Mary McDermott Shideler's Philosophies and Fairy-Tales artfully explores both the tension and unity of the imagination and reason in a way most prescient of our current situation. Prescient because the article appeared in the April 1973 issue of Theology Today! I thought the article was highly stimulating and helpfully provocative and found myself thinking in several different but related directions. I'll mention three:
Story/Myth/Experience Balances Reason and Enables Right Reason
Shideler addresses the limitations of reason and the necessity for imagination as evoked in myth. This resonates with the current rage over the significance of story in the pomoChristian thoughtspace. I also connect it with the importance of experience.
If I might use a pop psychology construct: experience, myth and story all access the right brain. Logical, sequential, linear information accesses the left brain. Myth accesses the right brain by addressing imagined reality. Experience, of course, is reality and has a similar effect. Shideler highlights how information can never fully encapsulate all that is religion. Something else is needed; something that compellingly captures the heart.
Mark Noll, in his The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, begins the book with the oft quoted judgment, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Perhaps Neurologist Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error provides some clue as to how a lack of appreciation of story and experience could lead to a deficit of thought in the church.
Damasio works with patients with brain damage. Some years ago, he became interested in a particular category of patients who were limited in their ability to experience emotion. Damasio found that while such patients performed well on standard intelligence tests, they nevertheless seemed lacking in the ability to adequately handle certain life situations, such as jobs, primary relationships, or even certain tasks that required a measure of what we might term “common sense.” Damasio concluded that emotions were a critical component of what we consider intelligence. Psychologist Daniel Goleman has explored similar themes in Emotional Intelligence, itself building on the work of Harvard multiple intelligence theorist Howard Gardner.
If the emotions – or the right brain – is the receptor of experience (reality), myth (imagined fictional reality) and story (imagined past reality), then is it possible that if in our consideration of religious verities we do not give sufficient emphasis to story, myth and experience, that we inhibit our ability to think accurately about God? In a nutshell, could it be that we do not think correctly about God because we do not give sufficient attention to experiencing Him?
If this is true, what is the remedy?
I believe that there are a thousand profitable avenues to explore that would address this – avenues as diverse as every Christian community and, indeed, every individual believer. I consider such things as practicing God’s presence. One could profitably explore this question from the perspective of worship. Practical service is another area to be thought about. Our churches should capture the imagination, but in so many instances this is just not happening. Yet another path of consideration is that of effective spiritual formation which is connected to a second strand of thought to which I was led by Shideler.
The Limitations of Information Transfer for Spiritual Formation
If we cannot think accurately about God unless we experience Him in our story and think about him in mythopoeic-like ways, then the process of spiritual maturation must encompass something more than mere information transfer. That something more is needed than mere instruction is evident from the New Testament documents, particularly when we look at Jesus and Paul. Of Jesus, Mark notes,
And He appointed twelve, so that they would be with Him
Mark 3:14a (emphasis mine, all Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible unless otherwise noted)
Others recognized the significance of the fact that Jesus’ followers were with Him.
Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.
Acts 4:13 (emphasis mine)
Jesus provided his disciples with experiences of Himself. He gave them a great gift of incalculable significance: His life with their lives.
Similarly, Paul also reminded his followers of their experience of him.
For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you, nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with labor and hardship we kept working night and day so that we would not be a burden to any of you; not because we do not have the right to this, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you, so that you would follow our example.
2 Thessalonians 3:7-9
Therefore I exhort you, be imitators of me.
For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church.
1 Corinthians 4:16,17
Join with others in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you.
Philippians 3:17 (The New International Version)
You also became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit,
1 Thessalonians 1:6
Jesus and Paul became a part of their disciples’ story and presented their own lives as examples to capture their disciples’ imagination!
Yet certainly Jesus and Paul provided life-transforming information to their disciples as well. This leads me to a third thought that Shideler stimulated.
The Need for Balance in Considering Postmodern Critiques of a Modernized Evangelicalism
Shideler had some great comments on the balance of the imagination and
reason:
Among other comments:
"Consequently, we leap too quickly into philosophical and scientific
dissection or in reaction against our unbalanced education, we abandon
ourselves too readily among the teeming images."
and I loved
"The unleashed power of water, wind, fire, or any of the elementals in
nature, is a terrible and sometimes a beautiful thing, and so is the
unleashing of the human unconscious. But what beauty there is in floods and hurricanes and earthquakes and the frenzies of mankind lasts only for an instant, and the havoc they produce is enduring. At the same time, it must be said that the walls which divide the consciousness and unconsciousness are sometimes so thick and high that we feel as if they cannot be penetrated by less drastic means....
Technically, extremism manifests the sin of sloth, and it results in
despair-not as a divine punishment, but as the inevitable consequence of
taking a road that is literally a dead end. The tyranny of unconscious
images is no improvement over the tyranny of abstract ideas. Neither the
rampaging flood nor the elegantly engineered water channels are sufficient
for enabling the desert to blossom like the rose, or to produce food. If
only the deluge can be directed, controlled, disciplined, and if only the
dry water courses can be filled . . . ."
As has been mentioned elsewhere, Brian McLaren has noted (and perhaps a bit too optimistically when considered as analysis but hopefully when considered as suggestion) that postmodernism is not amodernism but includes and builds upon modernism. Similarly, if postmodernity celebrates the imagination, our exultant joy in rediscovering what had been lost must not lead us to abandon the reason that modernity enshrines. In spiritual formation terms, our recovery from the addiction to information transfer as the omnicompetent modality of spiritual transformation does not invalidate the necessity of information transfer. Balance is what is needed.
A helpful article!
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