Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation

Lanta Davis

Baker Academic

July 30, 2024

240 pages

The opening words of Lanta Davis’ Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation led me to expect a much different kind of book. Davis writes, “Christians live in an enchanted–perhaps even a magical–world. Resurrection overcomes death, wine becomes blood, and water imparts salvation. Full of mystery, surprises, and paradoxes, Christianity is a faith of the upside down, a holy beautiful confusion.”

But Davis does not then write about “re-enchanting the world” in a way that fans of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis might expect, perhaps by creating a Middle-earth with its own history, language, and mythology. I might have enjoyed such a book, but what Davis has in mind becomes clear (and compelling) soon enough. Instead, she writes about “the art of fashioning the soul,” using the imagination as the way to spiritual formation and development.

Davis, a professor of Humanities and Literature at John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, divides her book into three parts: orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. In other words, “forming right belief”, “forming right practice”, and “forming moral character.”

To someone like me, whose faith was shaped and formed almost entirely by catechetical instruction (beginning in the third grade) and exegetical preaching, this book opens a wholly new way of thinking about and experiencing spiritual formation. Davis spends little time critiquing the way most people experience spiritual formation today. Still, it seems clear that she means to offer an alternative to, even a radical departure from, how most Christians find their spiritual selves shaped and formed today.

In Part 1, Davis introduces iconography and invites readers to engage with one of the world’s oldest surviving icons—Christ the Pantocrator, from the fifth or sixth century, which can be found today at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. (The middle of the book contains 20 pages of color photos of icons, church architecture, and Christian art, so the reader doesn’t have to search the Internet while reading.)

Davis’s reflection on Christ the Pantocrator and what the icon reveals about Christ was both compelling and startling–compelling because her insights are profound, and surprising because people raised in Reformed churches are not used to finding so much theological truth and depth in art. Instead of becoming idols, Icons can be used to combat and resist every form of idolatry.

I confess that Davis’s discussion of bestiaries was almost entirely new to me, but fascinating and persuasive nonetheless. She writes, “We don’t hear much about bestiaries today, but they were remarkably popular and influential for most of the history of Christianity.” I found myself determined to find out more.

In Part 2, Davis introduces readers to sacred space and takes us on a tour of church architecture. She is restrained in her critique of most church architecture today, but seeing how architecture was used in the early centuries of the Church leads the reader almost inevitably to the conclusion that much of church architecture today is utterly shallow in its meaning and quite possibly at odds with the Christian gospel itself. Modern churches exist, she writes, for people seeking a “holy fix” instead of fixing our eyes on Jesus.

Finally, in Part 3, Davis introduces readers to the art of moral character through “avoiding evil” and “doing good.” Davis uses Dante’s Divine Comedy as a guide ( she convinced me, among other things, that I needed to re-read that particular work). Readers are not only introduced to various vices but also to their corresponding virtues. The art of imitating virtues is revealed to the reader in Lady Fortitude, Lady Temperance, Lady Justice, and Lady Prudence.

Davis writes that many challenges facing the Christian church today, like nationalism, consumerism, and partisan politics, result from a crisis of imagination. However, the book is almost entirely about the cure, not the disease. Perhaps tying the cure more closely to the toxic qualities of much of evangelical Christianity would have given the book a more urgent quality, but Davis (perhaps to her credit) has chosen to keep her focus elsewhere, helping the reader to notice how the church in its early centuries was profoundly different in the way it taught and interpreted faith.

As I read, I wondered about the book’s intended audience. I could not imagine most church book discussion groups taking on a book like this, though reading and discussing it would be far more rewarding than most chosen books. My guess is that Davis wrote with her university students in mind. They, after all, would be in the late stages of faith formation and might be uniquely positioned to absorb the contents of a book like this one. I could imagine them asking themselves questions about their own faith formation, the Sunday school curricula that formed them, and the worship spaces where they first caught glimpses of Jesus. I am delighted that Christian university students today are being challenged this way.

(Note: Davis’s work on the Christian imagination and formation has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, Smithsonian Magazine, Plough, and Christ and Pop Culture.)