Finding True North: An academic reconciles reason and imagination

I came to see that those few months of intense research and reflection in which I considered my atheism did not mark so much a change, as a tipping point. When I encountered arguments and evidence for Christianity, my reason was finally able to align with my imagination, which, like a compass needle, had tremulously pointed toward true north for many years. (pp.xvi-xvii)

She begins in her childhood and early academic career, where interaction with fantasy novels like Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings painted a picture of a world that “felt right.” Specifically, Tolkien’s works “had a place for both hope and disappointment, achievement and failure....It was a world in which there is darkness, but also real light, a light that shines in the darkness and is not extinguished” (p.25).

Fantasy and imagination echoed the longings of her soul that she could not quite define. She admits, however, that her imagination was long at odds with her atheistic beliefs. She had treated art and literature as if they had real meaning but failed to acknowledge that this contradicted her belief that life itself had no meaning (p.11).

So, while the seeds sown by imagination lay dormant in her life, her first steps toward coming to faith came in the form of a series of intellectual and rational debates with her fencing coach (yes, she fences, with swords — hence the subtitle). The majority of the book details how, with patience and respect, Josh walked her through logical arguments first for the existence of a First Cause (a cause outside of the universe that brought it into being), then to a personal First Cause called God, and eventually to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, leading to Christian faith. Her journey here was primarily a journey of reason, or, as she describes it, of bringing her reason in line with her imagination. The final few chapters of the story chronicle her move from the Protestant world to Roman Catholicism:

I was too Catholic-minded to feel entirely at home in the Evangelical world, though that was the context for most of my apologetics ministry, but I was too theologically conservative to feel entirely at home in the Anglican world, either. (p.164)

She uses C. S. Lewis’ image (from Mere Christianity) of Christianity as a house. With "mere" Christianity one enters the house and finds a hallway. However, one cannot linger forever in the hall, one must choose a room (i.e., a strand of tradition) to dwell in and “[b]oth reason and imagination pointed me in one direction, toward the Catholic Church” (p.182).

I appreciate Ordway’s well-written metaphors that not only clarify and undergird her narrative, but beautify it. For example, she tells the story of how, when she was around eight years old, she didn’t know she needed glasses and just assumed that the fuzzy world around her was normal. Then, her brother handed her his glasses and she realized with sharp clarity just what she had been missing. Now, as an adult, she feels on edge without her glasses. She uses this as a metaphor for her life as an atheist, “when I consider my life before I knew Christ, I recognize how limited my vision was” (p.6).

I also appreciate the structure of her story. She interweaves chapters detailing her move to faith with “Interludes” describing special moments of her life after coming to faith. Her work is not so much a three-act play as a poem or a symphony. Ordway breaks her story into stanzas and artistically inserts snippets of her post-conversion life into the main storyline. In a sense, she gives away the end right at the beginning and beautifully interweaves her far past with her recent experience.

Her story is not just a nice and interesting story of how an atheist became a Christian, it is an apologetic in and of itself, a compelling argument for how and why Christian outreach to non-believers should be done in a way that marries the rational and the imaginative. It is this account — the account of the necessity of reason and imagination in apologetics and how successful such an approach can be — that makes her work of utmost significance to Christian apologetics today. In her words,

Too often in apologetics today, Christians are tempted to look for silver-bullet arguments, the right thing to say at the right time so that the other person will concede....Or worse, apologists may treat argument as a rhetorical kung-fu move to "defeat" or "crush" an atheist....All too often, we talk past the very people we are trying to help. (p.xv-xvi)