LOVE GOD WITH ALL YOUR IMAGINATION

BY JOHN MCATEER

GOSPEL LESSON: Mark 12:28-34

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of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, Which commandment is the first of all? 29Jesus answered, The first is, Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. 32Then the scribe said to him, You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and besides him there is no other; 33and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love ones neighbor as oneself,this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices. 34When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God. After that no one dared to ask him any question. 1. INTRODUCTION Im a philosopher and a theologian, but my first love was filmmaking. I have a degree in filmmaking and worked briefly in Hollywood before going to grad school to study philosophy. Im here today to talk about the way media and pop culture the stuff we all engage with on a daily basis relate to our faith. My thesis is that art and entertainment provide us with the images and stories that frame our imaginative engagement with the world; hence they are deeply important for Christian spiritual formation. Ill conclude with some examples from recent Hollywood films and some practical advice for pop cultural consumption. 2. WORLDVIEW AND RELIGION Images and stories are more important than you might think. They make possible our interpretations of the world and our sense of self. Our lives are story-shaped, with a beginning a middle and an anticipated end the way we make meaning is by fitting events into a narrative context. Our language is full of metaphors even that sentence used the metaphor of fullness, which literally refers to a container. So the kinds of narratives and metaphors we have available to our imagination determine how we experience our selves and how we talk about and think about the world. Together they give us a worldview, a comprehensive framework for giving meaning to our experience.

2 Worldview is a fundamental component of religion. Ones worldview is ones set of assumptions about what is real, valuable, and possible. It can be expressed in a narrative (or meta-narrative) about where human beings came from, where we are now, and where were going. This narrative is embodied and sustained in certain practices and patterns of behavior (or liturgies in a broad sense), which are themselves embodied and sustained in a community. Thus: a worldview + a meta-narrative + a set of practices + a community = a religion. From this point of view, religion is necessary for having meaning in life. Human beings are inherently religious beings. Without a religion, you would have no way to understand who you are no sense of self and no basis for acting no values or goals. Even atheism is a kind of religion, a way of making sense of ones place in the world. This means that there is no neutral viewpoint on the world. Everything must be interpreted from some religious perspective, and every value judgment, every choice or action assumes some religious framework. If youre trying to be neutral between, say, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Atheism, you would have to try to take up some standpoint that set aside all particular claims to truth about God, the Bible, transcendence, etc. But that supposedly neutral standpoint would just be the atheistic standpoint that rejects all particular claims about God, the Bible, transcendence, etc. Any attempt to be neutral is functionally atheistic and is therefore biased in favor of one of the options. In other words, there is no such thing as religious neutrality. 3. POP CULTURE AS RELIGION Because there is no neutral perspective, all cultural texts by which I mean a set of symbols that generate meaning a football game, the mall, a TV show, a painting, a song embody some particular religious worldview. Any cultural text embodies certain assumptions about what is real, valuable, and possible; it locates itself in relation to some cosmic meta-narrative; it encourages certain behaviors and creates a kind of community. Football, for example, embodies assumptions about the human body, about competition, the value of strength, etc. The mall also embodies assumptions about the human body, about consumption, the value of choice, etc. Likewise for fashion, advertising, technology, and other pop cultural texts and TV shows, movies, songs, and other media texts. This means that pop cultural texts are not just entertainment, they are liturgical religious symbolic actions. They form our souls in some way, developing habits of thinking, feeling, acting, and imagining. Today Im focusing on imagining. Our reflections on the importance of metaphor and narrative suggest that one can only think, feel, and act within the confines of what one can imagine, what one thinks is real, valuable, and possible. Thus we are spiritually formed by our imaginative engagement with the world. Just as participating in the Christian liturgy transforms our souls and helps us develop habits of thinking, feeling, imagining and acting, so does participating in the secular liturgies of pop culture. And it is impossible to understand what is going on in any text without entering

3 into its imaginative viewpoint. Unless we read a text from its own viewpoint, we are not reading it at all but projecting our own ideas onto it. Thus partaking of pop culture is a liturgical act of embodied religious practice in which we enter into a particular religious viewpoint. In effect, we try on a worldview and narrate a particular story about our selves to ourselves. We become a different sort of person, developing habits of thinking, feeling, imagining and acting. This is the point that leads many conservatives to reject pop culture altogether or to withdraw themselves from secular culture into a specifically Christian pop culture. I think that is a mistake. To see why, lets return now to our Scripture from Mark 12. 4. THE FIRST COMMANDMENT AS INCLUSIVISM Jesus says the first commandment is Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Our affirmation that The Lord is one can be read as making a point about the exclusivity of God: there is only one God. But it can also be read as making a point about the unity of God: because there is only one God, then all the goodness, truth, and beauty in the world comes from the same God, not from the many gods taught by polytheistic cultures. In other words, this is an inclusivistic point. If there is only one God, we can appropriate all the goodness, truth, and beauty we find, regardless of its source in non-Christian art, philosophy, and religion. All truth is Gods truth. One of the best examples of this comes from Acts 17:22-27 when Paul is in Athens and appropriates the altar to the unknown god, naming it as a search for Christ:
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Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, To an unknown god. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find himthough indeed he is not far from each one of us. Because human beings are inherently religious because we need some sort of religion to give meaning and value to our lives and because there is only one God one true source of meaning and value the Athenians, like all human beings, have an innate sense of longing that points them towards God. St. Augustine says, God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. We all long to know the truth, to find genuine beauty and lasting goodness.

4 And, because there is only one God who created everything, including human beings, it doesnt seem likely that any community of human beings would be fooled into believing something completely false for any length of time. We were created to know God ,and the world was created to point us toward God. So, to believe that a religion was completely false, youd have to believe that the people who accept that religion had completely lost their God-given minds and were completely out of touch with the God-created world. Thus, it makes sense to think there would always be some truth in any religion. My evangelical friends get nervous about the idea of learning from other religions. They like to point out that Jesus is the way and no one comes to the Father except through Christ (John 14:6). But admitting that other religions have some truth in them is not relativism or universalism or anything like that. Im not saying that it doesnt matter what you believe or that all religions are the same. Im saying that because Christianity is the absolute truth, we have reason to believe there is some truth in other religions. This is the idea of general revelation as in Romans 1 and Acts 17. Non-Christians can speak the truth. And, according to Christianity, Christ is the truth. So whenever non-Christians speak the truth, theyre talking about Jesus. But this doesnt mean that non-Christians know they are talking about Jesus. Like Paul in Athens, we must name the unknown God to them. 5. SPIRITUAL INTEGRITY So in Mark 12 Jesus begins from the unity of God, calling us to find God everywhere in the world. His next point Love the Lord your God then, is about bringing unity to your self and your response to God. Because God is one, you must integrate your love of God with every part of your life. There is no part of your life that is irrelevant to the worship of God. You should love God at work, at play, at home, not just in church. I like to paraphrase the four commands to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength as about habits of feeling, imagining, thinking, and acting. The reason I say habits here is because, in John 15 Jesus argues that love is about abiding an ongoing, habitual state of being, as opposed to a momentary experience. The idea is to give your entire life to God. By now, we can see that this idea follows from the fact that there is no neutral standpoint where one can set aside Christianity without entering into an idolatrous religion. If you try to go to work or school or the movie theater in some sort of secular way, that aspect of your life will be functionally atheistic. This is why it is necessary to always engage cultural texts with spiritual integrity, that is to say, to engage them as a Christian. 6. SPIRITUAL FORMATION AS VACCINE So far I have argued that engaging with a pop cultural text forms our world, determining how we experience life and the how we interpret things. Now, I add that this is only how things ordinarily happen. But we dont necessarily become evil by engaging with a texts

5 evil worldview. Texts are formative, and we must be careful about what we consume, but it is not as simple as thinking that if you watch violent movies youll become violent. We can, for example, watch The Birth of a Nation a racist propaganda film whose heroes are the KKK! without becoming white supremacists. We can, under the right circumstances, be immune to a texts formative power. How does this work? It is only what we consume mindlessly that harms us, the worldviews we dont notice that were consuming. When we engage with an embodied worldview and try on an imaginative perspective without thinking, the texts perspective forms the frame around our experience, determining what counts as rational or valuable for us without us realizing it. Alternatively, when we are mindful, we can enter into a texts nonChristian worldview without being malformed by it. We may not be able to avoid shopping at the mall, but we can recognize the ways it is trying to form our values so that we can guard against it. The solution is not ignoring popular culture thats impossible in our day and age. You cant avoid all advertising, fashion, shopping, technology, sports, media, etc., even if you move to a farm way out in the country. The solution is taking in pop culture mindfully. Moreover, if we view pop culture from our Christian perspective, it can even teach us new truths about God. The Christian liturgy is counter-formation. Both literal worship services and the cultural liturgies of Christian art and entertainment form us in the image of Christ. See Romans 12:1-2:
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appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of Godwhat is good and acceptable and perfect. The renewing of the mind happens through imaginative engagement, which frames how it is possible for us to think and feel. When we enter into the Christian way of imagining, our minds are renewed converted from a non-Christian perspective to a Christian one that transforms our soul so we are no longer conformed to our old worldview. Worship alone might be enough for spiritual formation, but it certainly helps to have an additional diet of Christian art and entertainment. This need not be the kind of bad Christian subculture stuff like Kirk Cameron movies. It could be great films like The Tree of Life, great novels like Pulitzer winner Gilead, great music like John Tavener anything that deeply embodies a Christian worldview. (You have to be careful, though. Not everything that is about Christianity on the surface is deeply Christian. I worry, for example, that what underlies Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ is a view of masculinity that owes more to Hollywood action films than the Gospels portrayal of Christ.) Only those who have already been formed can resist the worlds formation. This is why the

6 media children consume is more influential on them than the media adults consume. Those who are unformed are incapable of mindful media consumption. Remember that there is no neutral point of view, so in order to interpret and understand a text, you must have some point of view. And if you dont bring one with you that is, if you have an unformed imagination you will take on the texts point of view by default. Learning to see the world from a Christian point of view, on the other hand, opens up the truth of the texts for us and allows us to recognize it as truth, naming the unnamed God of the texts religion. The Christian point of view exposes falsity as falsity and we are able to resist it. Those who have been taught to imagine Christianly wont be fooled. And they will be able to see true things that they havent yet known. We try on or imaginatively enter into the works worldview, but we do so consciously recognizing it as false the way one might engage in role-play without thinking one has actually become another person. This allows us to understand what the text is saying without being spiritually formed by it. In this way we can recognize the truth that is there amidst the falsehoods. 7. EXAMPLES As an example of how this is supposed to work, consider the Harry Potter novels and films. Conservatives worry about the presence of magic in the story, because magic is antithetical to the Christian worldview. But those who have been formed by a truly Christian worldview, wont be fooled by magic. Instead, they will be able to recognize the truth in the stories themes such as the rejection of an oppressive desire for purity, which can be relevant to the contemporary church not to mention the intentionally Christian theme of the power of sacrificial love. Consider also the TV show Glee. It seems to me that the series embodies a particular view of sexuality which is grounded only in self-fulfillment. There is no recognition as far as I can tell that sexuality might be about a deeper sort of intimacy that can only be found in selflessness and monogamy. But those who have been formed in a Christian worldview wont be fooled by the lure of promiscuity. Instead, they will be able to see the shows powerful portrayal of a truly inclusive community where everyone is loved and welcome regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, handicap, religion, etc. They glee club even shows inclusive love toward their enemies! Other recent examples: Woody Allens Midnight in Paris was about the false promise of nostalgia, suggesting how we might resist the errors of idealizing the past, a perennial temptation for any community such as the Church that defines themselves in terms of carrying on a tradition; Conversely, Martin Scorseses Hugo was about the importance of remembering and celebrating our ancestors and also about the human necessity of vocation and meaningful work; The Dark Night Rises was about what it means to be a hero, and ended up giving the Christian answer that a true hero is one who sacrifices ones life for ones community a important reminder in a time when even Christians have trouble imagining a nonviolent hero.

7 Upcoming movies that seem promising: Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Les Misrables. 8. CONCLUSION In summary, all cultural texts are religious. So, we must be mindful of how we consume them so we know how they are trying to spiritually form us. We cant completely avoid popular culture, but we shouldnt even if we could, because we can benefit from the ways they can help us understand Christ, even if they themselves dont name Christ explicitly. We are imaginative beings, and we must learn to love the Lord our God with all our imagination. APPENDIX 1: PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR MINDFUL MEDIA CONSUMPTION Ask yourself how you are being formed Ground yourself in Christian spiritual formation by participating regularly in Christian worship and art. Read reviews (Metacritic, but also a particular critic whose taste you understand even if you disagree)

APPENDIX 2: UNINTENTIONAL PROPHECY The Gospel of John gives us an interesting example of someone who unintentionally spoke the truth about Jesus. See John 11:49-52:
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one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, You know nothing at all! 50You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed. 51He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, 52and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. What is interesting about the Caiaphas example is that (1) he is hostile to Christ, but nevertheless his words spoke a deep truth about Christ, and (2) he spoke the truth unintentionally. This licenses us to read texts against their authors intended meaning. This is the kind of case where were not really reading something, but projecting our own ideas onto it. What is interesting here is that this can lead us to notice something about our own worldview we had hitherto missed. We can learn about ourselves by reading ourselves into the text. And this can even be a case of Christ speaking prophetically to us.

8 APPENDIX 3: HOW TO FOLLOW CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE WITHOUT BEING A FUNDAMENTALIST This paper is really about how to believe that Christianity has its own kind of rationality and why that doesnt entail that we should completely reject culture. It also shows why the best way of using art to further the Kingdom of God is to teach people to read art (both secular and Christian) Christianly rather than simply making art with a Christian worldview. This is because non-Christians wont be able to understand Christian art, and Christians can understand all art as Christian art. So the Mennonites were right all along: the family is a kind of monestary for making new Christians.