Anabaptistica
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 56, No. 2 – Spring 2014
Managing Editor: Terry L. Wilder
Edited by Andrew Davison. Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2011. 167 pages. Paperback. $22.50.
The Enlightenment project of reducing knowledge to deductive reason and certain proofs has long been acknowledged to be a failure. It simply cannot achieve its aims. Still, there are those who continue to cling to its ways of thinking. The authors of Imaginative Apologetics contend that one of those adherents is the church both in its theology and its apologetics (3-8). They argue that the church needs to be freed from this false worldview and immersed in a new world view that utilizes a fuller account of reason.
This fuller account of reason involves the use of imagination as connected to reason, and as a means of arguing for God and theological truths. Reason, the authors contend, both knows and desires leading us to seek truth in many ways (xxv). As a result, the church should embrace the whole of reason and give an expansive view of what it means to be a human being (xxvii-xxviii). It must return to a more humble position of reaching out to the needs and desires of people. Apologetics should be both rational and attractive because human beings are more than cold intellect and we cannot convince others on purely rational grounds, only by being attractive and more persuasive (9-11).
Rationality begins within a community of people with presumptions/axioms in which people choose to have faith since all thought is done through prior commitments. These axioms not only guide how we think, but also are tested and changed. Since no way of thought has pride of place, the church invites people to see what its worldview and community is like and how it is better than other worldviews (13-17, 26-28). This is the point where imagination becomes important. Imagination helps to awaken people to their desire for absolute truth. By stoking the fires of imagination, the church can get people to reflect on their experiences of reality and the mysteries that it contains. People are stoked to think, make parallels, and establish meaning concerning reality that takes on a theological nature and gives them a sense of the divine because people desire to go beyond just the bare facts (31-45).
According to the authors, people would not have the necessary ingredients by which they can reason without imagination. Perception gives us data, imagination meaning, and reason truth to which people willfully assent (73-78). This imaginative apologetic, however, involves more than just argumentation. The church needs a healthy spiritual life that points to God and will cause people to take the gospel seriously (96). This apologetic should also be aware of the culture and speak to it using the culture’s hermeneutic. As a result, the culture will understand the gospel and see ways in which it truly yearns for God (112-25).
However, this approach to theology and apologetics has some serious issues. Though the authors reject the Enlightenment project, they take their view—the mechanics of rationality—as rationally foundational. All people reason in the manner they claim. As a result, their position on the mechanisms of epistemology takes pride of place, which is exactly opposite to what their argument asserts. If it does not take pride of place, then one can only judge it as being better than the alternatives, and how can he do that if all judgment takes place within the biased presuppositional confines of a worldview? One can only have an opinion as to what is the best explanation, not knowledge.
This view of apologetics also appears to be based in a phenomenological philosophy. Knowledge is more of a personal and/or communal enterprise than a grasping of reality as it is making imagination so important to rationality. Knowledge is not discovery of reality, but a construction of concepts that are cast onto reality in order to understand it. Such a philosophy raises a fundamental problem. If knowledge of reality is based on imaginative constructs filtered through the presuppositions of the community in which one lives, does he or any community really have true knowledge of reality? It does not appear so. No one has access to the way reality really is, only to their biased, communal conception. Such a philosophy inspires doubt and skepticism, not knowledge.
Further, why believe that rational thought requires imagination? What does one imagine when he deduces that 2+2=4 or infers that A causes B or judges that one explanation is better than another? It seems perfectly possible that a person can make rational deductive, inductive, and abductive inferences without imagining anything, and simply because a person(s) develops a word, concept, or model to explain his perception of reality does not indicate that imagination is involved. It is not obvious what place imagination has in reasoning if it has a place at all.
Lastly, this view of apologetics also fails to take seriously the problems that sin throws into the epistemological mix. If all human beings are sinners, then we should not expect either our imaginations or our cultural hermeneutics to be reliable guides to the truth. We also cannot expect to utilize other cultural hermeneutics to present theological truths since some hermeneutics will not be compatible with those truths. As a result, it is not evident how an imaginative apologetic is useful in a fallen world.
