This three-part series was originally presented as a single seminar during the International Baptist Convention meetings in Sicily in the spring of 2025. Follow these links if you missed Part I or Part II.
If we want to follow Christ in this way—capturing hearts to change lives with truth and beauty—we would do well to begin by recognizing the imagination once again as “a truth-bearing faculty.”[i] The Enlightenment largely bullied out of us this belief that the imagination involved in the arts, in poetry, and in parables could convey important truth to us about reality. Enlightenment thinkers, like Sir Francis Bacon, viewed the imagination with suspicion and largely sought to disenchant our world.[ii] In doing so, however, the heirs of the Enlightenment overzealously went too far. They went for the throat and attempted wholesale disenchantment.
Jesus can re-enchant our world.
They never stopped to consider the question, “Are people really made better by being disenchanted?” In English, a person “disenchanted with life” is usually a synonymous term for a person who is depressed. This connection is more than a mere coincidence. If the Enlightenment disenchanted us to the point of depression, guess what Jesus can do? Jesus can re-enchant our world. Jesus can open our eyes to see the wonders and eternal truths of God on display all around us.
Like riding a bike
C.S. Lewis gives us a very relatable example of re-enchantment and does so in an imagination-capturing way when he talks about the four stages of our relationship with a bicycle. When it comes to bikes, we first pass through an age of un-enchantment. Lewis says, “I can remember a time in early childhood when a bicycle meant nothing to me: it was just part of the huge meaningless background of grown-up gadgets against which life went on.”[iii]
Yet, as most of us found out, following this stage arrives an age of enchantment. Lewis goes on to say:
“Then came a time when to have a bicycle, and to have learned to ride it, and to be at last spinning along on one’s own, early in the morning, under trees, in and out of the shadows, was like entering Paradise. That apparently effortless and frictionless gliding—seemed to have solved the secret of life. Now one would begin to be happy.”[iv]
Then, as many of us also discovered, a third stage arrives—an age of disenchantment.
“But, of course, I soon reached the third period. Pedaling to and fro from school (it was one of those journeys that feel up-hill both ways) in all weathers, soon revealed the prose of cycling. The bicycle, itself, became to me what [the] oar is to a galley slave.”[v]
Most people today live in that third stage of life. They are stuck in a phase of disenchantment with the world around them. They are stuck not knowing that there is a fourth step—a stage we are meant to arrive at as Christians. It is a place we ought to be drawing others: a stage of re-enchantment.
A stage of re-enchantment
Lewis said, “I have had to go back to cycling lately now that there’s no car. And the jobs I use it for are often dull enough. But again and again the mere fact of riding brings back a delicious whiff of memory. I recover the feelings of the second age [the age of Enchantment]. What’s more, I see how true [those first feelings] were—how philosophical, even. For it really is a remarkably pleasant motion. To be sure, it is not a recipe for happiness as I then thought. In that sense the second age was a mirage. But [it was certainly] a mirage of something.”
Many people have discovered in coming back to the Church and the teachings of Christ something akin to re-discovering the bicycle. It’s like entering that fourth and final stage. It is like being born again into a second childhood and becoming re-enchanted with life.
You may have lost your youthful idealism when it comes to the Church. You now see the Church more for what it is: a hospital for sinners navigating the world instead of a luxury liner for saints traveling to heaven. In many ways, however, the more realistic view is also the most enchanting view. The humbler view is oftentimes the more awe-inspiring one.
A better story
As Christians, we participate in the work of re-enchanting the world by telling a better story. We are called to do what Christian scholar Christopher Watkin calls “out-narrating.” Watkin says, “Out-narrating is not about telling the better story in the sense of being the most gripping or necessarily satisfying; it is about telling the bigger story, the story within which all other stories find their place.”[vi]
Others can be better storytellers than you are, but you as a Christian have the better story to tell. In the Bible, you have the bigger narrative—the story that makes sense of all the others. To borrow from J.R.R. Tolkien, in the gospel you have “the one story to rule them all.”
As a Christian, you have the better story to tell.
In part through his conversations with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis was converted when he began to see the gospel’s ability to out-narrate and re-enchant all of life. He said, “In passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”[vii]
Here is a fantastic example of conveying a truth with an imagination-capturing image. Lewis says that you believe in Christianity like you believe in the sun, not just because you see it, but because by Christianity’s light you see everything else. With statements like this, Lewis had a way of expressing big truths that theologians also conveyed but in fairly boring ways. For this reason, Malcolm Guite says that “we must call the poets to the table as well as the theologians” if we are to follow Jesus in expressing God’s truth in imagination-capturing ways.[viii] Our hearers (and our own hearts) need both.
To see and feel rightly
The Bible gives us both Paul’s didactic epistles and David’s poetic psalms. Even in Paul’s most didactic of epistles, however, he is often quoting poetry and bringing natural images in to illustrate spiritual truths. For example, when Paul wants to explain the dangers of false teaching, he reaches for the image of leaven (Gal 5:9). When he wants to talk about the “mystery of godliness,” he pulls out a confessional poem (1 Tim 1:16). As human beings, we need both the didactic and the poetic. Malcolm Guite points out how the poets and theologians desperately need one another. The poets often need the theologians to see rightly, and the theologians often need the poets to feel rightly.[ix]
The poet may very well move your heart to tears at the wonder of the Incarnation where the theologian only succeeded in boring you.
To see that need in yourself, just compare how you feel reading very theologically precise writing about the Incarnation and how you feel reading a poem about the Incarnation. The poet may very well move your heart to tears at the wonder of the Incarnation where the theologian only succeeded in boring you. It is a wonderful thing that theologians have many rich, theological terms to talk about the Atonement. Yet, in a George Herbert poem about the Crucifixion, we feel that “love is that liquor sweet and most divine, which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.”[x]
Offer the imaginative
One of the best ways to set on fire future generations is to kindle their collective imagination to love and serve the Lord. This is the work of the Spirit, ultimately, but in setting hearts ablaze the Spirit works through the imagination-capturing proclamation of God’s Word. In the way we present the Word to others, we can stand in the way of this happening (making the truth seem less attractive). Or, as we teach God’s Word, we can open an imaginative doorway and point our hearers through it to just how enthralling the biblical view of life really is.
Christians today need to show the world that the Church has more to say about wonder-hunger than anyone else. We have a theology of the imagination that offers the active and imaginative life that even the most committed atheists are really longing for.
The goal of these articles is to whet your taste buds for engaging in this imaginative work. Whether you teach a church full of folks or only your children, capturing your hearers’ imagination with God’s truth is a work worth giving your time and yourself to. If you need further models for how to convey divine truth in imagination-capturing ways (beyond the example of the prophets, apostles, and Jesus himself), simply pick up almost any book by St. Augustine, C.H. Spurgeon, G.K. Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis. These men don’t get everything right, but what they do get right they say in a way that sticks with you. This is why we still read them today. God uses such teachers (just as God can use you!) to re-enchant the world and capture people’s imaginations with his truth.
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[i] Guite, Malcolm. Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God (Square Halo, 2021), p. 11.
[ii] Ibid., p. 14. Also see the argument made in Malcolm Guite’s Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (Ashgate, 2008).
[iii] Lewis, C.S. Present Concerns (Collins, 1986), p. 71.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Watkin, Christopher. Biblical Critical Theory (Zondervan Academic, 2022), p. 21.
[vii] Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory (HarperOne, 2001) p. 140.
[viii] Guite, Lifting the Veil, p. 51.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Herbert, George. The Poems of George Herbert (Oxford University Press, 1907), p. 33.
