NOTE: This piece was originally written for a group of treasured colleagues and students, and so is directed at them throughout.
Our Present State of Spiritual Exhaustion
In his Harvard commencement address of 1978, Russian exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered this critique of Western culture: “Having experienced applied socialism, I certainly will not speak for it. But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West, such as it is today, as a model for my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.”[1]
Think of that. A survivor of the Gulag did not find Western affluence to be an attractive alternative to his Soviet experience. In fact, he diagnosed both East and West with symptoms of the same disease, “We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”
And think of this. If the West was spiritually exhausted in 1978—if our prosperity, and superficiality, and what Solzhenitsyn called our “hastiness” fostered a spiritual crisis then—how much further down the road must we be today? And what antidote might a theological seminary deliver in an effort to reinvigorate a spiritually exhausted culture?
This is the task that I was set for our time together: to reflect with you on the way a theological seminary equips its students—and through them the churches in which they minister—to weather the cultural storms of our day. What do graduates of our seminary most need, and what do they receive, that enables them to shine gospel light as good neighbors to those swept up in the political, intellectual, and sexual confusion of our day?
Two Ways to See a Seminary
There are two perspectives we could adopt to help us answer this question. In the first place, we could begin by defining the seminary by the people who make it up. We might call this the view from below. And so we would focus on intelligent, diligent students learning under the stewardship of a thoughtful, convictional faculty, confronting together the pressures of a culture that has forgotten God. And it would make sense, from this perspective, that the best use of the faculty would be to provide students with a catechism of current events. In this way, we could be confident that our graduates would carry a ready answer to every cultural question that they might face.
But, if our curriculum is married to current events, we are at risk of finding ourselves widowed, and with very little to say, when today’s hot-button issues give way to tomorrow’s. (What seminary curriculum, just 35 years ago when Phoenix was founded, would have prioritized a Christian response to AI or gender dysphoria? Yet what seminary curriculum could ignore them today?) In fact, the risk is greater even than this. In viewing the seminary from below we are perpetuating the very problem we hope to solve: using God to accomplish the earthly outcome that we desire. This is short-sighted at best and, as Solzhenitsyn recognized, it is idolatrous at worst because it places our “hope in political and social reforms.”
So, a second and a better way to locate the chief purpose of a seminary in our current culture is to locate ourselves as a community of learners under the Lord Jesus. We might call this the view from above, from the mind of God.[2] The great work of a theological seminary, in this view, is to saturate our students with a vision of the Triune God as the supreme object of our knowledge, affection, and obedience. Thus, our curriculum emphasizes the richness, fullness and warmth of the revelation God has made of Himself in the Scriptures, opened to us through the faithful theological reflection handed down by our forebears in the faith.
In this view from above, to paraphrase Augustine, God is gloriously use-less. That is, He is not to be used as the means to any end beyond Himself, however noble or needed that end might be. He is the end. Knowing Him and enjoying Him is the aim of our everlasting life as the people of God and thus must be the aim of any season of life spent preparing people to live out the first fruits of their salvation in the world. This is not only a counter-cultural way of living, it is the pathway to recover what Solzhenitsyn identified as “our most precious possession, our spiritual life.”
This is my answer to our original question: what antidote might a theological seminary deliver to reinvigorate a spiritually exhausted culture? Our highest calling is to cultivate students with minds that know God more truly, with hearts that love him more fully, and with lives that follow him more duly as a result of their season of preparation here.
But arrows are formed and sharpened in order to be well sent. This means that the qualifiers I have used like “chief” good and “highest” calling are important. In thinking about the role of the seminary in forming culture-shapers, we do not want to play “loving God” and “loving our neighbor” off against one another. We must keep them together. We must also approach them in their proper order; loving God first and for his own sake, which then compels us to love our neighbor for the sake of God’s great name. We believe, with C.S. Lewis, that the seminaries which do the most good on earth are those who have their hearts and minds most occupied with the God of heaven.[3] What better gift do we have to give the exhausted world around us than an invitation to live for lasting things!
What I would like to do for the remainder of this piece is to suggest one way that this conviction actually works itself out. It is one thing to believe that a seminary captivated by the greatness and goodness of God best equips students to resist sin and shine light in the world. It is another thing, and I think a more helpful thing, to watch how those dots connect between the God we come to know and love in seminary and the spiritual antidote our culture actually needs.[4]
The Antidote of Imagination
In his book Imagining the Kingdom, James Smith of Calvin College suggests that the link between seminary education and our impact on a spiritually exhausted culture can be found in the way theological study develops our imagination.[5]
What he means is that we live from our hearts. In King Solomon’s words, “keep your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23). In Smith’s words, “the driving center of human action is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood without needing to be thought about.”
Notice that this well-spring, this motor, this driving center of our behavior, is “under the hood.” It “doesn’t need to be thought about.” In other words, we make hundreds of decisions every day that we are not fully aware of. We do not analyze or debate them. We make them instinctively. We make them because they seem right. And they seem right to us because they go with the grain of our longings and our loves. We live from our heart.
The food that fuels the desires of our heart is what Smith calls “the imagination.” Imagination, here, does not mean “pretend,” like an imaginary friend that we grow out of, but it means transcendent, a spiritual expansiveness that we grow into. Imagination is a way of perceiving, that leads to a way of thinking, feeling and doing, that is not constrained by what our physical eyes can see. A Christian imagination is the way our heart draws life from a spiritual world that is more real and vital and important and valuable than this visible world.
As Paul explains it in 2 Corinthians 4:16 “So we do not lose heart… for this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us a weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” Another word for imagination, then, would be the faith by which the eyes of our heart root our lives in the conviction of things not seen (Heb 11:2).
Solzhenitsyn would agree that the heart is the issue, the need. He asked, “How did the West decline to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns?” In other words, was our culture doing just fine until something drastic and unexpected wrenched things out of order? No, he answered, “It does not seem so. The West kept advancing along its proclaimed intention.” We are, in other words, reaping the eventual and inevitable fruit of our cultural imagination. He continued, “This means that the mistake must be at the root. I refer to the view of the world, given expression in the Enlightenment, defined as rationalistic humanism. Here, all that is spiritual was abandoned with unwarranted zeal.”
With this “enlightened” abandonment of what is invisible, what is supra-natural, and the enthroning of usurpers such as: empiricism, with its canon of sensory experience; rationalism, with its tyranny of reason; naturalism, with its exclusion of any cause outside of what we can see; materialism, with its pursuit of our best life now; humanism, with its idolization of autonomy—the West has shut itself off from imagination and so accelerated the treadmill under its exhausted soul.
The Trinity as Fund for the Christian Imagination
If the mistake lies at the root, the antidote must be as radical as the disease. It must target the root of our thinking, eradicating Godless epistemologies and re-theologizing our view of the world. We can affirm the validity of reason, the significance of experience, and the good of humanity made in the image of God. But we must also affirm that these truths, from below, neither exhaust our possible sources of knowledge nor serve as the primary source of food for our heart. If the cure for spiritual exhaustion is a Christian imagination, we are on the hunt for revelation—truth from above, from outside—not only as possible but as primary in our worldview.
In his Mediation and Communion with God, Gordon-Conwell professor John Jefferson Davis directs us to the doctrine of the Trinity as the fountainhead of such revelation, “The doctrine of the Trinity,” Davis argues, “is the foundation of a Christian concept of ultimate reality.” And, therefore, the doctrine funds a vibrant Christian imagination: “[This doctrine] implies the primacy of invisible spirit over visible matter both for our epistemology (how we know what is true), our morality (how we know what is good),” as well as our axiology (how we know what is beautiful).[6]
The Trinity: the Father as God unoriginate, without beginning, without becoming, but always the fullness of all that is good; the Son as God eternally begotten, the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact imprint of His nature; the Spirit as God proceeding, as the Father beholds the fullness of Himself in His Son and the Son rejoices in the holy excellence of His Father such that the joy of these two Persons in God—exercising all the comprehension of omniscience and all the energy of omnipotence—is itself vibrantly personal, the Person of God the Holy Spirit. As 1 John 4:8 reveals, “God is love.”
This joyful, self–sufficient fellowship is the fountainhead of ultimate reality. Creation, it has been said, was the overflow of the laughter of the Triune God. We have been created by a God who knows Himself perfectly and who loves himself fully. And so, we have been created with the purpose of finding our truest happiness in knowing Him and loving him as truly and as fully as we can, His Spirit helping us.[7] Here is the reality that underwrites the Christian imagination: God as the source of revelation, God as the source of satisfaction.
Deep Comedy and Western Civilization
But does the Trinity, and all this seminary thinking, do nothing better than make us pointy-headed? Make us self-contented? Disconnect us from the world? Another way to ask it would be: what kind of tangible, cultural impact does a Trinitarian imagination actually produce? In his wonderful book Deep Comedy, Peter Leithart suggests that, in fact, an imagination fed by the revelation of the Triune God is rich enough to power the literary corpus of an entire civilization. He demonstrates this richness by tracing the way(s) Christian revelation impacts cultural understandings of history which, in turn, give shape to the dominant motifs in their literature. Literature became the litmus test for the presence of the Triune God.
Leithart notes, “the classical world was dominated by a tragic view of history, in which history moved from glamorous beginning toward a tarnished end.”[8] In the Platonic mold, later is always lesser. As Homer’s contemporary Hesiod pictured it, history inevitably regresses through a series of metallic ages: from gold, to silver, to bronze, before finally devolving to iron. Caught in the talons of such irretrievable loss, the wise man was the Stoic, who had mortified his capacity for hope. Not revelation but regression. Not satisfaction but stoicism.
By way of contrast, “As it penetrated the Greco-Roman world, the Christian gospel challenged this tragic [view] by presenting a fundamentally [and deeply] comic vision of history.” Defining his terms, Leithart goes on: “Comedy is a story in which the characters face danger but ultimately rise to a happy end. Deep comedy brings two additional nuances: First, the happy ending is not contaminated by fear of future tragedy, and second, the characters do not simply end as well as they began, but progress beyond their beginning.”[9] In deep comedy, to use again the language of 2 Corinthians 4:17, this momentary life of suffering prepares us for an end that is better than the beginning, an eternal weight of glory that is beyond compare.
These requirements for deep comedy resonate with the Christian imagination, rooted in Trinitarian reality. In God, supplementarity does not diminish glory. The Second Person of the Godhead is not less than, and is in fact the co-eternal fullness of, the First Person. There is no seepage of glory, even when the Word of God takes to himself a human nature. He remains, as John tells us, full of grace and truth. What is more, the Christian imagination knows of no mere recovery of Paradise lost. As St. Anselm anticipated, when the reign of death is broken and Paradise is regained, the contours of the new creation will far exceed anything we have yet tasted.[10] Our welcome home is a creaturely participation in the very delight of Trinitarian fellowship (Jn 17:26; 2 Cor 3:18).
The closest ancient antecedent to deep comedy helps expose how chasmic the Christian difference truly is. When the Roman poet Virgil wrote of a golden age restored, he found himself nevertheless unable to escape the constraints of what he could see. The Virgilian vision could, at best, muster only a return to the empire’s origin, not an advance. And his enthusiasm for Rome’s future was checked by the mortality attending even Aeneas’ “eternal kingdom.”[11]
The Christian hope, however, born in Bethlehem nineteen years after Virgil died, is not undone by mortality as the King comes to set up His kingdom. Rather, as Viola discovered in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, what turns disaster into delight, what makes the tempest kind, is the breaking in of resurrection power. This promise of invincible life—in T.S. Eliot’s words (lifted from Julian of Norwich), that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” or in Tolkien’s exquisite hope that “everything sad will come untrue”—is the exclusive contribution of Christianity.[12] And it has animated Western literature with a wisdom and a hope that are not of this world.
Deep Comedy Against the Modern Dystopia
If classical literature was deeply tragic, and truly Christian literature is deeply comic, Leithart closes his book by suggesting that “modern literature is deeply disappointed.”[13] We hear again, in the literature of our age, the symptoms of spiritual exhaustion brought about by Enlightenment scientism and skepticism. And we hear again the need for a robustly Christian imagination—drinking deeply from the rich reality of the invisible God—as the chief answer for our culture in the gospel.
Leithart’s tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern literature is proven true by a glance at a genre of social criticism that grew out of the Renaissance, the utopia. Thomas More’s 1516 fictional work Utopia is both a critique of culture as it stood and a picture of the solution that More anticipated. The most significant aspect of More’s perfectible society is that it already exists, an island paradise discovered at a considerable geographic distance from our own.
The disequilibrium following a world war at the opening of the twentieth century prompted a shift in the prophetic picture of our global future; a dystopic vision of the world. What unites these negative utopias—from the strangling bureaucracy of Orwell’s 1984, to the mass suggestion of Huxley’s Brave New World; from the omnivorous censorship of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to the cyclical sameness of Lois Lowry’s The Giver—is the conviction that the answer to man lies with man. As Eric Fromm notes in his “Afterword” to 1984: “I am sure that neither Orwell nor Huxley wanted to insist that this world of insanity was bound to come. It was quite obviously their intention to sound a warning by showing where we are headed unless we succeed in a renaissance of the spirit of humanism.”[14]
So, we are still dealing with a prophetic project, though if the early utopias located the answer at a geographical distance from their audience, these later dystopias mark a shift to a distance that is chronological. Their storyboard spools through the ticker-tape of time in order to confront us with a future blighted by the logical conclusion of our current forms of dehumanization, and thus call us to resist everything leading to that end. But both sides of the utopian/dystopian coin prescribe a similar hope: if dehumanization is the problem, humanism must be the solution.
Believers in Jesus who have read these books, however, find that the mist of hopelessness lingering over their conclusions gives the lie to the remedy they propose. The problem is now more clear than ever. But what is equally clear is that mere distance, in terms of either space or time, can only spread the disease further out and deeper down. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal did not have to know these modern works to remind us that, “Man is beyond man. Apart from grace [revelation] we cannot understand the very truth that explains us. God has kept for himself the right to tell us about ourselves.”[15]
Speaking to Men About God
This means that there is no answer for the exhausted human condition apart from grace; apart from revelation. And so, the Christian author, wrestling with these same social observations, does not speak to men about man, but to men about God. C.S. Lewis, to take but one example, describes modernity’s dysfunction in prime dystopian form throughout That Hideous Strength. And yet Lewis does not locate the answer for our wretchedness in this world, as in a utopia. Nor is it found in the future–history of this world, as in a dystopia. Instead, in the language of the novel, the answer for humanity is found in the marvelous way Maleldil (the Creator) has dealt with the “bent” Oyarsa (the Devil) on Thulcandra (Earth). More simply, as his protagonist Elwin Ransom discovers, the answer for this world must come from another world.
This grace of revelation—God freely entering His fallen creation and drawing men to Himself—is the mark of the Christian imagination. It is found in wizards who arrive precisely when they mean to—and when we need them to—on the morning of the fifth day when we are cut off on every side. It is found in the golden lion from the Emperor beyond the sea, who takes our place under the knife of the White Witch. It is found in the balance between what Pascal calls our “wretchedness” as sinners and our “greatness” as God’s image–bearers. The Christian answer, in other words, is found in revelation, substitution, and resurrection unto ever-increasing satisfaction.
All of these concepts are spiritual. All of them are supernatural. And all of them are rejected on their face by the exhausted world that needs them so desperately. As Orwell wrote of Lewis’ novel, “One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in.”[16] To which Lewis responded, in a letter to Dorothy Sayers, “apparently reviewers will not tolerate a mixture of the realistic and the supernatural. Which is a pity, because (a) it is just the mixture I like, and (b) we have to put up with it in real life.”[17] Indeed, not only put up with it, but put our hope in it.
Conclusion
Our seminary exists to train men and women for a lifetime of faithful ministry in the midst of a culture that has forgotten God. In forsaking God, the Creator and Satisfier of their soul, our friends and neighbors have set for themselves the wearisome task of belonging to themselves (identifying and redeeming themselves) and hewing out for themselves cisterns that can hold no water.[18] Their loves are disordered by sin such that they suppress the truth that can be known about God and are given over to the perversions, confusions, and deceptions that we see around us in the world and, increasingly, in the church.
What is to be done? Specifically, what is the role of the theological seminary in forming students who will be sent to confront this rebellious darkness with the unflinching light and redeeming love of Christ?
In a word, the seminary must give students a vision of God big enough to live with, and to live for. In his magnificent essay, “Learning in War Time,” C.S. Lewis calls us to consider that there are some duties we face, like the duty to save a drowning man, that could cost us our lives. But a duty worth dying for may not be worth living for. We must not, for example, insist on drown-proofing the whole world before allowing anyone to move on to other business. He drives the point home like this. “It seems to me that all political duties are of this kind. A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”[19]
Phoenix Seminary operates from the conviction that culture, society, country and party, while important, are not worth living for. This honor belongs alone to God. And therefore, God is most greatly honored, and our world most deeply helped, as we come to know and love the God who is our life. Spiritual exhaustion, and the sin it inspires, must be addressed through a vital Christian imagination. Walking our students into this great vision of God is the charge and privilege of theological education.
Nathan Tarr is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Doctor of Ministry Program Director at Phoenix Seminary.
Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address, “A World Split Apart” at Harvard University on June 8, 1978. Quotations from this address taken from Edward Ericson and Daniel Maloney eds. The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 561–576. ↑
See John Woodhouse, “The Trials of a Theological College” in Brian Rosner and Andrew eds., The Trials of Theology: Becoming a Proven Worker in a Dangerous Business (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2010), 98-99. ↑
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Williams Collins, 2016) 134. The quote runs, “A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” ↑
E. Stanley Jones, “The early church did not say, with dismay, ‘Look what this world is coming to,’ but, with delight, ‘Look what has come into the world.’” E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1942), 183. ↑
James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). ↑
John Jefferson Davis, Meditation and Communion with God: Contemplating Scripture in an Age of Distraction (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), 70. ↑
In the classical, and the early Christian, understanding identifying our telos, or the purpose for which we were created, is crucial in determining (and rejoicing in) our goodness since that goodness is determined by whether and the degree to which our behavior corresponds to and leads toward our designed end. ↑
Peter Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature (Moscow: Canon Press, 2006), xi. ↑
Leithart, Deep Comedy, xii. ↑
One of the arguments Anselm adduces to support his central claim that the man providing satisfaction for human sin must also be God owes to the infinite value required to restore fallen man from bondage to sin. The reason why Adam, a man, was able to effect our fall from sinlessness to sin owes to the fact that he was not created perfect (i.e. static) but “very good” and intended to draw ever closer to God. God is not now attempting to restore us to this original Edenic state. Rather, He aims to bring us all the way to Himself. Anselm Cur Deus Homo. ↑
See Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963); Virgil, The Georgics, trans. Robert Wells (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982), 32-33; Leithart, Deep Comedy, 9-14. ↑
C.S. Lewis wrote, in a similar vein, that “Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even [our] agony into glory.” The Great Divorce (London: Collins, 2012), 69. ↑
Leithart, Deep Comedy, 150. ↑
George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Penguin, 1983), 291. ↑
Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writing trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42-43. ↑
Orwell reviewed Lewis’s That Hideous Strength the day it appeared. The original and full review (“The Scientists Take Over: Review of That Hideous Strength,”) can be found in the Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945. Reprinted in The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, Vol. 17 (1998), 250–251. ↑
Lewis’s letter to Sayers is quoted in C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 231. ↑
Alan Noble writes, “To be your own and belong to yourself means that… this freedom comes at a great price. Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for meaning in my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests itself as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression. But because everyone else is also working frantically to craft and express their own identity, society becomes a space of vicious competition between individuals vying for attention, and significance, not unlike the contrived drama of reality tv.” Alan Noble, You are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (Downers Grove: IVP, 2022), 4. ↑
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War Time” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (London: William Collins, 2013), 53.. To apply this logic to our political activity, we must belong to a Party because we believe in certain things, rather than believing certain things because we belong to a Party. ↑