N.T. Wright on Imagination

This is a response to N.T. Wright's lecture entitled "The Bible and a Christian Imagination" given at Seattle Pacific University in 2005. A transcript of the lecture can be found here; I'd recommend looking it over before continuing: http://www.spu.edu/depts/uc/response/summer2k5/features/imagination.asp

This lecture deserves to be taken very seriously by the Christian community in America today; Wright's insight is inspiring and his pointers are spot-on. His beginning distiction between beauty and ugliness is profound. The world is indeed a mixture of dark and light, a vital fact that is often overlooked by art which exagerrates one or the other--thus following nihilism, secular humanism, Disney princessism, and Clint Eastwood action-filmism. The realization that the world is a mixture should have profound impact on Christian views of the arts. First, comfortable, middle-class Christians of America need to become less attached to "purity" and more aware of the quiet desperation staggering on just miles from their suburbia. This is essential for many reasons, but certainly for an honest engagement with the arts. Christian qualms about R-rated movies, for example, need to meet the reality of R-rated horrors both within the Sacred Book and without on the scarlet block. R-rated movies simply make Christians feel uncomfortable, yet this uncomfortability is precisely a challenge to empathy with those whose lives reflect the horrors on screen. Christians need to realize that their call to engagement will not allow for a comfortability that denies the ugliness of this present age. At the same time, Christians need to embrace beauty and especially create beauty. A movie like Avatar, no matter how pantheistic, should be embraced by Christians as a brilliant picture of a living earth, the kind of earth whose rocks can sing out praises to God. This evokation of the beauty of nature, and the envisionment of future beauty and glory, is the resounding call of Romans 8:18-22. If anyone should be caught up in the vision of a beautiful world, it should be Christians (Rev. 21).

This is why the arts, as Wright noted, are not accidental but are essential to the Christian community. Art provides the fuel for imagination, an imago Dei task which brings future realities into the present following the precedent of the Resurrection and the sacraments. Art is indeed sacramental in this sense; it allows for joinment with the Spirit in a hopeful, awefilled vision for new creation and the tangible concreting of new creation in present creation. Art, again like sacrament, takes it cues from the Bible. As Wright said, Scripture kindles imagination which kindles worship. Art allows for a new perspective on the present, a transfiguration of the ordinary if you will, bringing a spiritual dimension to the incompletely-beautiful material--which is the essential sacramental task. All of this then leads to worship, a full-bodied and resounding shout of praise which joins with the chorus of creation to extol our common God!

Finally, Wright's point that the resurrected Jesus meets us where we are is central to the imaginative task of art. The present scene of Christian art is fragmented, split between the fully-involved engagers who properly see many conservative suspicions of art as irrelevant and the conservative suspicious who see art as dangerous and impure. This is a point where dialog must enter. To many Christians, a movie must make it past a content-checklist, a desire which arises out of valid concerns. To other Christians, any content-checklist is a missing-of-the-point, which is also a valid concern. Christiananswers.net/spotlight is an excellent example of such a dialog, where content is addressed tastefully but a full review of the artistic work itself is also offered. In all of this, the Christian artistic community must remember that Jesus meets everyone where they are, and thus neither be too quick to ignore content-concerns nor too slow to challenge traditional content-fears. There is a time and place for everything (Ecc. 3).

All of these thoughts I fear stray far from Wright's original piece and are presented much less-eloquently. Still, perhaps some good pointers may be attained here too. Ultimately, no blog can do justice to the rich possibilities of Christian imagination. You simply have to see it for yourself, and to do that we Christians need to start imagining.