Dru Johnson
Our imaginations determine our understanding. What we can grasp depends upon our ability to imagine what is happening below the surface.
The plumber uses her highly skilled imagination to see a water pressure drop as the cause of my problems when I could only see the presenting symptom. The same with a doctor and a fever, or a scientist and her raw observations. Like the plumber, doctor, and scientist, we must nurture an accurate imagination of the invisible world through sustained encounters with reality.
We might think of the “supernatural” world as invisible. Or worse, we might think of the invisible world as the territory of angels. In Scripture, angels burn bushes without destroying them, but they also walk, talk, eat meals, and thus pass gas (presumably). All of these are visible (and audible) things. A hearty discourse runs throughout Scripture about those who do and don’t understand the invisible things that animate history (more below on this).
Returning to the scientists in our world, think about what they are trying to do. The scientist dedicates herself to the study of the invisible features of the visible world. The chemist adds nothing to our understanding by describing what we can plainly see before us. The remarkable feat of the scientific community occurs when a scientist accredited by the community of chemists can tell us all the things that we cannot see but that must be true in order for the molecule that we can see to be the way it is.
The chemist’s near-magical ability to “see,” expound upon, and successfully predict all the invisible features of this molecule make her “the chemist” and the rest of us “the pedestrian learners.” How does she see these invisible structures that adequately account for the visible world? She sees because her imagination has been sculpted by traditions in the scientific community and rituals that have disposed her to imagine what is not visible, but must be true.
She can tell us why the Mickey Mouse shape of the molecule H2O contributes to the surface tension of water, why the crystalline properties of ice are unique to water amongst other liquids, or how water joins to salt in order to slip more or less easily between biological cell walls. None of these things are visible in the molecule, ice crystals, or lipid layers themselves. All of these invisible features are testable and predictable, to a point, which indicate her true understanding of H2O.
Jesus on the Hebraic Imagination
Jesus cites this same ability—to understand the invisible features of the visible world—as necessary to the imaginations of his followers. He chastises the masses who can predict the coming weather through meteorological imaginations shaped by tradition and practice, but can’t apply the same interpretive skills to “the present time” (Luke 12: 54–56).
Avoiding subtlety, Jesus compares the coming judgment to the “days of Noah” and the “days of Lot,” but he surprises his audience with his critique of those who were judged (Matt 24; Luke 17). They might’ve expected Jesus to describe Sodom and Gomorrah’s crimes as city-wide violent sexual assault of vulnerable people. Instead, he announces their crimes: “they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building” (Luke 17:28). What is Jesus doing here?
In Luke, there is a sustained theme: our anxieties will infect our traditions and nurture our imaginations one way or the other. We can see what is not visible or be blinded by our anxieties about maintaining the status quo. His is a radical message: our status quo focus can numb and dumb us to God’s empire coming into the world.
Jesus also struggles to find the proper analogy. His “to what shall I compare the kingdom?” statements portray him as a teacher par excellence. He searches for and finds appropriate analogs of the invisible kingdom from their experiences. There is no real way in which the kingdom is a tree or loaf of bread (Luke 13:18–20). Rather, these experiences of blooming and pervasiveness foster our ability to transfer their concepts over to the conceptual realm of God’s empire—invisible to the naked eye, as they say. There is something about the empire of God that is surprisingly explosive, and that provides rest. But understanding the analogy is not the same as seeing “that which is not visible but causes things to happen.”
Of course, Jesus does not invent this kind of imagination, but situates his teaching within the intellectual world of the Torah. In Exodus and Deuteronomy, we find commands to shape the imagination of Israel and her children through rituals in the home and pilgrimages to the Tabernacle (Exod 12; Lev 23). Practicing Sabbath restructures their imagination of the creation event. The artifice of a seven-day week structures Israel’s calendar alone in the ancient Near East. In Joshua, this same program of imagination sculpting persists; Joshua demands that a pile of rocks be used to explain God’s empire and how their God has ruled and wants to reign through them (Josh 4:21–24).
And sadly, Israel’s spectacular failure to keep Sabbath, the home-based rituals that require explanation to the children (e.g., Passover, Sukkot), and the pilgrimage rites is inextricably linked by the prophets to her heinous behaviors against the weak. Israel grew numb and dumb to the invisible features of her world through neglect of the poor, oppression of the foreigner, and abandonment of the rituals designed to shape her imagination.
How do we become the kind of people who can skillfully affirm, “We believe that this is the empire of God come upon you,” or, “We’re pretty sure that is not the empire of God”? Both acts of imaginative discernment are needed, but the former gets asserted too promiscuously and the latter is largely dumped off on pastors.
How God Sculpted My Imagination through Newark’s Public Housing
My family and I have had our imaginations dramatically re-fashioned several times, whether living in another country or a different culture within our own country. My imagination was profoundly shaped through our church befriending a public housing community.
Living in Newark, New Jersey, we attend a Brazilian immigrant church. If you’ve ever been to Newark, the visible indicators of the lack of God’s empire might seem overwhelming. Though our church consists mostly of Brazilian and Spanish-speaking immigrants, they sought to be involved in the public schools and public housing. The fact that it’s an immigrant church is important for one reason, if not more: they know what it’s like to be outsiders. Through our church’s relationships in the community, we have learned—up close—how deep the disparities go in our city. But they are not merely financial disparities.
We have also learned the rationale for some of the inexplicable traditions and rituals of the public housing community. Coming from a community of safety and comfort, it was hard to understand the community’s rites that reinforce the values of personal survival, protecting one’s body, and protecting one’s street credibility (much like ancient Roman views of honor and shame). Claiming to see the good news of God’s invisible empire means assisting in disentangling community members from these arresting norms of life. But that action has to include nurturing their imaginations that life could be different from everything they’ve ever experienced. We had to be confident in something entirely hidden to them. We had to see God’s empire in what looked like the common-place empire of a gangs and drug running.
We also had to learn to see past how people present themselves. Just as we imaginatively fill in the vacant part of the moon over its phases, our imaginations had to trust that there is something more than what we’re seeing, something hidden, that was worth spending time with. Whether they be the affluent “we can take care of ourselves” suburbanites or the cyclically poor in the trailer parks and public housing, hurting communities all seem to have their own flavor of “fronting.” And, it takes a confidently honed imagination to see past a community’s defensively presented façade.
We could either naively project our vision of what we wanted people to be, or carefully listen and learn who they were, despite how they might initially appear to us. I caught myself wanting to project an “innocent victim of circumstances” onto second-graders who were spewing curse words and acting out sexually lewd behaviors. I wanted little children to be nothing more than pristine souls who were casualties of their environment. They were casualties, but so much more. They were sinners, just like me. They were brave and sweet. They and their aunts, moms, dads, and cousins were complicated and sometimes tangled up with gangs, drugs, and prostitution. And so, our emerging vision of God’s rule in their lives was equally complicated.
We not only saw beneath the surface in them, but simultaneously learned how to look under our own hoods. God’s rule in our lives was equally complicated. We began to identify with others as sisters and brothers rather than “them.”
We in the church had to develop an experienced imagination. As in many communities where addictions and violence are in the air they breathe, most folks in those communities are rightfully slow to trust outsiders. They often present an outer persona that doesn’t match who they might want to be if things were different. If the church cannot imagine what the empire of God looks like when befriending such communities, the church might perpetrate its own status quo ideas of faith and salvation—which are typically quick and lazy: “Get saved and God will do the rest.”
The traditions that nurture the church’s and community’s imaginations require long-term commitments include waiting the five or six years it takes to earn basic trust in a hurting community. The church has to be willing to let the Holy Spirit shape their imaginations too, knowing that “success” may look radically different from what they have planned. They may have to let the time-honored processes of commitment and learning craft the lens through which they can see the empire of God at work in a broken community, which untrained eyes won’t see.
When asked, “How do you know your investment is working?” they might point to the broken stalls in their bathrooms from kids who vandalized the church, the times they calmed a police officer when a teenager was in trouble, or their dwindling funds, used for all the bills they are helping to pay—bills of slothful freeloaders and working families alike.
So far, this sounds like a “white savior complex” delightfully unaware of itself. I’m not sure this relationship can ever fully escape that. But, the reason it’s so important for us to commit to our communities is that God is using these sustained friendships to shape our imaginations alongside theirs. Because of this theological sustenance, I have learned more—theologically speaking—from kids in public housing than any seminary course could have ever taught me. How?
Weekly interaction that includes a meal. How can we move from naïve to novice to skilled seer of the invisible world—like the scientist—unless we’re in regular contact with the skill? Like a language, it has to be practiced in lots of novel circumstances. My view (which has roots in Scripture): the only way to know people is through food. Meals are magical.
Commitment to endure lots of mistreatment of our property, ourselves, and God. If we get in just to test the waters, we will experience short term successes (or, at least, things we might mistakenly label “success”) or quick failures that will drive many away. As with any learning endeavor, communal grit is necessary.
A reduced focus on behavior. What I’ve learned is that poor urban communities actually get lots of help from various government and non-profit agencies. The folks who live there see professionals who are paid to come in and help ease burdens and offer clothes, food, money, Christmas gifts, and more. What they rarely see is people who want to be with them just to know them. Many people in broken communities have lots of professionals paid to engage them—social workers, teachers, community policing officers, after-school tutors, etc. To this day, most of the children with whom we spend our time as a church are still partially convinced that all of us are being paid to be with them. We make an effort to tactfully inform them that we are all here by choice and for no pay. They are constantly dubious.
Our Imagination Rituals
Our rituals come from different sources: from Scripture, from traditions, but also from raw interaction with our real world. Much can be said about having our imaginations sculpted by Scripture (e.g., festal meals like Passover or Communion) or traditions (e.g., the structure of a worship service). But I want to focus on the value of rituals improvised through encounters in the objectively real world with folks who aren’t like us. Some might recognize an affinity below with Lesslie Newbigin’s work on the gospel encountering other cultures (see: The Gospel in a Pluralist Society):
Imagination crafting requires spiritual discipline, but these aren’t spiritual disciplines in the way we typically think of them. Most of us are familiar with the standard set of disciplines (e.g., fasting, prayer, silence, etc.) which we cannot avoid individually tailoring and curating to some extent. While nurturing an accurate imagination is a spiritual discipline, it is not individualistic. One community commits to learn from another community of difference.
This means that a listen-learn approach takes priority. Our commitment to these xenophilic friendships doesn’t begin by bringing a structured solution. It begins by presence with the community and listening to what animates them, what scares them, and how the power dynamics work. For instance, we couldn’t enter the housing project unless we had the tacit agreement of the gangs. Knowing how the gangs think about the children in their community is the first baby-step to knowing how to care for their children. It’s as complex as any government agency. Like the biologist who has to deal with the reality of a platypus when all she has is the classical taxonomies, our notions have to be calibrated by careful attention to the realities on the ground. Like being thrown into a corral with an unbroken horse, that horse will teach you how you are going to interact with it as much as anything else. But you must listen to the horse to learn how to interact.
Fostering our community’s imagination also has a trial and error component. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” (attributed to Mike Tyson). Think of our scientific community again, they cannot talk themselves into free floating speculation for very long. Their ideas have to be tried and trued to the objectively real world. Theology could take a note here. Rather, the objects in the world will tell the scientific community how true their notions might be. So too, we have the opportunity to regularly test our notions, not in the comfortable labs of our own church cultures, but in the arena of folks who aren’t like us. Maybe we’re fortunate enough to have a church with such diversity, but if not, we need those who aren’t like our culture to teach us. I once read a PhD dissertation that made a great point: when Jesus crossed the lake in Mark’s Gospel, he usually entered the land of “the other”—gentiles, demoniacs, etc. It’s also where his disciples became most resistant to the gentile mission. The point is: Jesus tried out his power in the real world outside of the Jewish microcosm to show that it was universally true and real. He later sent them out to see for themselves (Mark 6:7–13).
But the disciples didn’t want the inclusion of “the others,” which becomes an ongoing problem for Peter to the very end. Jesus proved the reality of his empire not only in the comfort zones of Judea and hinterlands of Galilee, but inside the realm of demons, foreigners, the despised, the low-class, and even within the realm of Rome’s imperial reach. It’s where the Gospels shift from awe at Jesus’ authority in teaching to awe in his authority over the Jewish world, demonic world, water world, storm world, and all powers and principalities. If we don’t test out our developing imaginations in the real world of “the others,” then how will we have confidence that we’re not just deluding ourselves? We won’t.
Regularly encountering others not like us sharpens our imaginations in that it forces us to re-shuffle what we thought was important. It quickly highlights our deficient understanding. It helps us to imaginatively separate what is universal about the empire of God from our parochial ideas we’ve mistaken for universal.
Like the scientist who investigates the real world, our vision of the invisible needs to be faithful to reality. And that process cannot happen merely through theological reflection and study, but the grip and slip of encountering those who don’t buy into the vision of this empire we’re selling, and by our community encountering other communities who have experienced the world differently.
Dru Johnson is the director of the Center for Hebraic Thought and associate professor of biblical and theological studies at The King’s College in New York City. He writes on biblical philosophy, ritual, conspiracy theories, and the biblical nature of scientific knowledge (more at drujohnson.com). His family lives a stone’s throw from downtown Newark, NJ.
Image: Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee