– three –
Reaching Out
Getting a Grip on the Imagination
The reaching of the imagination towards a new world is the result of God’s reaching towards us.
DEFINING THE IMAGINATION: SEEKING POSSIBILITY
What exactly is the imagination? That depends on whom you ask. Scholars have noted “a groundswell of philosophical interest in imagination” in the twenty-first century.1 Yet the imagination is so multidimensional (one scholar lists twelve irreducible conceptions!) that it is notoriously difficult to define. Perhaps imagining is better recognized than defined: we know it intuitively when we see it (or do it!).2 Yet the danger is that without a clear definition, the imagination might become a conceptual junk drawer gathering many miscellaneous things.3
In order to make my argument that taking the imagination seriously is central to the task of making belief believable in an age of authenticity, I need to clarify what I mean by imagination. That is the aim of this chapter: to create a philosophical and theological framework for a reimagined apologetic. This chapter will proceed in three movements. First, I wish to define the imagination as a faculty concerned with possibility. Second, I will defend the imagination as responsive to real presence. Third, I want to direct the imagination for participation in the theodrama of Scripture. My goal is to sketch an account of the imagination in which the human person responds to divine presence by seeing, sensing, and shaping possibility in the created world.
Let me begin with a clarifying claim. Imagining is a strategic, intentional, and embodied activity that suspends actuality for the sake of reality. If that sounds dense, let me break it into four parts, which I will examine and illustrate in turn. First, imagining is a strategic activity. In imagining we aim to accomplish something we could not accomplish any other way. Second, imaginings have intentional content: we always aim the imagination at something. Third, there is a bodily basis for all human imagining: our embodied experience of the world provides structure for what we can imagine. Fourth, the imagination suspends actuality for the sake of reality: we can imagine things that do not exist, but our ultimate goal is to grasp the world more securely.
Let us consider these claims using a line from John Lennon’s classic song: “Imagine all the people living life in peace.”4 My purpose here is not to deliberate over the content of Lennon’s proposal but to examine his use of the word imagine as illustrative of my claims.
First, imagining is a strategic state. Notice that Lennon is using the word imagine in a way that exceeds some ordinary uses of the word. For example, I might say, “I imagined that traffic would be light today, but my commute took an hour.” In this case, the word imagine is used to refer to a mistaken assumption, an ill-considered projection. Alternatively, in response to complaints that there is “nothing to do,” I might say to my son, “Use your imagination!” In this case, I mean something like “make-believe,” proposed as a way to cope with childhood boredom.5 In neither example is the imagination granted “real world” significance. Imagining consists either of idle speculation or immature escape. The real world, it would seem, requires evidence-based investigation and concrete thinking.6 But it is clear that Lennon is using “imagine” in a way that exceeds both conjecture and escape. He is counseling a consideration of possibilities—a suspension of disbelief—which he believes can erupt into reality.7
If the imagination is nothing more than an idle faculty for amateur thinkers and immature dreamers, no serious theory of imagination would be necessary. What requires a theory of imagination is the recognition that we use the imagination strategically to get a better grasp of the world. Lennon clearly believes that responding to his imaginative invitation will result in a more peaceful, united world. Imagining is strategic: there is something that can be accomplished by imagining that cannot be accomplished by any other mental state. And therefore, as philosopher Amy Kind puts it, “imagination deserves its own box.”8
Second, imaginings have intentional content. This is a technical way of saying that we don’t just “imagine” in general; our imaginings are always about something. This is even the case in the cases I gave above. I may tell my son “use your imagination,” but without additional context, he will be unable to comply with my command. The imagination only works by latching onto concrete content, aiming at some possible object or situation. For my son, the implied context is a room full of Legos. What I mean is something like, “Point your imagination at your Legos, and see what you come up with.” But this intentionality can go either direction: either we point the imagination toward the world, or we find the world pointing into us, impressing something on our imaginations. So, I could just as easily mean, “Let the Legos stimulate your imagination and see what you come up with.” Both the projection of his imagination toward the Legos and the Legos’ impression of particular images on his imagination are acts of imagining, as is the negotiation of the two, the “seeing what you come up with.”
Similarly, when we consider the more sophisticated imaginative activity recommended by Lennon, we find that he is not prescribing imagination in the abstract but the exploration of a very particular set of possibilities. We are directed to consider the possibility of a world without national or religious boundaries. How do we imagine this? What images impress themselves on us? How do these images resonate with our sense of the way that things are and the way that they could be? Another way of saying this is that imagining is not mere daydreaming, empty-minded musing on nothing in particular. Imagining seeks to bring real content before our field of perception.
Third, there is a bodily basis for all human imagining. Imagining doesn’t just take place in brains on sticks but in bodies.9 This means that our embodied experience of the world provides the structure for what we imagine. We can imagine all sorts of possibilities but not anything we wish. As philosopher Julia Jansen explains, “An imagined object or scene is imagined as being seen, heard, smelled, tasted and/or touched. An object that . . . cannot be experienced in at least one of these modes is ‘unimaginable’ in the relevant sense.”10 Furthermore, the world around us is already organized (as we perceive it) according to our bodily position in it. Think of our most common prepositions: up, down, in, out, around, and through. All of these have an unavoidable connection to our bodily existence in the world.11 Our embodied embeddedness in the world is the ground of us being able to make meaning of the world, as well as the impetus for the search. We are inescapably invested; “because we are in the world,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “we are condemned to meaning.”12 We cannot separate imaginative cognition from embodied coping. As the imagination does its work, it works within the limiting structure of the body.
When Lennon asks us to “imagine all the people living life in peace,” imaginative clarity requires the simulation of sensory details. Perhaps we imagine the sight of people smiling and simply going about everyday activities undisturbed by violence. Perhaps we imagine the sound of laughter and celebration. Perhaps we imagine the smell of food as people eat together. Without sensory details, imaginings fail to captivate and connect. We are aware that the objects evoked are not present, and yet we make them present to our consciousness through the act of imagining.13 Though the imagination is capable of tremendous flights of fancy, it remains anchored to reality by the body, which always remains part of the real world.14
This leads to our final claim, that the imagination suspends actuality for the sake of reality. Here we see the goal of the strategic intentionality described in the first two claims. What sets the imagination apart from other sorts of perception like memory, belief, or speculation is that the imagination need not be directed toward something that actually exists. The possibilities we ponder often side-step the real world: reimagining history, violating social and cultural convention, even ignoring physical laws, such as, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!” When I imagine Superman leaping tall buildings with a single bound, the fact that Superman does not actually exist cannot keep me from imagining him. To put it technically: Superman’s existence (his ontological status) is not a necessary condition for the imagination. We may have mistaken memories, beliefs, or perceptions, but these faculties are at least aimed at actuality. We expect our memories, beliefs, or perceptions generally to be accurate as they can guide us to grip the world. But the imagination can also consciously aim itself toward non-actuality, toward what we know to be fictional.
With respect to Lennon’s song, even if I know that the world actually has national borders and religious affiliations, I am nevertheless able to ponder a fictional world without these features. But here is a critical distinction: to say that the imagination need not be aimed at the real world (of what is actual) is not the same as saying that the imagination is not aimed at reality itself.15 As I will argue later in this chapter, it is precisely this capacity to disconnect from actuality that enables it, by simulation, to grasp reality more fully.
With this foundation in place, let me restate my claim in a less technical way: the imagination is the embodied human faculty concerned with possibility. The imagination perceives possible ways of being in the world, is captivated by other possibilities, and seeks to negotiate a space for life amid possibility. We may use our imagination to relive memories, make metaphors, or to escape from boredom, but what I am most interested in is why we do all these things. In exercising out imaginations, we are looking for connection amid chaos, using our imagination as an “organ of meaning.”16 We must make sense of the world. But paradoxically, we seek concrete meaning by moving in a subjunctive mood, exploring possibilities, in search of a firmer grip on reality, using the imagination as an organ of truth.
Thus far I have been content simply to describe the activity of the imagination in terms of how it helps humans “feel their way into” making sense of the world.17 In doing so I have sidestepped several significant philosophical conversations about the relationship of imagination and objective (noumenal) reality. But now it is time to step back briefly into those conversations. Insofar as my argument concerns an exploration of specifically Christian possibilities, it is necessary to move from descriptive to normative claims. Thus far I have argued that we cannot separate our imagining from the everyday search for meaning. Our imaginings help us cope with the world in which we are inescapably invested.
But while our imaginings are not less than coping mechanisms for existential crises, they can also be more. We use our imaginations not just to cope with crisis but also to connect with community, responding to embodied others and perhaps to an Absolute Other as well. So how might we defend the imagination as a means of not just practical knowledge (how to navigate the world) but also contemplative knowledge (how to connect with ultimate reality)? Can we ground our imaginings in reality? And is it possible that some of the possibilities we ponder might actually be “authored,” bearing the signature of the divine? This section requires a more technical level of discussion, and those who are not as philosophically inclined may wish to proceed to the third section of this chapter, titled “Directing the Imagination.”
DEFENDING THE IMAGINATION: SIGNIFYING PRESENCE
There is a long tradition in philosophy of being skeptical about the connection between perception and reality.18 David Hume is representative: he held that since all knowledge is mediated through the senses, we only have access to our image-ideas of the world. Do I really know my wife, or do I merely know my idea of my wife? Hume exposed the imaginative leaps inherent in staples of human thought: abstract ideas, causality, personal identity, historical knowledge, and moral sentiment. Under the scrutiny of Hume’s empiricism, all of the above were reduced to subjective invention without an empirical ground. The situation was unenviable and intractable: “the worlds of reason and of reality . . . are both fictions of imagination. . . . We have therefore, no choice but betwixt a false reason and none at all.”19
Plenty of thinkers rose to answer Hume’s challenge. Some, like Thomas Reid, argued for a common-sense realism, arguing that a person who is not sure that the world external to his senses actually exists is akin to a person who believes himself to be made of glass.20 But more followed Immanuel Kant, who doubled down on the imagination’s synthetic power. Hume was right, Kant argued, that categories like time and space had to be imagined. But far from being arbitrary, these imaginative projections were feats of consciousness, reflexively provided to facilitate an intelligible experience of the world.21 This radical affirmation of human consciousness ushered the imagination from the philosophical margins to the center of discussions of ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics.22 With the Romantic movement a visionary paradigm of imagination rose to ascendancy. Aristotle’s mirror, which reproduced reality, was replaced by a lamp, which could provide the world a light of its own.23 Shelley famously announced that poets were society’s new priests, “hierophants of unapprehended inspiration . . . the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”24
This visionary paradigm was not unprecedented, having roots in Neoplatonic philosophy and medieval mysticism.25 But what was new was the way that the mystical vision was increasingly domesticated. In other words, rather than receiving meaning from the depths of some external reality (God or being), the imagination was seen as its own source. William Desmond sees in the Romantic movement an “aesthetic will to power,”26 and it is not surprising that the imagination would be subjected to the scalpel of postmodern suspicion.27 In an ironic return to skepticism, deconstructionism eroded confidence that imagining had any ground in some originating source. Instead all we have are signs referring to other signs, and it is signs “all the way down.” In postmodern philosophy, Richard Kearney writes, we find a parodic imagination, manifesting in the ironic play of endless intertextuality. The parodic imagination is the inversion of mimesis, denying any original source beyond our imaginative reproductions. The imaginative mirror has been revealed to be just one more carnival mirror, endlessly reflecting and refracting perspectives in intentional or unintentional parody. In an age of screens, selfies, and social media saturation, we feel the force of the postmodern critique.
So where does the imagination go after the postmodern turn? Is there a way to move beyond the play of parody? Kearney himself offers a way forward: the recognition of presence. The presence of embodied others who are not reducible to myself furnishes me with an ethical imperative. When I encounter someone who is not myself, coping must also make space for care. In the spirit of Emmanuel Levinas, Kearney writes, “Here and now I face an other who demands of me an ethical response.” Here is an image with a concrete referent: “the ethical existence of the other as an other—the inalienable right to be recognized as a particular person whose very otherness refuses to be reduced to a mimicry of sameness.”28 Deconstruction may be a necessary step for exposing power, but we must do more than tear down imaginative pretensions. Eventually deconstruction’s thunder must fall silent before the face of the other, whose presence demands to be taken seriously. Indeed, Kearney suggests that the role of the imagination in hypermodernity is precisely this: to respond to presence, to negotiate “the relationship between the self and the other.”29 To put it technically, Kearney’s solution focuses the phenomenological lens in a personalistic way. Once concerned with connecting to and representing reality, now the imagination’s constructive function is oriented toward social coping and cooperation, enabling understanding and empathy in a fragmented and violent world.
Kearney’s personalism highlights the necessity of human solidarity, and this is a good start. But we must also say more than this: flourishing requires more than just an account of social cohesiveness. In light of local and global crises, a theory of imaginative care is needed where negotiating “the relationship between the self and the other” includes not just economy but also ecology, our relationship to the physical environment that we inhabit. Furthermore, a theological account of the imagination concerns the role of the imagination in negotiating our sense of being addressed by the divine, the Wholly Other. In other words, there is a givenness to the world, full of an otherness “which flows through me without my being its author.”30 If we can find a way to make sense of this, we can also find a better ground for our profoundly felt responsibility to care for human persons and non-human creation.
Literary critic George Steiner helps us take this further step, arguing that our encounter with otherness has more than just social implications; it has aesthetic and theological implications. Steiner writes that art is essential to our humanity because it trains our imaginations in hospitality. For it is in great works of art that we encounter “real presence,” an otherness that breaks in, interrupts, and confronts us with an invitation we cannot ignore. Steiner writes: “The voice of intelligible form . . . asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’”31 Aesthetic experience is generative: by its very nature it forces us to make sense of surprising new possibilities. As the poet Rilke reminds us, aesthetic encounters make a claim on us: “You must change your life.”32
Perhaps we have all experienced this. A spark of insight when composing a song, a flash of wonder beneath the stars, a smile from a child that seizes us with an overwhelming sense of the goodness of existence. In such moments we feel that we are receiving something that we know is not of our making, not reducible to ourselves. Aesthetic experience, Steiner argues, calls us to imaginative hospitality. It calls us to respect and receive the otherness of the presence that knocks on the door of our hearts, to allow it to become our teacher. Steiner writes that we must “allow ourselves to touch or not to touch, to be touched or not be touched by the presence of the other. . . . The issue is that of civility . . . towards the inward savour of things.”33 Aesthetic experiences rarely fit neatly within our philosophical frameworks. They are saturated phenomena where the experience exceeds our categories to contain it.34 Yet our inability to grasp completely what is confronting us does not limit its ability to affect us. Steiner’s example is the power of music: “How music possesses us is a question to which we know no credible, let alone materially examinable answer. All we have are further images. And the defiant self-evidence of human experience.”35 The succession of images need not be parodic, especially when their cumulative effect shapes us in ways that enlarge our souls.
Steiner’s most provocative argument, however, is his central one: that we must assume the presence of a transcendent Other in order to have meaning at all. God may or may not be there, he says, but we must suspend disbelief and wager God’s existence in order to experience meaning. In other words, works of imagination stand on their own as phenomena full of felt meaning in search of a ground, even if we cannot empirically prove its ground. Though we may feel the contingency of meaning, we speak and create because we implicitly believe that meaning and feeling can be adequately conveyed. Every time we communicate, much less create or encounter art, we take the wager that our efforts are meaningful. To take the wager on transcendence is to believe that our intuitive sense that imaginative works have ultimate meaning is not a lie. These works are meaningful because reality is meaningful, grounded in the presence and address of God.
Steiner goes on to argue that “everything we recognize as being of compelling stature in literature, art, music is of a religious inspiration or reference,”36 as is the category of meaningfulness itself. In every civilization our artifacts testify to the way that humans create imaginative works, not just to cope with their place in the world, or to cooperate with their neighbors, but to connect with and respond to the address of the divine. This inescapably religious consciousness must be taken seriously. Indifference to the divine (either divine presence or divine absence) suffocates artistic ability: “Where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.”37 Notice that Steiner is not arguing that only theists can be creative; great creativity comes as well from the recognition of divine absence. What shuts down creativity is a closed mind, a posture of indifference toward possibilities that linger outside the empirical frame.
It is not necessary to agree with Steiner on every point to feel the force of his argument. Regardless of the contested status of the imagination in postmodern philosophy, we have the experience of beauty, goodness, and truth emerging meaningfully from the realm of the imagination. This experience must be respected. Works of imagination create space for surprising encounter with the other, and if Steiner is correct, an Absolute Other. I will pause here to note that this is a key rationale for selecting novelists as my case studies in part two of this book. Artists, poets, and writers regularly traffic in the realm of imagination, training our powers of perception to see and feel things that we would not normally see and feel. If our habits of engagement have become narrow, works of imagination can reopen our horizons.
We can also extend Steiner’s argument beyond our encounter with works of human creativity to our encounter with the world around us. The experience of sky and sea as beautiful and meaningful, the provocation of gratitude or artistic response, suggests the ethical imperative of stewardship if not hospitality. To quote Steiner again: “The voice of intelligible form . . . asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’”38 The creative impulse in the midst of creation makes sense if our physical environment is in some sense authored, addressed to our perception, meant to evoke our desire, hospitality, and participation. Indeed, as we will see below, a theological account of the imagination understands human imagining as a reflection of humanity’s encounter with divine presence and action. This means that no matter how fallen or agonistic our creative acts may be, the very impulse to create follows our creational structure; we cannot help but create. As Paul Fiddes writes, “The reaching of the imagination towards a new world is the result of God’s reaching towards us.”39 If this is correct, every act of creativity unwittingly continues the conversation that God is having with creation.
My use of Steiner is an imaginative provocation: my purpose is not so much to prove the Christian ground of imagination in terms acceptable to all but rather to suggest that the questions raised by our aesthetic sense of the gravity and goodness of being—the experience of presence in human relationships, art, and nature—are sufficient motivation to consider the ground for meaning offered by Christian theology. It is a further conviction that this exploration of meaning is primarily an affair for the imagination in the aesthetic realm, and only secondarily for the intellect in the realm of ratiocination. The imagination, after all, enables more than mere exploration; it facilitates participation in the mystery to which theology testifies, grasping the surplus of meaning that cannot be fully expressed in language (“this is my body”). Complete understanding of divine address is impossible, but the art of understanding can be cultivated through a disciplined imagination, and this is precisely what works of art invite.40
Presence and participation: these terms highlight the Christian conviction of a God who moves toward humanity in communicative action, addressing human imagination with new possibilities of being in the world. Having defined the imagination as concerned with exploring possibility and defended the imagination as concerned with discerning presence, let us consider how the Scripture directs the imagination toward participation in the biblical theodrama. How does God engage, sin impair, and grace renew this faculty of presence and possibility?
DIRECTING THE IMAGINATION: SCRIPTING PARTICIPATION
Imagination in Scripture: The eyes of the heart. Running parallel with developments in philosophy, the imagination has been a topic of great theological interest in recent years.41 Yet a search through Scripture for the word imagination may yield less than promising results. This is especially the case for the King James Version, which held sway in the English-speaking world for three hundred years. Though three different Hebrew words are translated, in every instance the translators render the word in a negative context. Genesis speaks of the pre-flood imagination [yēṣer] of humanity as “only evil continually” (Gen 6:5). The prophetic hope in Jeremiah is that one day the nations will be gathered at the throne of Yahweh and no longer walk “after the imagination [šǝrrirût] of their evil heart” (Jer 3:17). Proverbs tells us that one of the seven things that God hates is a heart that devises “wicked imaginations [maḥăšābāh]” (6:18). The New Testament seems to give us more of the same: three different Greek words (dianoia [Lk 1:51], dialogismos [Rom 1:21], logismos [2 Cor 10:5]) are rendered “imagination” with consistently negative connotations.42 In modern translations like the NIV, “imagination” continues to appear in consistently negative settings, as a stand in for either “foolish speculation” or “self-reliant thinking” (Ps 73:7; Ezek 13:17; Is 65:2). Does this mean that any attempt to validate the imagination using Scripture is doomed to fail?
Quite the contrary. The biblical authors are not objecting to the created structure of the imagination as I have been describing it, but only to its fallen direction. They are objecting to imagining, thinking, devising, arguing, prophesying, and living without reference to God. Autonomy, not creativity, is in view. Indeed, rather than trivializing the imagination, these passages treat the imagination as a faculty to be reckoned with! In Scripture, the evil use of the imagination results in idolatry, and idolatry is always accompanied by injustice. Imaginings have consequences, and vain imagination results in real-world wickedness.
Positively, we might note the close connection in these passages of imagination and heart: a vain imagination comes together with a foolish heart.43 In the biblical usage “heart” is the control center for the human person, including the “personality and the intellect, memory, emotions, desires and will.”44 In view of this connection, Garrett Green goes so far as to argue that the biblical “heart” and what he calls “the paradigmatic imagination” are the same faculty.45 But this runs the danger of losing the surplus of the meaning of “heart” in the associated freight of “imagination.” A better solution is proposed by Alison Searle, who writes that the close connection leads us to incorporate “imagination” into the “richly suggestive semantic field” of the biblical concept of “heart” without identifying the two.46 Drawing from Ephesians 1:18 (“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened”), Searle proposes that the imagination is better understood as the “eyes of your heart,” connecting vision with volition. She writes:
Imagination is shown biblically to be both corrupt like every aspect of human nature since the Fall and thus intimately connected to intellectual and volitional acts of disobedience against God; but also necessary to a right application of the Word of God, as in the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), which implies a degree of empathetic identification.47
We should also notice that imagination is necessary in making sense of the pluriform shape of Scripture, which comes to us just as often in stories, songs, and parables as it does in letters and law. To take the imagination as seriously as Scripture requires, we must move beyond the fallen direction that the imagination may take to explore its creational structure more carefully. This will enable us to seek a redeemed direction for the imaginative work in which we are already engaged. I will sketch an account of imagination within the biblical story to highlight three primary aspects of creaturely imagining: seeing, sensing, and shaping.
Imagination and imago dei: Seeing, sensing, shaping. Although the word imagination does not appear in the Genesis account, there is more than just a lexical link between image and imagination. George MacDonald asserts a theological connection: “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.”48 This claim is striking for two reasons: the identification of imagining as something God does, and the identification of imagination (rather than rationality, morality, or relationality) as central to the divine image.49 We do not need to displace these other aspects; we only need to recognize how imagination is vitally connected to each of them. As humans reflect God’s image, it is the imagination that explores possibilities in order to fulfill the mandate of care and cultivation, unleashing the potentialities of creation for its own good to the glory of God.
Pascal Bazzell corroborates this interpretation of the divine image, arguing that the pronouns in Genesis 1:26 (“Let us make humankind in our image,”) are plurals of “deliberation,”50 and that what is being highlighted in the Genesis account is the reflexive capacity of divine image bearers “to see and to talk to themselves.” This reflexivity is foundational to human identity and ethical action: “Every human being has a reflexive capacity, which means that people perceive themselves and live out their lives according to that perception.”51 We can see how imaginative reflexivity enables other aspects of the image like rationality, morality, and relationality. Rooted in the created world, the imagination enables us to navigate our position in the world amid the rational, relational, and moral possibilities that exist. William Dyrness makes this connection in an evocative way:
A world that offers the conditions for growth into obedience and maturity also offers the opportunity to exercise genius and creativity. In such a world, humans wonder: what if we could find a way to ride those horses, or let that dog come and lie by our fire? What if we crossed this daisy with that one; what would that be like? This reflexive spark lies behind all creativity, all culture making.52
Thus, imagination is essential for imaging God in cultivation of creation, and any discussion of the divine image ought to include the imaginative capacity to say, “what if we did this?”53
It is because of this creaturely reflexivity that we are, as Taylor puts it, “self-interpreting animals,”54 always seeking to understand ourselves. We ask the question that other animals do not: Who are we? There are multiple layers to our self-interrogation. First, there is an aspect of seeing, the apprehension of our position in the world: Where are we? Next, there is an aspect of sensing, the way desire is evoked particular directions: What is worth pursuing? Finally, there is an aspect of shaping, the creative activity of culture making: What will we make of our situation?55 The imaginative faculty moves us forward by facilitating three things: (1) an orienting vision for the world, (2) an aesthetic experience of the world, and (3) poetic participation in the world. The lives we lead in response to these questions are our lived interpretations of God’s creative address.
Let us briefly examine each of these dimensions. Imaginative seeing occurs when the imagination projects an image toward the world that is connected to belief or desire that something be the case. Projected belief is successful when belief matches the world; projected desire is successful when the world matches the desired state of affairs. This is the most basic level of intentional imaginative activity, including the simplest forms of imagining like speculation (“I imagine it will rain today”).
Whereas seeing projects an image on the world, sensing moves in the opposite direction and occurs when an image impresses itself on the mind. Instead of me using my imagination, my imagination uses me, captivating me with a felt sense that translates spontaneously into a physiological response. The image that impresses itself spontaneously evokes fear or gladness, anxiety or anticipation, consistent with my desires.
Finally, shaping is the most creative exercise of the imagination, a multi-dimensional constructive project in which a person clears a generative space to facilitate a perspectival shift. Counterintuitively, this means pursuing imaginative tension, even stirring up unpleasant emotions, for the sake of some greater imaginative payoff.56
An illustration may be helpful. When I read Harry Potter to my children, their imagination is engaged at multiple levels.57 First, when my children imagine that Voldemort is chasing Harry, their minds are projecting an image for the sake of the story. This is the first layer of imagining: seeing. The image allows the story to be believable on its own terms, even if my children willingly suspend their disbelief about Voldemort’s existence in the “real” world. They are seeing things that are not physically present, and they are able to distinguish between the truth-value of their imaginings in terms of the story from the truth-value of the imagining in terms of the real world. Furthermore, they desire that Voldemort not exist in the real world, even as they desire that he exist in the world of the story; both imaginative desires seem to be satisfactory to them. When we close the book and they try to go to sleep, they find that the image of Voldemort continues to impress itself on their consciousness. This is the second layer of imagining: sensing. They still see images of things that are not present, but what they see is evoked contrary to their desire (they don’t want to see it). Yet their imagination has been taken captive, and they feel that they are still on the inside of the story. Thus they spontaneously feel Harry’s fear as the imaginative impulse evokes their desire for safety. The image has captivated their imagination so that they are not able to wish it away by sheer force of will. Finally, even if the feeling of fear evoked by the images that linger is unpleasant, they continue to ask for the story each night. When they play, they integrate the narrative of the story into their games, acting out the adventure together in a mash-up of other stories they have heard, seen, or invented. This is the third layer of imagining: shaping. The story creates tension, but it also situates the difficult emotions in a larger narrative. Playing with the elements of the story creates a space where they can process the difficult emotions they encounter in the primary world. In the scenario, all three kinds of imagining are active at the same time. The first moves from mind to world, the second reciprocally from world to mind, and the third creates a space in which the two can be negotiated in a satisfying manner. Throughout the process, they are engaged in the larger project of exploring possible ways of being in the world.
But if human imagination is meant to image God in unfolding the potentialities of creation, it follows that our seeing, sensing, and shaping find their fullness in being, loving, and doing, the “essence of ethical life.”58 The imagination projects possible visions, draws out our desire, and seeks creative space. But as we move toward ethical fullness, seeing must lead to integrity: the visions we project must become true of us. Sensing must lead to commitment: properly elicited desires, rightly ordered by love. And shaping must lead to care: taking responsibility for the world in which we are embedded (see fig. 1).
Figure 1: Organizing the Imagination
Aspect of Imagining | Seeing: imagination as orienting vision | Sensing: imagination as aesthetic sense | Shaping: imagination as poetic participation |
Operative Question | Where are we? | What is worth pursuing? | What will we do? |
Kind’s Taxonomy | Propositional Imagining Mind → World | Sensory Imagining World → Mind | Creative Imagining Intermediate Space |
Ethical Dimension | Being | Loving | Doing |
Ethical Concern | Integrity | Commitment | Care |
We become more fully human as we use our imagination to image God. The image of God gives the imagination structure, but it also provides direction, a destiny. To follow and fulfill this destiny, our imaginations—what we see, what we sense, and what we shape—must become more fully responsive to the work of God in creation and new creation, which directs us to a fuller and deeper humanity.
Imagination and creational constraints: The limiting structures of creation. Human imagining reflects the imagination of God, but always in a creaturely way. To be a creature is to be limited, and so there are always limits for human imagination. In the Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve are given extensive freedom (“You may freely eat of every tree of the garden,” Genesis 2:16 NLT) but always within particular constraints. These constraints are not meant to diminish human beings. They are intended rather to guide them into flourishing proper to the kind of creatures that they are meant to become. Some of the limits in the Genesis story are structural, reflecting their embodiment (the need to eat and to rest), while others are aesthetic (the cultivated garden over against uncultivated creation). The most significant limit is moral: the prohibition of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Although the imagination is able to suspend actuality to explore possibility, it remains constrained by and grounded in created limits. The imagination can help us discover truths about the world only because our embeddedness in the world sets the parameters for our engagement. As we learned from Merleau-Ponty, if our imaginings are to be intelligible, they must take root in embodied experience, and this is true even in our wildest fantasies.
Some of the structural features of imagining are inescapable: we are unable, for example, to imagine logical contradictions (like a square circle). But imagination is also constrained by natural laws. We are able to imagine ourselves resisting gravity (as in the case of superheroes), but under normal conditions we do not take this flight of fancy as an actual option. When it comes to enacting the possibility, imaginative play gives way to profound imaginative resistance (“I imagine that if I jump off this building, things will not go well”). Things are a bit more complicated when it comes to moral constraints, but a moral structure does exist. Whatever we imagine automatically triggers our moral intuitions. We may find it possible to imagine a state of affairs where evil is conflated with good, but we resist imaginative identification with the conflation.59 For example, imagine a world in which all baby girls are killed at birth. Now imagine a world in which it feels virtuous to kill them. We can quite easily fulfill the first proposal, but we feel incredible resistance to the “countermoral proposition” in the second.60 Perhaps it is possible to justify such a world, but only through a tragic failure of imagination. When the imagination functions correctly, it follows moral intuition, what Paul called “the law written on our hearts” (Rom 2:15). Similarly, when it comes to aesthetic judgments, our imaginations seek space and resist sterility. Imagine life in a cell. Now imagine life in a garden. Now imagine a world where life in a cell is better than life in a garden. It is almost impossible without the addition of constraints. We simply have the sense that the garden affords greater possibility, a greater opportunity to grasp and make meaning in the world. Our embodied desire to have a “maximal grip” on our situation means that the imagination seeks the best possible conditions for achieving it.61 The imagination must have limits in order for it to navigate between real possibilities for life in the world. These limits, the most important of which is the body, reflect the structure of creation and are meant to lead to fruitfulness rather than sterility.
Imagination and sin: Life outside limits. God created the human imagination to aid us in our cultural task, unfolding the potentialities of creation. This creative obedience is meant to take place within the physical, rational, moral, and aesthetic limits of created order. The imagination simultaneously tests the boundaries of these limitations in search of new possibilities even as it is grounded in them. But the Genesis story shows humanity’s ability—on the serpent’s supposition—to imagine and enact behaviors outside the limits of divine design. The tempter encourages humanity to overstep the limits set for them by God, proposing a way of being in the world in which humans refuse their creaturely vocation, reaching for autonomy. To return to Bazzell, the serpent’s temptation exploited Adam and Eve’s reflexive capacity, their ability to imagine themselves living outside God’s limits.62 Once the limits are overstepped, and humanity rejects the Creator’s rule, entropy is unleashed. Denied vocation begets distorted vision. As Calvin writes, “The natural order was that the frame of the universe should be a school in which we were to learn piety and from it pass over to eternal life and perfect felicity. But after man’s rebellion, our eyes—wherever they turn—encounter God’s curse. This curse, while it seizes and envelops innocent creatures through our fault, must overwhelm our souls with despair.”63
The result of the curse is that wherever we turn, rather than being led to worship we are beset by anxiety. Sin disorients what we see (we encounter God’s curse) and what we sense (we are overwhelmed with despair). This in turn skews what we shape. A diseased imagination traffics in idolatry, injustice, and what Bazzell calls “reflexive oppression,” the misperception of who I am and the possibilities that are available to me. All aspects of fallen imagination conspire in futility, sensing, seeing, and shaping projects that are distorted, deceitful, and destructive.
The creative freedom of the human imagination remains significant, and in a fallen world this is a frightening fact. It is the distortion of reflexive freedom that leads Cain to say to his brother, “Let’s go out to the field” (Gen 4:8) and the Babelites to say, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower” (Gen 11:4 KJV). Rather than participating in divine blessing, human imagination unleashes divine curse. Indeed, to the biblical writers there is no greater horror than a world in which people fail to see themselves and the world in light of God, a world where everyone does as they see fit (Judg 21:25).
Yet despite human rebellion, creaturely limits continue to exert their gravity on us. While the human imagination can resist and rebel, it can never function fully outside of created structures, since those limits make possible our making sense of the world. Thus, the imagination, though cut off from the source of virtue, is nevertheless pulled back toward creational norms. These norms reflect the structure of creation, but we can choose whether we will live into them or against their grain. Violation is possible but destructive. Robert Goudzwaard explains:
The purpose of norms is to bring us to life in its fullness by pointing us to paths which safely lead us there. Norms are not straitjackets which squeeze the life out of us. . . . the created world is attuned to those norms; it is designed for our willingness to respond to God and each other. If man and society ignore genuine norms, such as justice and restitution of rights, respect for life, love of neighbor, and stewardship, they are bound to experience the destructive effects of such neglect. This is not, therefore, a mysterious fate which strikes us; rather, it is a judgment which men and society bring upon themselves.64
When norms are broken, they break us; when followed, they move us toward greater flourishing. Even in our rebellion we feel the provocations of beauty and justice, norms reflecting the grooves of creation, and God’s continuing commitment to a world that though badly broken, still belongs to God. We will return to this in a moment.
Nevertheless, apart from further divine intervention fallen imagination leads to an earth full of violence. In the days of Noah, human imaginings are described as “only evil continually,” turning creativity toward corruption (Gen 6:5 KJV). Divine judgment in the form of a flood arrests the destructive work of human imagination, stopping the spread of evil across the face of the earth. Yet all is not lost. God’s redemptive project continues: “God remembered Noah” (Gen 8:1), and God works within the fallen situation to bring creation into the fullness intended from the beginning. Both image and imagination find their renewal through divine action: God chooses a covenantal people, and through this people gives the redeeming gifts of the Son and the Spirit. As the Son renews the image of God through the Spirit’s power, grace grants renewed possibilities for human imagining, for what we see, sense, and shape. But how exactly does this happen?
Imagination and renewal: The liberating spirit of new creation. Only the light of revelation, made effectual by the Spirit, is able to open the eyes of the heart (Eph 1:18). This revelatory light comes through the law of the Lord (Ps 19:8; 119:105) and finds its ultimate expression in Jesus Christ, “the true light, which enlightens everyone” (Jn 1:9 NRSV). Christ comes as the atoning sacrifice for sin, and the gospel gives us new eyes to see creation.65 The curse that caused us to look on creation with despair is reversed. Creation becomes doxological again, as the Spirit grasps us with a renewed sense of our place in God’s world. We now find ourselves “in Christ,” captivated by visions of his kingdom, a kingdom of “justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17 NTE). Restored vision serves our restored vocation. As God’s workmanship, we seek to do good work, shaping possibilities that anticipate the kingdom that is to come (Eph 2:10).66 This imaginative renewal, the healing of our seeing, sensing, and shaping, takes place in union with Christ; as we contemplate the glory of the Lord, the Spirit transfigures us with ever-increasing glory (2 Cor 3:18).67 This is good news!
And yet more must be said concerning the work of the Spirit in the imaginings of those outside the covenant community. This is especially relevant since Christian witness invites us to engage outsiders hospitably with a reason for our hope. Indeed, what hope do we have that the gifts of the Son and Spirit have bearing on those outside the walls of the church?
There is plenty of hope. Made in God’s image, inhabiting God’s world, and living before God’s face, every human being is always already responding to God’s revelatory initiative. As we saw in the previous chapter, Calvin developed this responsiveness in terms of the sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis) and the seed of religion (semen religionis), an inward capacity to perceive God’s presence that results in the religious impulse to reach for God.68
Calvin is expressing the deep Christian conviction (which of course he draws from the Scriptures and tradition) that everything good is a divine gift, having its source in God rather than in humanity. The corollary to this is that if we find beauty, goodness, and truth in human imaginings, we can look nowhere else for their source.69 For his part, Calvin was convinced that the droplets of divinity given to fallen humanity lead to idolatry rather than piety.70 The “bright lights” of creation fail to bring clarifying vision apart from further illumination by the Spirit.71 And yet a tension remains in Calvin’s thought. He emphasizes that despite the distortion of sin, God daily discloses his grace and glory through everything, “so that men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him . . . upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.” He continues:
Yet, in the first place, wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness. The reason why the author of The Letter to the Hebrews elegantly calls the universe the appearance of things invisible [Heb 11:3] is that this skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible.72
God’s glory continues to shine, giving off such “sparks” that fallen humanity cannot escape the “boundless force of its brightness.”
Why does Calvin so emphasize the inescapability of revelation if it does not lead to faith? There seems to be an extra-cognitive apprehension of God’s presence that Calvin cannot rightly call knowledge (since all true knowledge leads to piety).73 Nevertheless this apprehension is ineradicable. The imagination is impaired by sin, in need of enlightenment in order to see clearly again. And yet there remains a deeply felt sense of divine presence and address, to which humanity responds in all our cultural and imaginative endeavors.74
Many of the imaginative models and cultural products that fallen humanity makes manifest reflexive oppression, proliferating idolatry and injustice, resembling Babel (Gen 11) or Babylon (Rev 20). But this is not the whole story. As Bavinck reminds us, though the descendants of Cain seem outside God’s covenantal line, God graciously allows them to live, multiply, and develop culture. This can never be done in God’s absence, and Bavinck writes, “There is thus a rich revelation of God even among the heathen—not only in nature but also in their heart and conscience, in their life and history, among their statesmen and artists, their philosophers and reformers. There exists no reason at all to denigrate or diminish this divine revelation.” Bavinck emphasizes that this is not merely a leftover presence of God; it “is always a positive act on the part of God.” This means that the difference between religions is not revelation; rather, all religion is a response to revelation: “All that is good and true has its origin in grace, including the good we see in fallen man. The light still does shine in darkness. The spirit of God makes its home and works in all the creation.”75 This is the hallmark of a truly Christian imagination, the conviction that every good and perfect gift—every impulse of faith, every inkling of virtue, even the idea of the beautiful—comes from above (Jas 1:17).
There is mystery here, to be sure. Calvin himself acknowledged that God’s Spirit must be at work outside the covenantal community, encountering them with grace so that God’s “goodness can be felt without the Spirit of adoption.”76 These are real encounters with God’s Spirit, even if those encounters do not result in regeneration. Such a conclusion is entailed by the unity of divine revelation. Listen to Bavinck: “Revelation, while having its center in the Person of Christ, in its periphery extends to the uttermost ends of creation. It . . . does not resemble an island on the ocean, nor a drop of oil upon water. . . . The world itself rests on revelation; revelation is the presupposition, the foundation, the secret of all that exists in all its forms.”77 God’s revelation in creation, conscience, and culture is comprehensible because “to objective general revelation there corresponds an illumination of Logos (John 1:9) or of the Spirit of God in understanding and conscience, in heart and mind of man, whereby he can understand the general revelation of God in nature and history.”78 The point is that whatever imaginings orient our life in the world, they are always in some way (however diminished) responsive to the revelatory initiative.
The critical issue, of course, is discernment.79 Imagination leads people not just to build and create but also to tear down and destroy. Human depravity reminds us to be cautious in our celebration of imaginative meaning making. The difficulty with the resource of common grace/general revelation is that we can make hasty pronouncements of where God is at work. The Barthian “nein” came as a result of a German church so overjoyed and astonished at human progress that they were unable to see a difference between the march of the violent armies and the footprints of God. But this caution should color rather than collapse our critical engagement.
Whether we call God’s initiating action “general revelation” or “common grace,” we need some way to speak about God’s nonsalvific, revelatory movement toward creation, to which human imagining and human culture is a response. To deny the true, good, and beautiful outside the covenantal community, Bavinck writes, “would not only be in conflict with experience but would also entail a denial of God’s gifts and hence constitute ingratitude to him.”80 This does not mean that fallen humanity has been given a universal upgrade or that we can give a blanket affirmation to all human imaginings. Both common grace and general revelation remain ad hoc and mysterious, a matter of careful and discerning identification, of saying, “Perhaps this is” or “What else could this be?”81 Such divine overtures, when we encounter them, may not always bring about individual salvation, and yet they give a foretaste of cosmic salvation, the healing of all creation. This eschatological perspective might make further sense of times when the imaginative sense projected or provoked by a cultural product is deeply resonant with the theodramatic imagination of Scripture.82 The Holy Spirit continues to guide human imagining toward instantiating a taste of God’s kingdom. This is the theological ground for us to anticipate God’s work in human imaginings outside the walls of the church.
CONCLUSION
Our larger project is a reimagined apologetic, or an apologetic that takes the role of the imaginative mode of “feeling the way in” to faith much more seriously. This chapter sought clarity on the imagination itself, defining the imagination as an embodied faculty concerned with possibility. It is able to suspend actuality for the sake of reality, exploring proposals of belief (seeing), experiencing evocations of desire (sensing), and expanding a space where tensions can be made manifest and managed (shaping). It is precisely through this embodied, emotive, imaginative engagement with the world that we integrate experience, belief, and desire to make meaning of our lives. I next sought to defend the imagination against its skeptical despisers, arguing that the experience of meaning in imaginative works suggests its ground in some originating presence. Finally, I sketched a theological account of how God engages, sin impairs, and grace renews human imaginings. I further argued that this imaginative activity never takes place in God’s absence. God, through the Holy Spirit, encounters humanity in mysterious ways, casting new visions, drawing out and deepening desire, and creating spaces of possibility for human identity and community. This is one aspect of the image of God that remains in fallen humanity. As Dyrness writes, “To image God is also to imagine a better future—a new way of being in the world. To image God is to ask, ‘What if my life, our life together, could be like this?’”83 As I will argue in the remainder of the book, it is precisely in this space of possibility that a reimagined apologetic seeks to work.
What might this look like? For help we will turn to listen to those whose work regularly draws them into the realm of imagination: artists, poets, and writers. In the next section I explore two case studies of imaginative engagement in the midst of a secular age. As I have argued, the postromantic ethic of authenticity invites an approach that takes our imaginative sensibilities seriously. I offer an example of a reimagined apologetic at the dawn of modern secularity (George MacDonald) and an example of a reimagined apologetic once the age of authenticity is in full flower (Marilynne Robinson).