Imagination, Truth, & Salvation

Thus Susan R., from the comments on this post:

It was helpful to learn more about EOC theology, and also useful for me to realize through reading your posts that a fair chunk of my motivation in moving further into the Anglican church (and therefore moving further away from the evangelical church) has to do with “aesthetic considerations,” for lack of a better phrase. I’m not talking about beautiful church buildings or vestments or music—though I do think all that is distantly related to what I’m referring to—I’m referring mainly to the language of their theology.

I don’t know if that’s very clear. More concretely: It was the phrase “salvation as inclusion into story” in your earlier post that piqued my curiosity, and in the second post your references to narrative, drama, plot, arc, etc., tipped me off to the realization that I’m drawn to theology that reads more like literature than lecture. And I really don’t think it’s compelling because it sounds prettier; it’s because it actually sounds truer somehow. For example, I am suspicious of Calvinism because it seems to me that it is trying to flatten out and square up and then dice all of scripture into nice, rectangular pages of lecture notes—and that strikes me not only as unappealing but also as unlikely. When is truth ever so neat and tidy? (Particularly the truth about an actual Person?)

Yes, and I think that a lot of evangelicalism is an emotional relief ("I am loved.  I am not going to hell") but an existential prison for exactly this reason.  It puts one in a satisfying relationship to the past ("I am forgiven") and to the present ("I am loved"), but the future becomes a suspiciously tidy affair.

A nice light read (really) on this subject: Bishop Kallistos Ware's How Are We Saved?  The Understanding of Salvation in The Orthodox Tradition.  

Money quotes that I think apply to your paragraphs above:

"Human free will is an essential condition, for without it even God Himself does nothing." -- Macarius

"Through our bodies we relate to the material environment around us, and so our sanctification implies the sanctification of that environment as well.  We are not saved from but with the world."

"We are to treat the world as a sacrament of God's presence, and to regard everything created as theophanic." 

Susan continues: 

Anyway, if you ever find yourself flailing about for topics here at the Riparian Church, I propose some rambling about the possible relationship between truth and beauty in theological language.

 You mention your journey into Anglicanism as being a bit of a relief at this level.  I can certainly understand why, and I think your reasons are wonderfully well articulated: there's something seriously shallow about the evangelical articulation of salvation, at least in its barest form, and Protestantism forsakes history by its inattention to beauty.