly understand worship, the affections, and the correct application of biblical principles.

Towards Conservative Christian Churches – 22 – A Christian Imagination

Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible”, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”: make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please will you do my job for me”.

- C.S. Lewis 1

Shaping the affections of parishioners feels like trying to make your children grow taller. There are some factors completely out of your control. There are some things which they do which can help or hinder the process. There are a few things you can do to encourage healthy growth.

A pastor who wishes to see ordinate affection in his church is able to do a limited number of things. You cannot re-grow a Christian culture. You cannot recover the sensibilities of our Christian forefathers and transplant them into the hearts of modern Christians. You cannot make people love what they do not love. You cannot do in your church in a few years what is meant to be done through culture over centuries.

You can pay attention to the five matters mentioned earlier. You can become aware of how the moral imagination functions, and do your best to help the formation of a Christian imagination in your people. What follows is a somewhat eclectic set of practical suggestions to this end.

1. Perhaps the most helpful article I’ve come across to help busy Christians to understand how the imagination informs all else is A.W. Tozer’s “Why We Must Think Rightly About God”. It is the first chapter in The Knowledge of the Holy, and I’ve sometimes used it as a mini-study or discussion.

2. As preachers, we need to spend far more time considering how analogical language is to shape our preaching. C.S. Lewis’ words bring the point home: we cop out when we keep announcing, “God is awesome! God is, like, totally, amazing!” It is the job of the writer, and in this case, the speaker, to so fire the imagination that the affections of awe and amazement are raised in contemplating God. When we take the imagination seriously, we will spend as much time, if not more, on exposition as we do on exegesis. Our word pictures, analogies, illustrations and overall rhetorical form ought to move the heart to feel rightly about God. Jack Hughes’ book Expository Preaching With Word Pictures considers how Thomas Watson did this effectively. Warren Wiersbe’s Preaching and Teaching with Imagination considers how the imagination is used throughout Scripture, and how preachers can pay attention to this. Finally, from time to time we all need to read a master like Spurgeon, to drink in sermons baroque in their imagery.

3. We need to think carefully about the imagery and the language used in the hymns we sing. Is it trite? Is it helpful? Do the songs employ vacuous cliches? Are they nothing more than rhyming doctrinal statements set to music? Assuming we are choosing superior hymns, we need to take the time to point out the imagery, and why it is useful. There will probably need to be some polemic work done from time to time, pointing out why the imagery or language in certain hymns or songs is trivial, shallow, sentimental or merely functional. If you church uses printed hymnals, if it is within your power, choose one which has a minimum of shallow hymns, for the average church goer does not suspect that hymnals contain both good and bad.

4. The same is true of the music we use in our worship services, or encourage as music helpful for ordinate affection. Abraham Kaplan helps us here:

In a fully aesthetic experience, feeling is deepened, given new content and meaning. Till then, we did not know what it was we felt; one could say that the feeling was not truly ours. It is in this sense that art provides us with feeling: it makes us aware of something that comes to be only in the intense and structured experience of the awareness. We become selves as we come to self-consciousness, no longer unthinking creatures of feeling but men whose emotions are meaningful to us. But popular art provides no such mirror of the mind, or if we do find our feelings dimly reflected in it, we cannot pass through the looking glass to confront our hidden selves. We are caught up on the surface, and our feelings remain superficial and deficient, as unreal as their reflections. The shades with which the world of popular art is peopled seem to us substantial when we ourselves are still only fictitious characters. Superficial, affected, spurious-this is the dictionary meaning of sentimental. So far as feeling goes, it is sentimentality that is most distinctive of popular art. 2

5. There are authors and poets who represent a Christian imagination, and their books are accessible to most. Authors like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Flannery ‘O Connor, come to mind. While we do not need to produce ‘approved books’ lists, some pastoral guidance can be helpful in nudging parishioners towards some of the classics and away from popular literature or television which does exactly what Kaplan describes. This is particularly important for children, whose imaginations are hungry and being shaped. George MacDonald’s defense of fairy tales in his chapter “The Fantastic Imagination” can be very helpful for people to see what part these play in shaping a Christian imagination.

6. Perhaps many church-goers will be unable to make sense of poets like John Donne or George Herbert (at least initially). However, they could probably benefit from reading Frederick Faber, or a collection of hymns by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley. A.W. Tozer did the church a favor in collecting a modest, but extremely helpful, set of Christian poetry in his book The Christian Book of Mystical Verse. This is probably a must-have for your church library.

7. We could talk of architecture, ritual, and ceremony, but it is beyond the scope of our discussion. Suffice it to reiterate that a pastor eager to see ordinate affection growing in his people must give thought to these things. He is responsible to inform his people that the imagination is shaped by a multitude of things, and that Christians have a responsibility to nourish theirs with what is excellent so as to be without blame on the day of Christ (Phil 1:9-10)

For all of this to be any more than an odd set of prejudices, the meaning of these things has to be explained. The meaning of the poetry, the literature, the music, the painting or sculpture, the architecture, or the technology has to be made clear. We must understand form, and explain how form communicates meaning. In fact, we must become interested in the meaning of all things, if we are to rightly shape the affections, and rightly apply the Scriptures. This leads to the seventh mark of a conservative Christian church: a conservative Christian church is committed to understanding the meaning of the world, so as to rightly understand worship, affections, and the correct application of biblical principles.

1. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 – 1963, New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007.

2. Abraham Kaplan, “The Aesthetics of the Popular Arts”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Spring, 1966), 358.

Towards Conservative Christian Churches – 21 – Imagination and Shaping the Affections

Many of the pastors I have met are unwitting moderns. I should know, for I am also a pastor, and a recovering modern. That is, I am someone who believed the lies of scientism: that the way to know reality is by fact-collecting, and that humans are capable of being completely objective in their fact-collecting. To put the lie another way, point the microscope, stethoscope, telescope or some other instrument towards the universe, and you will find out a pure, brute fact about what is. If you collect enough of these facts, you might be able to construct a big picture of what is.

Many spiritual leaders apply something similar to Christian discipleship. In their view, if you collect enough theological facts from the Bible you will be able to construct the whole picture. Therefore, their aim in ministry is to discover and then supply people with these facts. All else is peripheral, matters of preference, taste, or, in their words, ‘subjective’ matters. Lucky for their people, they’re ‘objective’, and deal mostly in supplying objective brute theological facts.

As I say, I am recovering from my modernism, for it still infects much of what I do. However, a biblical mindset understands that the Truth precedes the facts, and that even our understanding of Revelation goes through a grid. That is what leads conservative Christian pastors to pay attention to the imagination.

The imagination is that part of us which gives us an intuitive feeling about the nature of immanent reality. It is our grid, our map of reality to which we refer all the ‘facts’ we encounter. It is built over years, and supplied with an aggregate of symbols from our culture(s). Those symbols, as discussed in the last post, supply the sense of proportion and measure toward all things. This is what largely shapes a person’s affections toward God, himself and the world.

The cognitive aspect of the Christian faith cannot be divorced from the affective aspect. Indeed, as we’ve just seen, there is a sense in which they are dependent on one another.  This is the aspect of the Christian faith that does not seem to be given the attention it requires: how the imagination informs how we feel about the truth. It is our ongoing response to the truth.

We can sing of God in funny limericks, or in stately hymns. We can think of the Flood like this, or like this. We can imagine the experience of encountering God like this, or like this. We can compare sin to ‘Stinky Sox’ or to a curse. We can ‘theme’ the Christian life after treasure hunts, race-car driving, detective-sleuthing or cowboys and Indians, or use the biblical imagery supplied by the apostles. We can sing benedictions like this or like this. We can imagine the event of corporate worship (and therefore the setting for it) like this, or like this. We can dress up the faith in games, fun, material rewards, or in the motives Jesus gave. The list could go on. Whatever you decide about these differing visions, there is little doubt that these examples illustrate that Christians can and do have contrasting, even opposing, visions of how one should respond to the truths of God’s Word.

What we must not miss is that in these matters, we might have total agreement on the content (and perhaps meaning) of the theological facts under discussion. However, the form in which we teach them demonstrates how we imagine these truths ought to affect us. This is the difference between the modernist and the Christian: the modernist cannot see how the form of things shapes the sentiment towards the truth, which can ultimately shape the whole view of truth.

All of these matters are, in a sense, pre-cognitive. They provide a sensibility, a sentiment towards the facts under discussion. If the cognitive tells us who God is, the imaginative tells us what He deserves. If the cognitive supplies us with ideas to be known, the imaginative tells us how we ought to respond to those ideas.

And since Christianity is a religion of worshiping an invisible God, we are heavily reliant on these matters of the imagination to teach us a sensibility toward the truth. Therefore, the pastor who wishes to see affections properly shaped in his people must think carefully about such matters as the poetry in the lyrics of our songs, the music used in worship, the religious artwork we use (in our Sunday School material, for example), the themes or motifs adopted in our children’s discipleship, the motives we give for people (young or old) to serve Christ, down to how we design our place for corporate worship. These are not merely decorative, stylistic matters, they provide precisely the kind of analogies we spoke of previously. Form is formative. If our analogies are not serious, it is likely that the sentiment towards the things of God will not be serious. If the analogies provoke narcissism, it is likely that the sentiment towards worship and discipleship will be narcissistic.

Shaping the affections goes beyond providing facts. It goes to considering carefully the form in which ideas are presented. It considers how the entire worldview and sensibility towards the things of God is shaped by the analogies we give the imagination.

Towards Conservative Christian Churches – 20 – More than Cognitive

The cultivation of ordinate affection depends on several areas we have already covered in this series. A pastor determined to conserve biblical Christianity will be conserving several areas, each of which affect the others. Bear with me as we tie several elements already discussed to the shaping of the affections.

Since regeneration is essential to ordinate affection, a conservative Christian church preserves and propagates the biblical gospel. Apart from the heart being given an entirely new disposition, it will always love creature more than Creator, and therefore become more warped in its affections.

Since a right understanding of God, ourselves and the world is essential to right loves, a conservative Christian church conserves and teaches a comprehensive biblical and systematic theology. Without a systematic exposition of God’s Word, with practical submission to it, no one will love what God loves and hate what God hates.

Since example and exposure are necessary for the shaping of appropriate loves, the conservative Christian church conserves biblical worship, and understands one of its roles as a ‘catechism of the affections’. Corporate worship, with its forms, order and structure provides a lesson in proportion, decorum and appropriate responses. Corporate worship is the opportunity for adjusting the sensibilities of the worshipers, so that a common sentiment towards God, the world and ourselves is developed. It is not meant to be a venue for competing sensibilities to all find expression in the name of personal taste and Romans 14.

Since sanctification is essentially re-ordering our loves to bring them in line with God’s, the conservative Christian church gives much attention to teaching personal piety, and encouraging discipleship relationships. When Christians observe ordinate love for God, mankind and the created order, it is often caught. Therefore, piety is to be encouraged in the life of the individual and the family. Practical obedience is to be stressed as essential to knowing and loving God.

Since understanding a biblical view of man is crucial to loving God ordinately, the conservative Christian church gives time to teach on the importance of the affections, the nature of the affections, and their application: what ought to be loved and how. A pastor who gives himself to all these things is well on his way to shaping ordinate affection in his hearers.

However, all of the above is not sufficient. The conservative pastor must become aware that the affections are not only shaped by regeneration, sound doctrine, sound worship, true piety and teaching on the affections. My point in the previous post was to illustrate how God shaped the affections of His people, and it was not only through information and obedience. He filled their lives with a large variety of symbols, ceremonies and rituals. These did more than regulate health and civil life in Israel. They dressed up the mere material existence of God’s people with the drapery of symbol, metaphor and analogy. Notice, God did this in addition to the moral imperatives of the Law. God knows that while our hearts can be partly shaped by what our minds know, and by what we choose, the heart’s responses are primarily affective responses, taught by analogy. Affective responses are essentially about proportion: an object deserves a particular kind of love. There is a response to an object or person that is proportionate to what it is in reality. This kind of proportionate response or just sentiment, is not taught cognitively. It is taught through analogy, wherein the analogy provides the sense of proportion. The symbol, if correctly chosen, contains the kind of affections required for the observer to correctly respond to the realities behind the symbol. Seeing an animal die at the altar evoked certain affections commensurate with repentance for sin. Comparing God to a captain of an army called for certain affections proportionate to His nature. Conversely, the high places with their analogies of sexual potency and fertility evoked inordinate affection.

All of this is to say that the pastor who wishes to shape ordinate affection in his people must become aware of how our knowledge of God and ultimate reality is analogical knowledge, and therefore our affections are shaped by the right analogies. Since God cannot be seen, how can we know how to love Him justly and appropriately? When our affective responses are responses to biblical or well-chosen images, analogies, metaphors, symbols, and signs, they will be correctly proportioned. In other words, the conservative Christian pastor must give attention to the imagination, and to form. This we will examine next.