E. Stephen Burnett says:

(Resisting the urge to include HTML tags …) By the way, one can edit that way, by clicking the little HTML button on the new toolbar, to open a pop-up editor.

Some replies to Kaci — and Kaci, I’m agreeing with everything you said, yet you’re taking things in a slightly different direction, and either missing what I wrote about how all this imagination stuff is secondary anyway, and/or perhaps missing it because I wasn’t clear enough about that.

(Immediate EDIT: all this also applies to what Esther was writing, while I was also writing this reply, about how no amount of Christian-imagination “teaching,” present or past, can make up for a rebellious human heart that is determined to distort and abuse God’s gifts of truth-seeking and imagination.)

I kinda worry about people who marry simply to, ah, ‘relieve the burning.’ I know it’s not true in all cases, but I’d be too worried that, with nothing else to found said marriage on, it’d quickly turn toxic and abusive (not necessarily physically).

I’d definitely worry about this too, yet I wasn’t referring to getting married only for motives of physical intimacy. Instead it’s a benefit. Yet we mustn’t relegate that, even implicitly, to the level of bonus-feature-we-don’t-make-a-big-deal-about. (Not that I’m saying you did this — I just know people who have, and I know I have before.)

Marriage should be based on deeper love and commitment to honor Christ first, yet it’s also greatly aided by resultant emotions/passions. One can certainly stay married without having those emotions, just as one can stay in a local church that isn’t driven by delight in Christ and the Gospel. But it’s far better to have the delight and joy. In fact, it’s a Biblical command for a Christian marriage/church to have those.

The same is true for Christian imagination: it’s based on truth, and desire to honor Christ, and yet fueled by and echoed by our resultant emotions/passions.

I don’t really know that Paul was talking strictly about people who couldn’t control themselves; he elsewhere talks about self-control within the marriage bonds, so he clearly seems to think that can go badly.

Nonfiction rises again! But of course I enjoy that just as much. Here’s the passage, 1 Corinthians 7, written in the context of a local church with a lot of immorality and other disgusting stuff going on. Lots of controversies here, and not everything is clear (especially the chapter’s latter half, about the time being short, and people may stay single or get married, and is it a father/fiance marrying his betrothed or marrying off his daughter or whatever?). But the earlier parts are clearer, such as verses 8 and 9:

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

Burn with passion isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. It’s legitimate desire to be with the other person, to be intimate, in all ways — emotionally, physically, even “spiritually” in a way. Better to get married sooner, Paul says, than delay it and stay single, because if you do have those desires, they’re legitimate and mean you should get married if you can. And he does make it clear: not “exercis[ing] self-control” here is not a sin. Getting married is also not a sin, though Ministry reasons might exist for why you might not.

I’m still not wild about this use of ‘imagination,’ btw. It seems to be trying to hybridize the creative realm of fiction and the inventive ways in which we deceive ourselves. I suppose it’s a difference of scope, but I really don’t want to be using the term interchangeably.

Again, it’s the difference between imagination abuse and real, God-glorifying use of imagination. But I can understand not wanting to confuse the terms. You’re right — creative self-deception the way Camping and his followers have done is not at all on the same level as glorious, God-delighting “subcreator”-style imagination. It’s like saying a pedophile is “in love” with those he abuses in the same way a Godly or even decent husband and wife are in love. I’ll make the distinction more clear in the future.

Plus, it seems to legitimize his bad theology by putting it in the same category as speculating the end times.

Not my intent, though, which is why I targeted how Camping corrupted truth first and then abused his gift of imagination secondarily. Any use of imagination should be based on truth — a topic I hope to explore more in the next parts of this series.

It’s one thing to imagine a world in which Christ didn’t come, or in which the rules were different. It’s quite another to set out to change those rules.

… Change the rules for this world — exactly.

That’s why I still, even as an attempting doctri-nerd who after the whole Camping debacle wants to turn into an Amillennialist just for spite, have some appreciation for the much-maligned (often unfairly) Left Behind series. Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins weren’t saying Christ could come in our era (or the mid-90s, when the series began). They were asking a very speculative question: what if He did, and in this way? What would it look like? That’s completely legitimate use of imagination, and I believe they made it clear they were speculating. (Whether they did a good job writing, or people understood that, or had their own date-setting impulses fed, are other issues.)

I think I could give him any novel I wanted and it wouldn’t by default prevent him from thinking what he wanted or change his mind. Books may influence theology, but they can’t create them.

Amen times ten. But — still speculating here — if one could time-travel back decades ago when Camping was still acting more orthodox, to change history, and had some assurance that both time and people could be rewritten, I do believe that exposure to Christ-influenced imagination done right could have helped. But absolutely, that would be secondary to the main need for his sinful impulses to be changed from the inside-out, and ultimately only the Holy Spirit can do that.

Camping’s primary problem is (I believe this is proven even more true now) spiritual arrogance, sourced by an unregenerate heart. He doesn’t act saved. If he dies in this condition, he’ll have proved that he never was saved. Christians don’t act like this and make a practice of sinning, without repenting. (Source: 1 John.)

So yes, absolutely, only giving him fun novels — the best stuff Christendom has come up with, even by the Patron Saints of Christian Visionary Fiction, Lewis and Tolkien — would not have helped at all. I hope I never gave the impression I thought otherwise.

In fact, for all we know Camping knew about Christian imagination done right and overtly rejected it — just as he rejected the truth in the church where he used to be, and which did its job by disciplining him (yes!) when he started going off the rails, after which he (of course) decided the Holy Spirit had left the churches, and salvation was no longer available inside even orthodox-believing Gospel-driven churches.

You know, I stopped reading some sci-fi/fantasy because it was doing weird things to me? And you know, I have a friend who can’t read This Present Darkness because of her  previous dabblings in the occult. She just doesn’t think it’s a good idea. This line of thought would insist she read it.

I’d say that would be a distortion of my thought: wanting the results, but not the heart-level change that must precede it. Insisting someone hurl themselves into God-honoring imagination, without having the impulse to honor God in the first place — which can only come from repentance and acceptance of the Gospel — wouldn’t work at all. Not only that, it’s legalism: enacting another Do-This, without a Why.

Maybe that was an error above: I assumed the Gospel of repentance and faith in Christ.

I think if he had that part right, he’d never have done it. But it doesn’t matter how many books you read; that’s a matter of the heart. If the Bible doesn’t teach him, I don’t know a novelist on this planet who could. We’re good, buddy, but we’re not that good.

Agreed: not a chance. Not even the Patron Saints of Christian Visionary Fiction are that good. Even now readers claiming to be “familiar” with them will claim they said or meant things they never did (more recently, Rob Bell, totally missing the point of The Great Divorce, claimed it supports his beliefs in non-permanent Hell). So there’s no chance only great fiction, without a heart-level change that only the Holy Spirit could use to regenerate his spiritually dead heart, would have helped Camping.