Imagination: The Bible as art, not history
After a month of seminary, my mind was in the process of being blown. Despite many years of studying the Bible on my own and with my church friends, I was learning about translation, history, cultural assumptions, and literature. It was extremely uncomfortable. One morning in my “Hermeneutics and Exegesis I” class, the professor asked us to relax, close our eyes, and listen. He then began to read to us from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. A lover of fantastical forest creatures and of Tolkien, I was immediately transported to the green hills of the Shire leading into the Misty Mountains.
When he finished, my professor asked if we had been able to enter the story. “YES!” we all enthusiastically exclaimed. “To have that experience,” he said, “you need to suspend your disbelief, the part of your brain that is telling you, ‘this is impossible’. That’s the way to read Scripture. We are not here to prove if the Bible is a historical fact, but to be transported into the story.”
I responded as I often respond when I am faced with an idea that makes me uncomfortable. I called bullshit and chose to ignore it. The Bible IS true, I said. It is not just a piece of fantasy literature. Jesus is not Frodo Baggins! J.R.R. Tolkien is not God.
Twenty years later, I have shifted to finding the truths in the Scriptural literature that has been handed down to us. Those truths are made more real through the arts of story, poetry, conversation, and, yes, even fantasy.
I had another experience of suspending my disbelief recently when I re-watched Bohemian Rhapsody, a film about the band Queen and their iconic frontman Freddie Mercury. It is obvious that things are out of time. In the film Freddie reveals his AIDS status to his bandmates while they are rehearsing in a church for Live-Aid. In fact, he was not diagnosed until a few years later. The film amplifies divisions in the band when Freddie was working on his solo album. And (I’ll offer a spoiler alert even though the film is 4 years old) he did not find his lifelong partner, introduce him to his parents, reconcile with his family and with his lifelong friend, Mary, all in the 3 hours leading up to their historic Live-Aid performance in Wembley stadium (the old one).
Despite the impossible timing, in that sequence, we see all the things that we should take away from the life of Freddie Mercury: his hunger and zest for a full life in the face of death, his need for family—blood and chosen—his joy and power that he could share with thousands of people all at once, his musical genius, and, ultimately, how an entire world embraced him for all these things even as the tabloids speculated about his forbidden sex life.
I could read that in a history, or an analysis of his life, but that sequence sinks into my bones and my heart, because Bohemian Rhapsody is not a historical document. It is a piece of art.
The Bible is also a piece of art. Thank God it is not a historical document. History doesn’t change the world. In fact, the wisdom tells us we are doomed to repeat it. But art. Art moves us. This is where the Spirit dwells, in our imaginations and experiences of wonder.
Writer Glennon Doyle says, “Imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.” The Bible as art ignites our imaginations to remember who we are, and who God is.
