The Evangelical Imagination

Summary: An exploration of how images and metaphors influence Evangelical thought (or don't.)

The Evangelical Imagination is the fourth of Karen Swallow Prior's books I have read over the past 11 years, the sixth if you include the two classics in which she wrote the introduction. I have been in a private Facebook group and “friends” on social media for most of that time. I looked back, and basically, this is what I said to introduce the last books of hers that I read.

Part of what I appreciate about Karen's writing is that her writing is personal. She is not just writing abstract “Christian Living” books, theology, or literary criticism; she is a character in the story she shares as she is writing theology, literary criticism, and moral formation. In large part, her work explores virtue, and she uses her work as a literature professor to give tools to that exploration.

I could write a thousand words discussing Prior's past decade and the struggles she has been through, from very personal harassment by leaders within her denomination to leaving two jobs as a professor to literally being hit by a bus. (I understand everyone must include that line in a review of her work or an introduction to her in an interview.) I hope she will write a memoir sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, and I want people to read about The Evangelical Imagination, not my outsider's perspective of her life.

Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind will be 30 years old next year, and that is the book I think many will bring up as they discuss the Evangelical Imagination. Noll raised the question about whether there really was an Evangelical Mind and speculated about what it would take for proper attention to be paid to the life of the mind for the Evangelical. It was a book that almost everyone that wants to grapple with evangelicalism needs to have read. It is an important book, but James KA Smith's work has indirectly questioned Noll's thesis. It is not so much that Smith disagrees with Noll's assessment but that Smith is raising questions about what we should do because we are not simply “brains on a stick” but individuals with a more complicated relationship to our minds.

Prior is extending Smith's work and using Charles Taylor's idea of the Social Imaginary to explore how a stunted imagination impacts our ability to address what it means to think and see the world around us. We all know Abraham Maslow's quote, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This rough idea of the Christian Imagination was explored more than 20 years ago in Emerson and Smith's Divided by Faith. Emerson and Smith suggested that the reason Evangelicals cannot move past racial division is that their “toolkit” did not allow them to see the problem clearly but only through the lens of 1) freewill individualism, 2) relationalism, and 3) anti-structuralism. Smith and Emerson attempted to point out that the social imaginary of White Evangelicals impacted their ability to deal with race. Karen Swallow Prior is pointing out the social imaginary of Evangelicals more broadly and directly drawing parallels (for good and bad) to the Victorian age, where so much of the social imaginary of Evangelicals was developed. Most modern Evangelical do not know about those parallels and need someone to point them out.

As I was reading The Christian Imagination, I also listened to the audiobook of Mark Noll's recent history of the public use of the Bible, America's Book. In America's Book, Noll describes well how our imagination limits how we see the world with the example of slavery and the Bible.

In a word, what the Tappans, Grimké Weld, Cheever, Pennington, Douglass, and many others took from the Scriptures should have made proslavery advocates pause, since it came from the same divine authority they revered and interpreted with the same hermeneutical conventions they followed.

Proslavery, however, depicted all Bible-based antislavery as either dangerously liberal or outright heretical. Abolitionists like Albert Barnes and Daniel Goodwin insisted that they too honored the Scriptures. But when they drew on intuited truths from the moral sense to shape biblical interpretation, they seemed to their opponents to be doing self-consciously only what all abolitionists did un-wittingly-that is, abandoning the secure Word of God for heretical flights of egotistical presumption. (p 428, italics mine)

Wake up, dreamer, and open your eyesCome to belief, experience new lifeTell me, please where you have beenShow me the ways of the divine withinNo cabins in the woods, or pulling heart stringsThis is real life, made up of thingsA house, a home, husband and wifeAn empire looming large, full of strifeChange is happening, always reformingLike a thief in the night, the king is transforming

3.5 stars

Every chapter of this book was interesting and a lot of good food for thought. The last 3 chapters (Empire, Reformation, and Rapture) were the strongest for me and also the ones that landed the most punches as far as critique. It sometimes read more like a collection of related essays than a structured analysis of a “culture in crisis” with clear recommendations for action. I would like to have seen more of Prior's own synthesis and analysis as some of the chapters read more like a guided tour through a set of (good!) references with maybe a couple sentences of analysis/critique added at the end.