Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

by Holly Ordway

Apologetics, the defense of the Faith, shows why our Christian faith is true—but it’s much more than that. Apologetics isn’t just the province of scholars and saints, but of ordinary men and women: parents, teachers, lay ministry leaders, pastors, and everyone who wants to develop a stronger faith, to understand why we believe what we believe, to know Our Lord better, and love him more fully.

In Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, Holly Ordway shows how an imaginative approach—in cooperation with rational arguments—is extremely valuable in helping people come to faith in Christ. Making a case for the role of imagination in apologetics, this book proposes ways to create meaning for Christian language in a culture that no longer understands words like ‘sin’ or ‘salvation,' suggests how to discern and address the manipulation of language, and shows how metaphor and narrative work in powerful ways to communicate the truth. It applies these concepts to specific, key apologetics issues, including suffering, doubt, and longing for meaning and beauty.

Apologetics and the Christian Imagination shows how Christians can harness the power of the imagination to share the Faith in meaningful, effective ways.

Genres: Theology, Faith, Christianity, Christian, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion

206 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies. Her literary-critical study Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages received the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. Her book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Word on Fire Academic) is being published in time for the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death.

Reviews

[J. Wootton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual little book, far too likely to be overlooked and undervalued. In the cross-sectional field that is persuasiveness & advocacy literature, most of the attention gets paid to flashy, success-promising books by wealthy and/or famous people with grand platforms and large marketing budgets. Few writers have the guts to devote themselves to the art of cultivation - the long road of listening, of making a succession of conversations mutually meaningful, of genuine curiosity, of verbal and intellectual hospitality. This, if you like, is "sustainable persuasiveness" - the ability to make your case while making a new friend (or without losing an old one), be confident that you have been understood, and go on enjoying one another's company regardless of whether anybody's creed or convictions have changed as a result.

In tone, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination reads like a specialist speaking to non-specialists; the experience is not unlike attending one of Ordway's public lectures (worth going out of your way for). It makes accessible some very difficult concepts about metaphor, language, communication, and rationality that great thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield struggled to write about clearly. And it explains concisely not only the problems that arise when two people or cultures, living side-by-side, share a common vocabulary but mean different things by the same phrases and words, but how to notice when this is happening and do something about it.

As the title makes evident, the book is focused on the conversation between the Christian religion and the non-religious (a conversation radically different from the public shouting matches one sees on politics, media, and "The Internet", quietly pattering on through twenty thousand separate instances all around us all the time), but its principles also have broader applicability for anyone who feels that "our" cause is not being heard by "them". Our collective powers of imagination have atrophied, and have taken our ability to communicate down with them.

[Robert McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the final chapter, Ordway makes a case for creative apologetics, "not because the imagination is more important than the reason, or that the arts are more important than philosophy or theology, but because what we need most is integration. We need an approach that helps to show the wholeness of the Faith. For, after all, we are not merely making a few claims about the world, or about things that happened in the past; we are making a claim about the very nature of reality itself. There is nothing whatsoever in the heavens or the earth or under the earth that is outside our Faith."

Reading this, I was very aware of a deficiency in the Protestant record of including art in or alongside our apologetics. There is no shortage of excellent treatises, arguments, defenses, etc. coming from our tradition, but I simultaneously wonder why there are not more novels, films, music, and poetry that can handle outside criticism and give a beautiful and compelling testimony of faith. I think we could stand to humble ourselves and learn from Catholics like Ordway, who writes mainly to other Catholics but makes gestures across the aisle, referencing many from C.S. Lewis to Nabeel Qureshi. She maintains orthodoxy throughout this book, and any doctrine that would trouble a fellow Protestant remains peripheral by my judgement.

[Meagan | The Chapter House · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed a lot of this read--especially all the Lewis and Tolkien references! I can see why Ordway is a leading scholar especially of Tolkien.

There are certainly some divergences between her as a Catholic and me as a Protestant in this read, but a lot of overlaps as well, and I appreciate all the food for thought. Ordway does a great job at uniting apologetics with the imagination and the importance of both, not just one or the other.

[Dan Lawler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fantasy and the Gospel

Nowadays, says author Holly Ordway, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ consists of mere jargon-words with no substantial content and not much meaning to non-believers and believers alike. While the rational arguments of apologetics are necessary for indoctrination ("the most important tasks for the apologists is catechesis and formation inside the Church," Location 472), the evangelization of new converts requires the re-imaging of Biblical truths in a way that makes them appear more desirable to a jaded, materialistic culture. The gospel must be smuggled into the skeptical post-modern mind with the Trojan horse of fantasy, myth and metaphor. The more this messaging can escape rational analysis while appealing to the sub-conscious the better:

"The beauty of figurative language, used well, is that it can communicate truth both directly and intuitively, by its fittingness of image and meaning, even if the reader doesn't consciously understand it." Loc. 807.

"The effect of [C. S.] Lewis's subtle but persistent Christological focus is that the reader, probably without consciously realizing it, gains a sense of the meaning of who Christ is…." Loc. 717.

The goal of this sub-conscious programming is to influence the emotions so as to direct the human will toward a desired behavior: "Literature offers a mode of apologetics in which we can guide the natural human emotional response toward its right end and, by presenting truth in such a way that we are moved on the level of our emotions…." Loc. 1600. The process is intended to "harness" the mind in order "to guide the will toward a commitment to Christ." Loc. 295.

The main problem with this subliminal advertising for Christianity is it just doesn’t work. Adults are not converted to Christianity by fairy tales, not even by the good ones from Lewis and Tolkien. While the author credits her own conversion to Aslan, the talking lion of Lewis's Narnia, who convinced her that the Incarnation "could be true" (Loc. 231-235), she is the rare and possibly only exception to the rule. As for Tolkien, he did not write Lord of the Rings in order to cloak the glory of Christ in the "self-sacrifice of Frodo and the kingliness of Aragorn" as the author sees it. By his own account, Tolkien wrote the fantasy "because I wished to try my hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them."

Christian authors should write, musicians compose, and artists paint. If they are good at their craft and Christian at the core, their worldview will be represented in their work and both can be assessed and valued for what they are. But to treat art as a propaganda tool for religion diminishes both.

The author's own attempt at "imaginative apologetics" here ends up as quite off-putting. An earlier reviewer states that the "unabashedly Roman Catholic" author is "nothing if not irenic in tone." Not quite. The word irenic, in Christian theology, means tending towards the reconciliation of different denominations. Yet, among the components of "our Faith" advanced by the author are Transubstantiation, Purgatory, and the physical incorruptibility of the corpses of saints. In the book’s final chapter, the author wraps things up by discussing how "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church" and continues with an account of a Catholic who was hanged in Oxford in 1589 while "an Anglican priest in the crowd mocked him." (Loc. 2561.) To aggravate matters, the author refers to the hanged man as one of the "Oxford Martyrs" a term that in common usage refers to three Protestants who were burned at the stake for their faith in 1555 during the regime of "Bloody" Mary Tudor. Ironic, maybe, but certainly not irenic.

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely book. A needed book for the Church. The changes in our culture in the last few decades demand we think more deeply about the way we “defend our faith”. Ms Ordway points her finger in exactly the direction that needs to be followed. As a person who has worked in arts circles as a follower of Christ for the last two decades where imagination is important I think she precisely articulates not just “how” but “why” the Church needs to intentionally cultivate the imagination. We are more than our minds - Ordway never shuns good use of reason - but we are also creatures of will and heart - realms the imagination has greater influence. All followers of Christ - especially those in the Arts - should read this book and wrestle with its content.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Holly Ordway's thesis is one I've long intuited but never had such clear words to express: that since humans are not purely and solely rational creatures, our defense and presentation of the Christian faith must involve not only rational propositions but also the beauty and the meaning it offers. While imagination should not be the whole of apologetics, it is an element of the human experience too often ignored in sharing the faith.

I needed little convincing of her arguments; my reading and my own life have already demonstrated the truth of what she articulates here. However, I never have seen the ideas expressed so clearly, in such lovely, lucid, yet unfailingly scholarly prose.

Because I was already convinced, I read this book hoping for more practical ideas of how to bring the imagination into play in typical apologetic conversations. While Ordway does walk through excellent practical principles, her aim is not so much application as arguing for the inclusion of imagination in the first place. Because I was already on board, it took me much of the book to realize that most of the intention of the book was to get people on board. So I wasn't precisely the target audience. Still, a good read--and we even get a sampling of Ordway's considerable poetic talent!

[Catherine Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a few chapters for a school project several years ago and finally returned to it. The clarity and strength of Ordway’s writing is beautiful to read, and the ideas themselves are illuminating. I plan to return to this for future personal writing and research projects!

[Kelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read.

[J.J. Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much needed book for Christians desiring to articulate and defend their faith in an integrated way. The included poetry is also a nice touch.

[Gary Geraci · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book for aspiring Catholic artists and writers

Your art, my art, our art, is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and are the brushstrokes in God’s current and final Masterpiece. Thank you for this inspiring book and I loved your Sonnets at the end of each chapter. Now I’m off to make more brushstrokes...

[Curby Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am currently a student of Dr. Ordway at Houston Baptist University. She heads up the Cultural Apologetics Dept. This is a wonderful book on the role of imagination in apologetics. While not ignoring the need for sound arguments and debate, apologetics has been lacking in areas such as art, architecture, literature and music. Dr. Ordway is a Roman Catholic but instructs mainly Evangelicals at Houston Baptist. That is the kind of ecumenicalism that Christianity is in need of today. A must have for any apologist's library.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the core of Ordway's thesis is an important and necessary truth- reclaiming the power of story as a means of expressing the Gospel in a modernist world facing a kind of meaning crisis. If the old, rationalist pursuits have been found wanting, storytelling, or myth telling, is its counter.

And of course this requires cutting through the noise of those rationalist tendencies to reduce myth to something that is untrue. This of course fails to understand the true nature of myth telling as being anchored in historical truth. If we are to regain an ability to see reality as it truly is, this requires an ability to imagine reality in a way that attends for the full breadth of human experience. Ordway would label this incarnational truth.

This is in fact the thesis that drew me to this book, having heard and read Ordway elsewhere through articles, essays and lectures. Unfortunately though, this book quickly abandons this idea in favor of those old modern apologetic touchpoints. What begins as a necessary shift in terms of how we understand the role of apologetics reveals itself to be just another way into the same old practices. Thus much of the latter half of this book ends up as a litany of case studies, using storytelling to apologize common conservative touchpoints. Here it went from compelling to forgettable, and even tiring and eye rolling at points.

It's actually somewhat head scratching to be honest. How it is that someone with such a firm grasp on an important facet of the Gospel as story can be at the same time so mired in a need to reduce this modernist rhetoric and culture wars. Yes, worldview matters deeply to how we tell our story and what story we are telling, but that should be digging underneath the superfilialities of modernist christian apologetics, not guiding us straight back into it.

[Matt Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

heard her on *Unbelievable* w Justin Brierley . . very glad i did . . not only did she hit me w some Tolkien info I had not heard before . . (that he was, in fact, very aware of his fantasy genre predecessors and took that into account when doing LoTR, etc.) , but i enjoyed her overall approach so much, that i ordered this book . . this book here is excellent, though it does meander quite a bit and would benefit from a bit of re-organizing and cutting imo . . it also, imo, lives too much in the land of the overall theory or argument it's presenting and doesn't spend enough time working through how to actually live that argument out and apply it . . however, this is a big task and she did try . . giving it 5 stars for the overall power of the basic premises : that we need to focus on the imaginative power and meaning of the gospel in our apologetics as much as we do the truth . . that people won't care if the gospel is true if they don't first see it as meaningful, alluring, relevant, etc . . the way (basically) to achieve this is through the Christian imagination . . (basically) storytelling, art, music, etc . . it's a bit more complex than all this, of course - and as i said, she veers off track esp early in the book into some basics of hermeneutics, etc. - but that's the gist . . so . . 5 of 5 for this being such a great insight . . i only wish it were as simple a task to achieve as it is to (at least begin to) understand .

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good, thoughtful and short book which unfortunately feels as though it travels over too well-trodden ground. In its defence, the book is part of a wider Catholic series "Living Faith" which seeks to address particular Christian doctrines and viewpoints in ways that an educated but perhaps uninformed reader might engage with. Perhaps the fact that there is little new here that you wouldn't pick up from other books, is no criticism unless you happen to have read the other books.

More disappointing is the sense that Christian imaginative apologetics hasn't yet moved on from Tolkein and Lewis. Both are brilliant authors and apologists for the Christian faith, whose stars, if anything, have shone brighter since their death, but are there really no Christian writers, artists and poets alive today who have something to add to the subject? Also, wonderful that the Lord of the Rings is, I find it hard to declare it the greatest novel of the Twentieth Century. I know that there is inevitably some subjectivity in such a claim, but even so...

As an introduction to the subject it's good, but having read a few introductions I would have enjoyed something a little more mind-stretching.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An primer on an unexplored field of apologetics

Dr. Ordway poses several insightful questions about the effectiveness of the Evangelical Christian as an apologist to a post-christian culture. Then she brings to bear on those questions the factors of using creative, imaginative and not overtly Christian tools to dialogue with the culture.
Her examination and discussion these matters proof effective at raising other questions: who is equipped to do this? What is the expected results? How can such a tool be exercised? But those questions may take more than a brief treatise such as she provides her. The good thing is, she got me thinking about them. I am sure she will do the same for you.
If apologetics is your area of concern, be sure to read this valuable work.

[Kevin Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent look at how creating art - and not art whose meanings are explicit, but art which requires thoughtful interpretation - is a necessary means of not only expressing faith, but also defending it. This book will require a re-read - some heavy theological and apologetic lifting - but the idea that we aren't called upon to create art which is blatantly proselytizing, but called upon to create art which leads audiences/viewers/readers into thoughtful reflection and interpretation, was extremely heartening, especially for a guy like me, who long ago found himself called to write in the horror/weird/speculative genre, and who also has a healthy dislike/distrust of "Christian Fiction."

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ordway makes a strong case for an integrated approach to apologetics that is both rational and imaginative, tapping into both intellectual and emotional objections and explanations for faith. She draws heavily from Lewis throughout, and while coming from a distinctly Roman Catholic perspective, Christians of the Protestant tradition should find much of value here for our own approach to apologetics.

[Audra Gayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, I read Dr. Ordway's memoir Not God's type, and she introduced me to imaginative apologetics. As an avid reader, this field of study fascinated me. If you're interested on how literature and arts can be used as a way to point others to Christ, this book is for you. Be advised: Dr. Ordway is writing from a Catholic perspective. This doesn't bother me at all, but I just want you to be aware that you might not agree 100% on every point.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having only studied Apologetics as a reasonable/propositional defense, I found Ordway’s charge to integrate reason and imagination compelling. Through my literature studies this year, I can attest to the powerful way art gives meaning to truth. I especially enjoyed the chapters on language and how we can use imaginative Apologetics to recover lost meanings for some words.

[Anthony Rewak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book on Imaginative Apologetics with a special focus on how the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien can service the task of Evangelisation, with applicability to extend to other creative works. Good theory and great references to other works on Faith, Imagination, and Meaning. A good introductory work that also covers a range of problems that can be addressed with charity and truth.

[Michael Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on defending the Faith. The imagination is a critical (and lost) component in bringing others to the Faith, allowing us to share the truth in fresh ways, through relatable stories like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Lewis's Narnia series, and through poetry, like we see the Lord Himself do in the parables or the book of Job.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, accessible approach to apologetics. Makes a strong case for the integration of truth, beauty and goodness in appealing to the human heart. A fine synopsis of why and how to remove obstacles to the Faith.

[Bob Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful. Well said. Thought-provoking. Anyone who considers themselves to be some kind of Christian apologist (which should be every Christian) needs to read this book!

[David Bruyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing

Helpful thoughts on imagination begin but never really take flight. Far too dogmatically Romanist to be helpful to most Protestants.

[Jessica Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the way she blended literature and linguistics with apologetics!

[Ming Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good. I ought to re-read this sometime. Ordway does occasionally reference distinctly Catholic doctrine, but it is not too big of a focus.