#172 | Transfigure Your Imagination, Pt. 2 | Malcolm Guite

The great thinkers of the past were saying was, no, you only think the world is grim because you're only using the eye of science and reason on it. But there's actually much more out there than you know. And that's where you need the eye of imagination.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having another one of our.

Deep conversations.

I like to go to the Art Institute whenever I get a chance. I like to walk around and do the art.

Not that I'm any art connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy looking at the detail of how artists painted a canvas or sculpted a block of marble. It really does amaze me.

And over the years, I've joined a variety of different Facebook groups of art and artists examining different paintings and sculptures. And the other day, I had one that came up that really struck me, and it was Michelangelo's Moses. It's so incredibly detailed.

There's one part that really amazes me, though, and some people have actually drawn this out. But if you look at the little finger on his right hand, you'll notice that some of the fingers are moving.

In a certain way. But if you look back down at.

His forearm, you'll see that there's this slightly elevated part of the arm that has this ripple in it. And it's interesting because it only happens when one of those little fingers is elevated.

I mean, the amount of detail in this sculpture is really phenomenal.

And I don't really know much all about art, but it is incredible to me because I think about what he saw when he looked at that block of marble and he saw Moses with me. I look at that block of marble, and I see a block of marble. And do you know what the difference is? It's simple, really. It's imagination.

Imagination is hugely important in our walk with Jesus, although I would dare to say that most of us don't think about it that way, because when we come to know Jesus, he actually baptizes our imagination with the truths and the imagery of who he is and how we see the world. Now, I know some of you are like, I don't really grab what you're talking about.

And I think that's because many of us haven't really utilized our imagination for the Kingdom of God. Because when we come to know Jesus, we don't see the world as chaotic any longer. We suddenly have this order.

And that's because our imagination begins to construct it. There's order, there's function. Today we're going to continue our conversation with British poet and priest Malcolm Gite.

If you didn't catch the last episode, I recommend you go back and listen to it first. And today we're going to actually go deeper into the imagination and why it's important.

Now, this is a very deep conversation, and if you're like me, I'm not familiar with poetry and art, but I know the imagination is of vital importance. And he takes us on a journey. As a matter of fact, I felt like I was snorkeling.

And he just grabs me by the collar, shoves a mask on my face with some. With some breathing apparatus and takes me way deep down. And I wasn't quite ready for the depth. And it was a challenge to me.

And I've had to go back and listen to the conversation to see if I really understand what he's saying. And the more that I meditate on it, the more that I look at what he was saying or listen to it, the more I'm.

I'm amazed because it's filled with possibilities of what the world is and could be. Allow me to talk about a little further.

He actually talks about a prophetic imagination, and not even just the imagination, but different aspects of the imagination.

A prophetic imagination is how we see the future, how the truth of God comes to bear upon us, or the moral imagination, how we decide we are going to, in essence, sculpt our life in our modern culture in a way that points to Jesus. Or how even art can capture our imagination to communicate meaning that we can't necessarily understand in propositional truth.

If I could give a quick illustration on that, it would be like looking at a sunset, right?

And you might have someone with you, and you say, oh, it's beautiful, or it's grand or it's spectacular, but none of those words are able to capture how it actually makes you feel. See, that's the imagination at work there. It's helping you to see and discern something.

And you may not have the words for it, but it helps you dream. It creates in you a longing.

And see, all of this different understanding of imagination permeates into various aspects of our lives, and we need to be able to grab ahold of that and create a longing for who God is so that others might want to know who he is. Think about JRR Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings.

I mean, he creates this world in his imagination that really points to the reality and the exclusivity of Jesus. See, that's the imagination at work. Now this is a conversation where we learn about different aspects of the imagination, as I already alluded to.

And Malcolm Guy brings in other figures who will act as guides from history. Now, some names we recogn like Shakespeare or C.S. lewis, but others we may not be as familiar with, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He refers to him quite a bit. I know that I had seen the name in passing somewhere when I was reading, but I didn't really know much about him.

And after some sleuthing I learned that he was a theologian, poet and philosopher as well as literary critic who lived in Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And he's a poet that Guy is particularly fond of and was actually quite profound. And he's going to be referring to him in this conversation.

And this conversation is going to challenge you, but it's also going to enlighten you. And if you're not used to poetry, don't bail out. Stay in. Because he is sure to awaken your mind and your imagination to the truth of who Jesus is.

It is a deep conversation, but one that is necessary for a paradigm shift in the way we do ministry in a world that is increasingly hostile to the Gospel. And if you're like us, you're looking for a paradigm shift. The problem is, is that we don't like fixes that require us to think.

We want things that are quick and easy. And that's not how it works because these things are complex things.

The truth is simple, but sometimes communicating that truth is a process that can be quite complex. And if you are like us, you're longing for something more.

And as you're going to hear in this episode, if it rings true with you, then join us in this endeavor because we can't do it without your help. We need watering partners who can help us in this paradigm shift, difference makers who are willing to go against the current of the status quo.

And if that's you, just click the link in the show notes, select the amount that works for you, whether it's a one time gift or a monthly watering partner. And know that by doing so you're joining a movement to water thirsty souls and renew the church wherever it's found.

Now let's get to my conversation with Malcolm Guy. Happy listening.

Let's talk about imagination, because I did Read your book, Lifting the Veil. Imagination, the Kingdom of God. And why is it so important for us to even cultivate and talk of this imagination?

I think we have to begin by clearing up a common misunderstanding. Because we use the word imaginary to mean something completely made up and not the case.

We can sometimes think if people talk about imagination or, as Keats said, the truth of imagination, they think we're just wishfully thinking that stuff we make up might be true. And that's not what we're doing. We just have to say that at the outset.

Now, once we've said that, we can then say, but isn't it interesting how in a play or a story or a piece of art or music, you get a form or shape or a pattern which suddenly allows you to understand and realize and be moved by all kinds of really true things? You know, the story of War and Peace or Les Miserables or Hamlet or anything, you know, might be made up stories.

But everybody who's been there in the way some of those characters speak, everybody's felt, at least at some part, you know, what Hamlet felt when he said, to be or not to be. That is the question. You know, everybody knows what it is to love someone and lose them. And when.

When Hamlet says to Ophelia, nymph, in thy horizons be all my sins remembered. Okay, there isn't a person actually called Hamlet.

But that moment of bitterness and parting and confusion when suddenly, out of nowhere, Hamlet the doubter asks for his ex girlfriend's prayers. That's real. Yeah. And so. So we notice that there's all kinds of truth going on in. In manner.

But then Coleridge and others notice that, in fact, if you think about the senses, you know, the materialist picture is that all the data, if you like, all the streams of, you know, sensation come in through the windows of the eyes and the.

And the vibrations of the ears are somehow printed on us kind of as they are, as though we were, as the old people said, a tablet, rather a blank table. Now, serious thinkers began to realize that couldn't possibly be the case because.

Or it couldn't be just that, because you've got to make sense of the stream of information that's coming in. I don't like using computer analogies. They're limited. But to use one briefly, you're being asked to process millions of bits of data all the time.

But how do you turn that into knowledge?

How, out of all that stream of stuff, do you shape a human face or see a star or make a distinction or see perspective or judge between appearance and reality. All those are active powers of the consciousness or the soul.

And Coleridge in particular thought the imagination as a creative power that's able to make beautiful links and see connections and think up metaphors, was the power in the soul which took the raw sense data and actually actively, imaginatively helped to shape a proper sense of what's there and of how it coheres and what its significance is.

Now, the great breakthrough for Coleridge, I mean, I don't know how deep you want to get into the philosophy of this, but you may know that there were two kinds of dualism at work in the so called Enlightenment. One was Cartesian dualism, where Descartes had said there are only two categories of existence.

There's res extensor, which is all that stuff out there that has dimension and shape and that's just dead matter. So he said, I mean, he was wrong, but as he said, and then he said there's res cogitans thinking stuff.

And he thought thinking stuff was non material and that we had it and God had it and angels had it, but otherwise it didn't exist. So there was pure material which had no purpose or meaning. And then there were our minds and God's mind and angels minds.

And of course the next generation said, well, why do we need God and the angels? They're not making any difference to anything. Let's jettison them.

And then a couple of generations later said, well, maybe we haven't got minds, maybe it's all just chemical, it's all challenged. That was one dualism, right? But there was another dualism about how we know. And the great propounder of that was the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

And Immanuel Kant pointed out that everything we see, what he calls the phenomena, the appearances, are appearances that are mind shapes.

But what is actually out there in its raw state, if you like, unshaped by the perceiving mind and the particular set of lenses ground in the way they are that we happen to have, as opposed to being, say, insect. He said, we can never know what the real thing is out there. We can only know what we perceive.

And he made distinction between phenomena, which is what we think of as the world, and new omena, which is what might really be there. And that's a. It's a hell of a chasm to live with, you know. So we had these two big splits, you know.

Now Coleridge wasn't happy with either split, but the Kantian one, he said, Kant's got a point.

There must Be something in us that deals with the data, discerns its meaning, finds out which are the significant bits, puts them together, perceives beauty, perceives the sublime time that's not passive, that's not like a piece of photographic paper doing that. There's something more going on. But Coleridge said, actually this is a kind of primary imagination.

But the great breakthrough for Coleridge was when he was thinking these thoughts and then finally getting around to rereading the Gospels and reading particularly the prologue to John's Gospel. That in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were made from that.

There's this mind in God, this Logos in whom and through whom and with him all things are made. And then, of course, John says that he is the light and light that is the life of man.

And then he says he's the light that lightens everyone that comes into the world.

Because as he reads later in Genesis, and of course, John is partly a riff on Genesis, it begins with the same words, as you know, because we are made in the imago DEI in the image of God. So Coleridge began to wonder whether this inner deep power of imagination was part of the image of God in us.

But he says, the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Then he goes on to say, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite, I am just at the moment, because eternal is a very important word. The act of creation is eternal in the sense that it's not part of a temporal sequence. He got this from Augustine.

You may remember, famously in Augustine's Confessions, towards the end of the book, he has, like a meditation on Genesis, and he reads these beginnings. This is the beginning of Genesis. He says, in the beginning, in Principios, it would have been in his Latin text.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth, and the earth was out, form and void. So Augustine says, well, what does this word beginning mean if it's prior to creation?

Because surely time itself is a created thing, as he says, anticipating Einstein. Augustine says, God did not make the world in time, but with time, creates time and space in order that there should be a world.

So strictly speaking, the act of creation is not in the order of time. It's eternal. Now, the order of time has beginning, middle, and end. So there was a.

There's a beginning, whether it's a big bang or whatever you want to think it was, which is also the beginning of time. But the true beginning is in God, who is eternal.

And in that sense, you and I, right now on this zoom call, are as close to the eternal act of creation as, you know, the first star or the first human beings. Because eternity is. Is. Is. Is equally related to every point of time. As C.S.

lewis says in the Screwtape letters, the present moment is the point where time touches eternity. The presence is all lit up with golden rays. So the eternal act, from our point of view, is always going on.

Now, what Coleridge is saying, I think, and this is mind blowing, is that there's something of God, a reflection of God, because we're made in his image, in our perceiving and shaping imagination as we make sense of the world, which is actually reverberating with and connected to God's beautiful and loving act of speaking it into being and making it in the first place.

And that's why Coleridge said that the Newtonian image of the world as a mechanical thing operating by laws and like a piece of clockwork, and God is a creator who kind of created the watch or the clock and wound it up and is now retired to an infinite distance, you know, paring his fingernails while the world runs down. That's deism. That's not theism. It's not even remotely Christianity. But he said that's just a false image.

He says, if we want an analogy, but the relationship between creator and creation and us as perceivers, glad perceivers in praise of the beauty of creation, then he says, it's much more like a text. In fact, that's what the Gospel says. Genesis says, he said, let there be light, and there was light. It's utterance.

John says, you know, in the word all things were made. So that at least invites us to make an analogy. And Coleridge uses the analogy of poetry.

He says, when a poet writes a poem, of course it has to have a physicality. It exists as a text on a printed page, but the page by itself, flat in the book, unread, is not actually a poem.

It's a series of squiggles and black marks. The poem only shimmers into being as a poem.

When the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader meet through the reader's discerning the meaning and beauty of the images in the poem. Then the poem, if you like, shimmers into being as these two imaginations meet.

Now, of course, the mind of the reader is guided by the mind of the poet who's made the poem. But the mind of the reader has to be active and imaginative to get the poem.

So what Coleridge thought was that God's gift of primary imagination in all of us allows us to perceive his world. But he thought that since the Enlightenment we had actually created. We're not reading God's poem when we're fashioning an idol of our own.

We've got this fantasy that it's a piece of clockwork or a computer mechanism which has neither philosophical nor scriptural foundations.

Instead of letting it be what it is, the second book, as it were, of God that He's given us, his book in the scriptures and he's spoken his word into the world. So I found all that as I began to read it in my early years as a Christian, you know, hugely exciting. And I still find it hugely exciting now.

Coleridge goes on to say that what we think of as the imagination, like the creative imagination, the poetic imagination, the imagination that let him write the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or let. Let. Let Shakespeare write Hamlet or, you know, he thought that was like the primary imagination in that it was really creative.

And Tolkien went on to speak of it as sub creation. And that it was a special privilege of us among the creatures of God that like our Maker, we too could be makers.

And that if we were to make well with a kind of baptized imagination, deeply reading what God has already given us, we could make beautiful and lasting things which might themselves embody truth.

And one of the things that I suppose I've particularly done when I was excitedly rereading the whole works of Shakespeare in light of my new Christian faith, I or re remembering them, I knew a lot of them anyway.

But I was so excited when I read the beautiful passage about poetry in A Midsummer Night's Dream where you get this description of poetry, you may remember it's very famous where Shakespeare says through one of the characters, it's actually through a character who doesn't like poetry. So he gives the best lines to a kind of hostile witness.

But anyway, Theseus in Midsummer Night's Dream, says the poet's eye and find frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name. And that little speech is prelude. Press is framed both before and after by sentences which talk about two ways of knowing, apprehend and comprehend.

Earlier, before that description, the character says that imagination apprehends more than cool reason ever comprehends. Later on, he says, if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy.

So I began to think there's something beautiful going on between this.

Heaven, earth, earth, heaven, apprehend, comprehend the idea that it's something that's really true, but you can't get it because you haven't got a form or a shape for it. But imagination bodies forth the forms and things unknown.

It gives to what is real but unknowable, a knowable and lovable and holdable and nameable form. So I got that far before my conversion.

But when I reread that passage as a Christian, you know, a little more deeply soaked in the Scriptures, I was saying, what does this remind me of? This whole kind of earth haven't heard. Heaven, earth, apprehend, comprehend invisible, visible. And right in the middle of it is this.

Bodies forth and local habitation and a name. And I suddenly thought, oh, my goodness, this is exactly like the prologue to John's Gospel.

Because you remember in John's Gospel it goes, you know, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the same was with God, and all things were made through. And you read it and you know, there's some. This is terrific. Truth and philosophy and wisdom and mystery. But you can't see it, can you?

Kind of the words just going around like that in the top of your head. And then finally you get to verse 14 and it says, and the Word was made flesh, bodied forth, made flesh and dwelt among us.

And we beheld, we actually saw in this world with our eyes in bodily form. We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And I suddenly thought, now that's astonishing.

I think Shakespeare has framed the account of his art in which all the possible meanings which we could never quite get coalesce and are given a body in the form of the story or the play or the poet. And then we can comprehend them, we can enter into them. But maybe we can only do that because God the maker.

And you know that the Greek word for to make in that in John's Gospel is poyain. It's the word we get poet from. You know, he could say he Poet. And everything was poet. That was poet. And without his poetry, there was no poet.

You know, be another way to translate it.

So what if God, the supreme being and the meaning of all things, looks at his creation and says, if I stay up here disembodied and wordless, you're never going to get this. What if I was to take the whole of heaven, the very heart of my love, the.

The very core of who I am, that I want to communicate to you and body it forth, make it flesh in a person, all of me, for all of you. But now with a shape and a name and of course a local habitation.

I mean, the first question, I mean, Shakespeare would be working with both Latin and English Bibles. The first question of the disciples to Jesus in John's Gospel is, master, where are you staying?

I mean, magister UBI habitats, where's your habitation? And of course, John has that partly because he's riffing on Genesis. And the first question from God to human beings in Genesis is, where are you?

You know, we were hiding from God. We've always been hiding from God. And then we made this stupid idea that God was really hiding from us.

And they had this idea that Deus absconded to us, that God is not there. And God said, no, no, let me make this clear. You, the guys are hiding and I'm going to come. But if you want to say, where are you? Here I am.

And of course, before Abraham was, I am, you know, the infinite home.

So I began to see a parallel between the best account of poetry by the greatest poet and the most glory account of creation in the, you know, in the most mystical gospel and realize they were really talking about the same thing and that perhaps we can be creative and we can trust our creative imagination because we have a God who creatively and poetically bodied forth all of heaven in the body and person of Jesus.

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Even when I was reading your book, there was so much underneath the surface of every poet that you mentioned. Everyone talking about a Christian imagination, how to think this through. It took me a bit because I'm not used to thinking in those ways.

It was a challenge.

At the same time, I would stop and I would think of it and I would meditate further, trying to go deeper, trying to understand this idea of the Christian imagination and why we needed to cultivate a Christian imagination. And I realized we don't like to think very often anymore, and especially when it comes to matters like poetry.

We do like things like movies and that aspect of art.

But you're taking us into this journey, as you say, imagination and the Kingdom of God kind of rethink, reimagining what we understand about who God is, how he's working in the world. Why is that important right now in our cultural moment?

Yeah, so of course. Of course you can.

I mean, the first thing to say is that I've spent a lot of time and, you know, attention and prayer thinking about how the imagination works and why we can trust it and how it relates to the Gospel, because somebody should do that, and I happen to be the guy that's doing it. But you don't have to do all of that in order to enjoy and be blessed by a great piece of art. The thing itself is doing its work and blessing you.

And every time you go back into that art or that painting or that music or that poem, it'll have a little bit more to offer. And that's a beautiful thing.

But Christians in particular, I'm writing the way I am partly because historically, from the Reformation onwards, among some of the Protestant churches, there has been a distrust or a mistrust of the imagination and the arts, which is partly. Actually a kind of almost.

It's an almost accidental byproduct of a separate discussion about images and idolatry and the whole discussion about statues of saints and all of that stuff. I mean, that was a proper discussion to have.

And there may have been some places and Some conditions in which people were worshiping sticks and stones when they should have been worshiping the Lord. That may. I mean, that's a separate discussion, but.

But somehow the kind of spillover from that, instead of just suspecting a situation where a person didn't understand that a statue was a representation and that the reality was beyond the statue.

The kind of discussion Paul had in athens in Acts 17, where he says, he whom you worship without knowing, I preach, you're really already onto the beginnings of God, but he doesn't live in statues.

That kind of discussion spilled over into a general suspicion on the part of Protestants in general and Calvinists in particular, of all the imaginative and creative arts.

And yet the imaginative and creative arts have been used historically by the church and obviously throughout the Scriptures beautifully to glorify God. I felt that we. The time had come. And I'm not the only person. Lots of other people, Jeremy Begbie and.

And, you know, Paul Fidders and all kinds of writers in the last 20 or 30 years have said, can we, as fairly thoroughgoing orthodox Christians, you know, I'm a trinitarian, and I believe that the death and the resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened and makes all the difference in the world. Okay? Those of us who are, in that sense fully, you know, believing Christians who think there is a place for the arts and who thinks there's.

There's been a false divorce between reason and imagination and a false split and a kind of dissing of the arts as though they were only private, subjective, and possibly dangerous things that we need to defend them. And we need to defend them in fully, thoroughly thought through, philosophically sound orthodox Christian terms.

Now, I do, you know, there's a bit of me that I. That I mean, I do that in academic books as well, like faith, open poetry, you know, I kind of do that.

So you don't have to, but you can rely on the fact that somebody's done that thinking.

But when I wrote Lifting the Veil, I decided to take the core of what I was saying there and try and make it available, particularly to Christian artists or to pastors who have artists in their church, to try and give a good theological grounding to a proper Christian use of a baptized imagination. That's really what I'm trying to do in that book.

And I'm trying to inspire and encourage a rising generation of creatives, as you call them in America. It's extraordinary American habit of taking adjectives like creative and turning them into nouns. Unnecessary.

But anyway, let us use the term creatives I realize they're all out there, some of them.

I mean, Christian artists are in a very difficult position because on the one hand, they can be in churches that suspect them because they don't know what the arts are or what to make of them. And historically, they've got this baggage about images and idols and all that sort of nonsense. So they're kind of on the edge in their church.

And then when they go into the world, you know, the wonderful, you know, bohemian avant garde world of artists, they're totally on the edge there because they're Christians and everybody else is, you know, some kind of, you know, anarcho nihilist, you know. So these poor people are actually in a place in between now, actually, as it happens, that's a brilliantly creative place to be.

And from that place, they can both renew the church and convert the pagan artists, if they do it right.

And that's what, you know, great artists, visual artists like Makoto Fujimura, for example, and his whole idea of culture, care and so on, that's where all that is coming from. That's where a journal like image is coming from.

He's trying to support the artist who is, as it were, trapped between two margins, but actually also in this beautiful place between two margins where great change and creativity can happen. And I hope my book Lifting the Veil is a contribution to that. Watch my mind.

Bend and break.

Now.

Say it Even face.

Just need some pain.

But I think I reach the ending of the night Go and that.

Light through.

It Is interesting to me.

As I was reading the book, talking about the imagination and the kingdom of God, There has been a growth in the literature, as you mentioned, your friend Jeremy Begbie, in his book Beholding the Glory, he talks about that. And I remember, I think it was him that was talking about there were two between the Protestants and Catholics, talking about examining film.

It may not have been him. Might have been that series that Zonderba did on cultural exegesis, Beholding the Glory.

He edited it and didn't show. But it's a collection of essays by a number of different. I wrote the one on literature in there, but there is one on film and there's one on.

And that. That was a great book because it.

It took one doctrine, the doctrine of the inclination, and said, how can we look at that through the eyes of artists? Because what.

One of the things that Jeremy says is not only that churches should support artists, but that the arts are one of the media through which we can do good theology, that we should do Theology through the arts that we shouldn't. It's not a case of a theologian sitting and thinking syllogisms in their study.

And then maybe if you're lucky, they raid the world of the arts for a quick illustration which has no actual effect on their thought.

On the contrary, you want to take a great art like poetry and take a passage of poetry about poetry, like the passage from Shakespeare I quoted and say, what does that do for my theology?

How can I bring that back to help me reimagine perhaps an over familiar piece of theology and suddenly see it in a tremendously new and exciting light? That's what the arts can do.

I mean, people who do music or painting or song about rivers or the wind or fire are all providing something wonderful and rich for anybody who wants to do a theology of the Holy Spirit. Because those are the three chief biblical images of the Holy Spirit.

And the more an artist helps us to delight in and see what a stream or a blowing wind is, the more we will know about the Holy Spirit. You know, that's why I think Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is a great poem about the Holy Spirit.

Even though Shelley would not have said he believed in the Holy Spirit. But the poet Shelley knew better than the atheist Shelley.

Somewhere in my head I'm still a white knight flying across the plains into my last fight. Somewhere in my head I'm still a hero. Work my way back up from pretty much nothing. This is not that game with the bowling pins.

We used to just fight for our lives. And if you die young and are born again, please tell someone why.

When you're talking about cultivating a Christian imagination, how has the Christian imagination been impeded in our contemporary cultural moment?

Well, I think it's been attacked from two sides as it were.

One of the big divisions in the whole of modern thought since the Enlightenment, which springs from Descartes dualism between the peculiar non material stuff that's in here and all the actual physical, mechanical workings of the world out there. Res cogitans res extensa, right?

One consequence of that it wasn't something that Descartes intended, but it happened, was that we got this split between so called objective truth and mere subjectivity, right? And the arts.

I'm talking about general philosophy of the world now I'm not talking about Christians in particular, but the arts got relegated to this mere subjectivity. It was all touchy feely inner stuff, but it didn't make any difference to how atoms work or do you know what I mean? It was. So it was kind of a.

Like a. Like a sort of bit of just compensatory fantasy for the grimness of the world, but didn't affect the fact that the world was grim. Right.

Whereas, of course, what people like Coleridge and, you know, the great thinkers of the past were saying was, no, you only think the world is grim because you're only using the eye of science and reason on it. But there's actually much more out there than you know, and that's why you need the eye of imagination. I mean, C.S.

lewis put it brilliantly in one of his later essays called Oddly Blue Spells and Flalin Spheres. But anyway, in the essay he says, reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.

And because we downgraded the imagination, we have lots of information but no meaning. And then when an artist comes up with some meaning, they say, well, that's just subjective. So there's that split.

That's one thing that has put the imagination and the work of imaginative artists in peril and marginalized it.

And then, as I say, you get, as an added complication, you get this historical baggage going back to the Reformation and extreme Calvinist reactions to extreme Catholicism, where that somehow has got overlaid on the imagination debate and got mixed up with vain imaginations or images or idols or whatever, you know, which is really not relevant to it.

I mean, people don't go to a film and bow down, you know, they don't listen to a piece of music and say, I'm actually going to devote my life to that B flat major chord, you know, they don't do that. They say, something beautiful came to me through it. They always say through it. They always use the language of the icon rather than the idol.

I don't think there's a danger of idolatry except in certain kinds of very obvious Hollywood films, you know, and the whole cult of the Hollywood star. I think there's genuine danger of idolatry there, but I think that's a separate issue. I'm talking about the great arts.

What I think we have to do now is, at the moment, many arts are flourishing, but they're flourishing in a kind of cultural apartheid, a kind of separate development where we cede to science all the stuff that really makes a difference. Science and economics are actually in charge of the world.

And then we say, well, if you've got a bit of time off and you've got nothing better to do, go to a museum or an art gallery. But that's not about what the world is, that's the split we have.

And as long as we do that, then art is going to be seen as a self indulgent luxury rather than a necessity. But actually for the deepest things of being human, it's a necessity and we need to bring it back.

It all goes back to what Jesus said, of course, when he gives us the two great commandments, you know, and the first is this, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind. Now, somewhere in that all between soul and mind, part of both is your imagination.

The whole of your imaginative and creative capacity is naturally to be drawn forth and used in loving God. And the second is like, namely this, love your neighbor as yourself.

Now, when I think he says the second is like, I think he also means that you need all those capacities, heart, mind, soul, strength, to do any decent loving of another person. And I think artists involve themselves very strongly in loving their neighbours. I mean, when the great.

When Picasso painted that extraordinary painting Guernica, which is an astonishing and revolutionary piece of art, it was also a cry of horror at what human beings do to each other.

And it was a prognostication and a prophecy of what was to come in the Second World War and a word of warning from a deep humanitarian to the rest of humanity, depicting the actual savagery we were unleashing on each other. That was an act of loving the neighbor as well, if you like, of loving God.

Lost track of the forest through the trees Forgot what I was chasing Spent so many nights living out at sea that my heart is gone baking Everybody was close to me all stayed on dry land so now I'm driving back on in the state west I just gotta feel something not gonna wait till the morning because something's gonna change my mind I don't wanna change my mind.

What is the difference then that you see in the cultural expression of Christian faith between the UK and the United States?

The orientation of the Christian must always be outward to the world and particularly to the person who hasn't yet found that faith. We have this beautiful thing to share and we can begin sharing it by serving our neighbors in all kinds of practical ways.

So one of the problems that I perceive in Christian art, I think I perceive this more in America than in England, I'm not quite sure, but is that when artists find a place in the church, it always ends up being serving the church.

It's like you share our belief, we're comfortable with you, so you can make nice art that helps us to feel the faith we already think we know and understand and isn't going to challenge us too much and it's just going to be a beautiful chorus for us to sing. Do you know what I mean? There's a kind of inward focusing of the art into the Christian community.

Now there's nothing wrong with writing poetry or other art to serve the Christian community. I do it myself. My book of poems, Sounding the Seasons is for the church and I'm glad to serve my fellow Christians.

And I know that those poems help people to express and to grow in their faith.

But I also hold the hope, which is why I write other books like my Singing bowl collection, which much more general picture that I might have a chance through my art to do for somebody else, even if it was just one other person. What George McDonald did for C.S.

lewis when he was a 16 year old atheist getting on that train and reading fantastes and feeling this bright, luminous, and he says he passed the frontier by his imagination was baptized by reading George MacDonald, who he didn't even know was a Christian, in a book which is not overtly a Christian at all, although it's a fantasy which is just resonant with Christian truth. Now I want to write right now I'm working on a long poetic renditioning, I hope beautiful retelling of all the King Arthur stories. And I want to do.

But I'm restoring the faith and the symbols of the faith, you know, where they've been excised by Hollywood.

And I'm, I'm trying to write something, I think that I hope lots of teenagers will love and read and before they know it, they've begun to glimpse a Christian worldview.

They begun to imagine before they can believe something of what this beautiful sacramental world would look like if we felt it was drenched with God's love and meaning and purpose and wasn't just a mere concatenation of atoms in the void.

You know, I'm trying to do that and I think Christians should encourage their artists to be outward facing and make art for the whole world and not just decorative arts for the church. And I think so that's the first thing.

But the second thing which is really exciting I think is that some of the greatest artists who are not Christian, when you get to talk to them personally and get them to just come out a little bit about what they think they're doing, it's amazing how close they are. I mean, I'll give you an example.

I was once invited to preach what's Called the varnishing sermon, which is a strange English tradition in London before the exhibition of the Royal Academy every year in the summer.

Unbelievably, all these atheist or shock outrage artists, the kind that, you know, all troop along makers lambs to St James's Piccadilly in here because it's. Because we've done it for 200 years, so why wouldn't we do it again, you know, and they get to hear a sermon.

And I preached this sermon once and I talked about exposure and the vulnerability of exposure because they were all about to go and unveil their art that was hanging for all to see and in which they'd put something of their heart and soul and who they are and they knew not what gaze hostile or mocking or. But something gave them the courage to do it. Something made them feel it was worthwhile to have it hang there for a while.

And then I just gently turned that to the end to the cross. I talked about God as the divine artist and this greatest thing he's ever done, everything bodied forth in his beautiful son.

And his son, just like one of these pictures is nailed up and just hangs there and he the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, is utterly exposed and defenseless. And yet in that exposed, defenseless is offering the world a radical reappraisal of everything it does. And that's the very thing these answers.

And two or three of these answers came up to me and said, you know, I've never thought a bit like that. I always thought this Christianity was this dumb religion from the childhood of mankind. But I know what that's like.

It makes me think about Jesus in a completely new way because it speaks into the thing. I know now that kind of thing can happen all the time.

And there's amazing, you know, it's amazing how kinds of all kinds of people you wouldn't think are a lot closer to Christianity than you think they are. If only they. There was somebody who loved and appreciated what they did and spoke to them from within that language.

Do you think there are. There is a movement of people trying to starting to see that?

Yeah, I think there is. I think. And I think they're.

I mean, the other really interesting thing that's happening is that in the most unexpected place of at all, which is people who, having rejected the faith, realize there's a kind of magic and enchantment and beauty in the world and have returned to the old paganism.

So kind of neo pagans and people who kind of go on long, you Know, treks in the wilderness or live in yurts or you know, do what people call tree hugging. I think there's nothing wrong with tree hugging. Anyway, quite a number of people from that world are curious enough coming to Christ.

I'm in long conversation at extraordinary guy called Martin Shaw, you know, has a huge sort of substack following in the kind of. And he's one of the great storytellers in the tradition of sort of Robert Bly and kind of Iron John.

And these, these old folktales are really about our inner life kind of thing. And he has quite literally been visited by Christ.

I mean, he had these dreams of a great stag coming in with its antlers, but with a cross coming in and wrecking his house. And then, you know, he felt a light coming from heaven and he, I mean is. He calls the mossy faced Christ.

He realized that the deepest truth he'd always been looking for unexpectedly was Christ himself in and through and loving his creation. And you know, he's been baptized now. And you know, then Paul Kingsnorth is another example.

There's all kinds of people who are kind of coming to faith because they've, they've looked deeply enough into something else to know what depths they are. And because also Christ is the fulfiller of things. You know, he is one greater than, greater than Solomon.

Greater than Solomon is here, but one greater than Apollo is here. One greater than Pan is here, but not less than Apollo and Pan. And people who loved Apollo or Pam can find all that was best in that in Christ.

As Paul says, he whom you worship without knowing he might preach. Now Paul could only say that because he said to the Athenians, men of Athens, as I walked through, I observed, I observed the objects of wish.

I see that you are very religious.

He whom you worship without knowing, he didn't say, you're a bunch of dirty pagans who aren't kosher, you know, so do you, Luke, tell us that's how he felt when he actually arrived at Athens. But he overcame that and he really looked and he really listened.

And he goes on to say, as you remember in that great speech in Acts, some of your own poets have said, we are his children. In him we live and move and have our being. That's pagan Greek poetry he's quoting there now.

I think there's beginning to be enough Christians with enough confidence in their faith to really know and love pagans and recognize that actually pagans are a lot closer to Christ than mere materialists. After all, the gospel was eventually spread through Europe in an entirely religiously active pagan world.

And in a sense, they had enough of the language to get it. And I rather rejoice in the fact that scientific materialism is collapsing on every side. Some people, when it collapses, become Christians.

Hallelujah. Some people become neo pagans. But that doesn't trouble me at all. I think that may be a proper stepping stage on the journey to faith.

In fact, there's a poem by C.S. lewis about exactly that called a cliche come out of its cage. The cliche being the world's gone back to paganism.

And basically that poem says, if only like that would be a way better starting place than where we are now. And I think that's starting to happen. It's the coldest hand the run down this land where the ocean lands.

It's a tallest sound the damp smallest crowd but their hearts break loud Far from ever feeling lost we know me. I'll push you back towards Atlanty. They going down for love and love is free.

Stick with me and I will guarantee you'll never last among the crowd with me.

When you go to be with Jesus, I mean, what do you hope to have accomplished?

It's difficult to say. I don't know. I don't know when we're with Jesus, whether we'll use the talk of having accomplished anything ourselves at all. I.

I think you know, so Paul planted Apollos watered, but you know, it is God who gives the growth.

I will hope that through some of the things I've said and done and conversations I've had that Christ himself will have sown some seeds in and through me. My friend the poet, the great Irish poet Michael o' Sheill, was once asked whether he thought his poetry sowed gospel seeds.

And he kind of almost shook back and said, oh, goodness me. He said, no.

He said, if you're referring to the parable of the sower, he said, I take it that Jesus is both the sower and the sown, that the word is both the one who sows and the seed that is sown. But he said, I noticed that that parable pays a great deal of attention to the soil and the kind and quality of the soil.

He says, what I hope my poetry or any arts do is it's like taking clumped up stony soil and putting in a griddle and shaking it about and getting the stones out.

He says, I hope at best my poetry may have jostled the soil of the imagination so that when the sower himself comes, and who is also the seed, it finds some good ground. And I think that's pretty much what I'd hope to say for myself as well, that I jostled the soil of the imagination.

But I think it's Jesus who makes Christians.

You've traveled both between North America and the uk. What are the differences that you've seen in the Christian expression?

Well, I mean, the most obvious one is that, is that as far as church going and public and Christian expression is concerned, America is the more Christian country, we're more secularized.

But paradoxically, because of the separation of state and church in America, America can officially seem more atheist, even though it's actually more full of thriving Christian communities. On the other hand, England can seem more Christian because our monarch is the head of the church and because we have chaplains in.

In universities and we have vicars going into schools, you know, so we have a little bit more of the remnants of Christendom.

And I think, you know, there's some ways maybe America could learn from that, but actually we could learn from America about being a lot more upfront and clear as Christians about our faith and happier to share it without embarrassment.

What do you think the future is of Christianity in the uk?

Well, at the moment, my own beloved denomination, the Church of England, is in numerical decline. My view about numerical decline is these things come and go, and Jesus started with 12.

So even if we're only down to 12 in England, that'll be enough to keep the kids about the whole thing again. So I'm not panicking. You know, I think revival will come, but I think it may be quite a long time coming.

And I think it may take forms that the present church doesn't recognize. We have a phrase that the church uses here, fresh expressions of church. And there may be some fresh expressions of church.

I think they're going to be more grounded. I think they're going to be more local.

I think they're going to be very much concerned with people having to be resilient and live together through the changes that are coming environmentally, if not anything else, you know, and I think we're going to have to return to a simpler and more closely communal way of living. And that's the very way of living in which Christianity spread through England in the first place. So I think that might be quite good for us.

Actually, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It's been a joy. I mean, there's so much that I don't even feel like we've touched the surface. I've watched Many of your videos, read your books.

I know we're not even skimming the top of all the things that, that you, that you've done. You know, what's a, What's a final thought that you can leave with our, our listeners based upon your book, you know, lifting the Veil.

I would say your imagination is part of the image of God in you now. Like all of us in the fall, it's shadowed. It has its dark side, but it must be brought back into the light and to Jesus.

We don't war against the imagination. We baptize and bring it in as part of the heart and soul and mind.

And if you want to strengthen and feed and develop your imagination, then get out there and love and enjoy the arts. Listen to music, hear great songs, read poems, read novels, make time for those things. And remember, that's not some private diversion.

That's about finding out how things really are.

When Mary breaks Bethany, breaks the precious jar of alabaster and pours it out over Jesus feet and Jesus and Judas, who's the classic cynic, you know, Oscar Wilde said, a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And he's just got the cash register going and saying, oh, 300 denarii, we could. Yeah, but what does.

Jesus says it's the only time in the gospel that he uses this word. He says, sure, she has done a beautiful thing, and wherever the gospel is preached, she will be remembered.

There's the artist, apparently wasteful, utterly devoted, doing this apparently useless and beautiful thing which moves Jesus to his very heart.

Malcolm, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. How can people learn more about what you're doing?

Well, you've mentioned the. I have this little YouTube called spell in the Library, which is just for fun. But I also have a blog which is.

I don't know, Malcolmguy.com would get it. It's a WordPress blog and I post fairly regularly on that.

If you subscribe to the email thing, that's free, of course, and you just get an email with what I post when I post it, and that's all I wanted. I don't do subsequently. I just want to make all that freely available.

I have a little thing where people say, hey, you could buy me a coffee or a cake, you know, page to do that, you know, so. But basically I try and put as much as I can out there. And of course all my books are there in shops or libraries.

Well, I know that I've encountered them and I particularly enjoy your YouTube videos. They're entertaining, they're fun, they're fun to watch, and they're fun to listen to, too.

But I really, again, it's easy to subscribe to those, and then you just get them. And you can ignore them if you want to, or you can sit and be entertained for 10 minutes.

And they are entertaining. They're very entertaining. So I just wanted to thank you for coming on. Apollo Swattered.

My pleasure.

That was a fascinating conversation. Fascinating. I'm still digesting it. It's been almost two months since I had the conversation with him.

I know the church has not always been particularly welcome to artists for all of the reasons that he talked about and more. I mean, think about this.

There was actually a book that was written several years ago where they documented the difference between Roman Catholic filmmakers and Protestant filmmakers.

And the Protestant filmmakers overwhelmingly focused on the dialogue, the conversation, whereas the Roman Catholic directors focused on symbolism and color and imagery. Now, we're not saying that we're to have just jettisoned text for imagery or focus on text and neglect imagery. No, we need both.

We need both of these. And this is where these artists come in, because.

And you can actually hear this in Malcolm's voice because you could catch the wonder as he told the story of what God has done in the world and about how the truth of the way God had created and works in the world sneaks into even not so Christian poets and playwrights, painters and provocateurs. God's story sneaks in because even the pagans feel the tug, the pull of God in creation, in beauty and longing, in anger, at injustice and in love.

These things are put in us by God. The imagination helps us to believe so that we can understand.

Honestly, I am still wrestling with the implications of some of the stuff that he said, what they mean for the way that we see the world and how we interact with our neighbors.

But it rings true to me, because when we reduce ourselves just to, you know, punching the clock, to being like a machine, then it's any wonder that we become dehumanized. And we've allowed science and economics to define our world and oftentimes our worth. But see, that can't give us meaning.

That can't show us really how we are important, because meaning isn't found in economics, isn't found in science. It just gives the facts.

Is it any wonder that we live in a world filled with anxiety and people trying to define themselves any which way they can, because they can't find meaning anywhere else? Because we have so divided God's good creation that we can't possibly imagine it whole.

You know, we talk about rethinking, reimagining and redeploying in the pursuit of Christ's mission in all of life. And in many ways, the task of reimagining might be the hardest of the three because we have so reduced the way that we see the world and God.

I mean, we have separated information from meaning. We have forgotten that at the end of the day, God is not information. He's a person. He became one of us to redeem us.

We at Apollos Watered are in the process of reimagining the church in Christ's mission right now. Not because Christ has changed, he hasn't. I mean, we still are confessional Christians who believe in the, the bumpers of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

But we also recognize that our landscape has changed. Not that God has, but the landscape has. Now we communicate the truth of God to. The landscape is a little different again.

This is why we have four gospels. This is why Paul walked around and he would speak in synagogues in one moment.

And then when he gets to the areopagus, he totally changes his tactic by speaking and finding a connecting point to where they are. You know, I am not sure, I mean, none of us are sure what the church was going to look like in 100 years if Jesus tarries.

But I'm pretty sure it's going to be quite different than what we see and imagine it as today or what we see it as today. The truth of Christ will not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever, and praise his name because of it.

But perhaps with a sanctified, restored imagination, it will be closer to to him than ever. That if we can help people to see that and grow in that, it will help the next generation and set up the generations after that.

And we want to help make that happen. And I hope you do too. I want to thank you for listening to today's show.

I also want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Waters Stay Watered. Everybody.

Sa.