A Biblical View on Imagination
Stephen MillerI.What is Imagination?
Imagination. Perhaps the word suggests thoughts of fancy, of things fondly considered but never expected…not really. For some it is an experience they've had while watching a film or a live theatre event, or while enjoying an exhibit at an art gallery or a beautiful symphony. For some it is nothing more than an abstraction, an ethereal concept. Perhaps it is assigned to the realm of pretty and interesting things, the mere ornaments of life.
Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines imagination as "an act or process of forming a conscious idea or mental image of something never before wholly perceived in reality."1 The dictionary doesn’t give us all we need, but this is a good place to start. From the outset, it helps move us away from some common misconceptions of the term, such as the idea that imagination is simply childish make-believe.
Now, there is great value in the simplicity of a child’s mind, of thoughts ranging free and excluding nothing from the realm of possibility. If this is our definition of makebelieve, we ought to assign such childish behavior great value. After all, Jesus enjoined us all to become as little children, simple and accepting, welcoming the One who upset the apple cart of prescribed wisdom.
But we lose that over the years, don’t we? We learn much, but we doubt more. We become less accepting and more analyzing. The filter of our minds lets through less and less. How can we remedy this? I believe that our God-given imagination is part of the answer.
Imagination is not an add-on to our lives, a sort of software extension that we employ in order to make the program run smoothly. It is rather a function of thinking itself. In his book, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton writes about imagination as the means by which we can “see” things that exist apart from our world, allowing us to observe and ponder. It presents to us things “not realized but represented.”2
Janine Langan describes imagination as the way in which our minds digest and assess the multiple inputs we receive every moment. It is that which forms patterns, and “makes images out of the chaotic influx of our sense perceptions.” Far from Diderot’s view of imagination providing distraction and charm while reason does the heavy lifting, Langan asserts that “none of our conscious intercourse with the world around us is free from the imagination’s input.”3
In this essay, I aim to explore the nature of imagination and its status as an intrinsic element of our humanity. We will examine the biblical basis for understanding it, look at the ways in which it has been misunderstood and misused, and propose some ways in which we might properly understand its place in our lives.
II. The Biblical Basis for Imagination
Any time we look for a biblical basis for anything, there are at least two dangers we need to avoid. First, we must take care that we are not merely seeking support for our preconceived ideas. Second, we should avoid the temptation to search for explicit commands or prohibitions. To use the scriptures in this way is to relegate them to the status of proof-texts.
The Bible provides guidance and direction. It presents to us a record of the works of God among His creation. Commandments are given, encouragement provided, and warnings set forth. It is God’s word given to us. It is not, however, an owner’s manual, where all our questions are answered and problems solved by turning to the index, cross-referencing the topic, and flipping to the correct page.
Properly understood, however, the Bible will inform every area of our life. Therefore, just because we do not find a passage that says “thou shalt imagine”, we are not to conclude that the use of our imagination is sinful. To do so is to embrace a prescriptive hermeneutic, one which requires any human activity to be rooted in an explicit scriptural command. This is not only unsupported by the biblical record itself but can also lead to an intransigent position on interpretation, one that reeks of the legalism Christ found so abhorrent.
What then are we to do? As we have noted, imagination is a part of our shared humanity. Thus, as we look at scripture, we ought to seek ways in which imagination is portrayed. How is it used? How is it abused? How have the writers of scripture themselves employed imagination?
Scripture is made up of various genres of literature. Among these are historical narrative, prophecy, wisdom literature, and poetry. The most basic study of literature will show us that not every genre should be read in the same way. For instance, nobody reads Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and imagines that the author referred to a time when he stood in the literal woods and had to decide where to go. Conversely, it would be foolish to read a biography about Winston Churchill and draw the conclusion that the references to the Second World War were metaphorical in nature. Some things are symbolic, while others are literal. This is nothing new.
Consider the imaginative language throughout scripture. We have the poetry of David, the proverbial wisdom of Solomon, the startling imagery of the Hebrew prophets, and the storytelling of Jesus. They are calling us to engage our imagination. Thus, to discover what Scripture says about imagination, we should look to the literary examples within its pages, of which there are many. In so doing, we find that the very idea of imagination is implicit.
Examples from the Hebrew Scriptures
In the creation account, God gave man a task that called for creativity: naming the animals. Genesis 2:19 states that God brought the animals to Adam, “and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” We’re not given a detailed account, but it would be safe to say that, aside from being an enormously time-consuming process, this took a great deal of creativity. It is notable that God did not dictate to Adam; instead, He gave Adam creative license.
One of the most extended passages of Scripture dealing with creativity is found in the Pentateuch. For seven chapters in the book of Exodus (25-31), we are given a detailed account of the plans for building the tabernacle. God gave His people explicit instructions on what to use and how to build it. Materials included acacia wood, gold, bronze, linen material dyed several colors, and skins from rams and porpoises. There was great beauty involved.
Beyond this, however, there was great imagination involved. Take a look at the design of Aaron’s robe, for instance. God instructed the workers to attach pomegranates to the hem. These pomegranates were made from fabric, and were colored scarlet, purple, and blue. The first two colors seem natural enough, but have you ever seen a blue pomegranate? They don’t exist in nature. That came from the imaginative mind of God.
However, these pomegranates had no discernable use. They were decorations, serving no utilitarian purpose. They did not keep the priest warm, nor did they insure modesty.
They were simply beautiful. Additionally, there was no overt religious symbolism in them. Since the pomegranate was a fruit indigenous to the area, perhaps they served as an indication of God’s bounty and provision. We don’t know, but it seems that God didn’t find it necessary to elaborate. It was beautiful, reflecting the creativity of God. That was enough.
A few hundred years after the tabernacle of Moses’s era, we read about a new center of worship for the nation of Israel. Solomon’s temple described in II Chronicles 1-4 involved several elements that were included only for the sake of beauty. There was gold overlay, stone pillars, and bas relief throughout. Again, as with the priest’s robes described in Exodus, much of what was built was done so with an eye to imaginative beauty, not usefulness. We also read the description of a “molten sea”, which was basically an enormous tub made of cast metal. It was supported by a dozen cast metal oxen, and by some estimates, held almost ten thousand gallons of water. There may have been some practical purpose to this, e.g., washing of the priests during their sacrificial duties. Yet there was also a great deal of creative imagination involved. This was no simple bathroom sink.
Another example of imagination in the Hebrew scriptures is seen in the book of Ezekiel. The ministry of this prophet was full of visions and symbolic actions. In the fourth chapter, he is given the task of inscribing the city of Jerusalem on a clay tablet and laying siege to it. He was then told to lie on the ground for a total of 430 days, indicating the length of Israel’s rebellion toward God. Sounds a bit like little boys playing army men, doesn’t it? (except for the part about laying on the ground for over a year). Yet here was the prophet, imaginatively but quite seriously prophesying the desolation of Israel. It was a creative way of communicating truth to God’s people.
Perhaps no single book of the Bible employs the use of imagination more so than the Psalms. As a poet, David (who wrote about half of the Psalms) was a part of a rich tradition of creative writing. This writing consistently makes use of figures of speech hyperbole, metaphor, simile, allegory, idiom, etc. which require imagination. Yet it is a process that occurs almost subconsciously. For example, in Psalm 7, David writes about his need for God to save him from the wicked. In his warning about the consequences of evil, he says that the wicked man has “dug a pit and hollowed it out, and has fallen into the hole which he made.” (verse 15). While our mind may likely visualize a literal hole, we know intuitively that David’s intent is to convey the dangers of falling into trouble of our own making, dangers that go beyond what is physically observable.
One of the most common figures of speech is metaphor, in which one thing is compared to another without using the words “like” or “as.” Perhaps the most famous biblical example is found in Psalms 23, in which the Lord is said to be a shepherd:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures…
Now, we would belabor the obvious if we qualified these verses as non-literal every time they were read or spoken. We know that David does not see God as a literal shepherd watching over flocks of literal sheep; rather, he is likening the qualities of God to those of a shepherd. A shepherd protects, guides, and feeds his flock in much the same way that God takes care of His children.
Another figure of speech is hyperbole, in which deliberately exaggerated language is used to convey a concept. Such language is not intended to be taken literally. When David, therefore, calls God his rock and his fortress (Psalm 18:2), he is writing figuratively. And in the sixty-third Psalm, when David cries out to God to save him from the wicked, he writes thus:
Those who want to kill me will be destroyed; they will go down to the depths of the earth. They will be given over to the sword and become food for jackals.
This language is intended to convey the depth of David’s condition. He clung to God (verse 8), depending on Him as the only deliverance from the evil that surrounded him. David is not foretelling a precise and literal type of demise for his enemies; rather, he is intent on contrasting the consequences of pursuing evil with the reward of trusting God.
Examples from the Gospels
In the New Testament, Jesus made a habit of teaching people by way of telling stories. Over and over, He used parables and figures of speech to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. The parables he taught range in size from the extremely short story of the mustard seed to the elongated story of the prodigal son. In telling these stories, Jesus was helping ignite the imagination of His audience. He was causing them to visualize something that did not exist in observable form, but which had grounding in what was observable all around them. Neurons fired in their brains, visual images were formed, and they found truth through this process of mental construction. Their cooperative
effort with the imago dei in them created a space in their mind where they could house an eternal truth.
In film and theatre, a director will often say to the actor: “Show me, don’t tell me.” In a similar way, Jesus showed His audience by way of story. During one of the Jewish feasts, a group of people pressed Jesus to answer a crucial question: “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” To this, Jesus answered, “I told you, and you do not believe; the works that I do in My Father’s name, these testify of Me.” (John 10:24-25) In essence, Jesus was directing the people to observe and draw conclusions. He is showing them, not telling them explicitly. Again and again, He challenges his listeners to engage their minds and discover the truth that He is embodying.
Jesus also made use of imagination by asking open-ended questions. This mode of teaching led his listeners to seek the truth themselves. When the disciples frantically roused Jesus from his sleep as their fishing boat was being rocked on the Sea of Galilee, He asked them “why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” (Matthew 8:26) No examination of a rabbinic text or even the Torah itself could provide the answer. But make no mistake, there was an answer. And as each disciple uncovered that, they were forced to use their imagination. They had to close the gap between the obvious and the discernible.
However, while Jesus did engage the imagination when telling stories and asking questions, He did not intend for there to be a subjective “truth” that varied from listener to listener. As He told the story of the Good Samaritan, for example, each listener may have had a different mental picture of the robbery victim. Yet the truth Jesus intended to convey was essentially the same for everyone. Similarly, when Jesus asked, “who do you say that I am?”, He was not giving his audience the freedom to decide for themselves. Rather, He was putting them in the position of reconciling their own beliefs with the objective truth of His Messianic identity.
At this point, it’s a good idea to differentiate between cognition and imagination. Cognition refers to knowing. As human beings, we have cognitive ability because we are able to comprehend information received by way of our various senses, and to subsequently make a rational assessment of that information. Imagination, as mentioned earlier, is the ability to create a mental image of something that we have not actually perceived.
These two are closely tied, though imagination takes the mental process a step further than cognition. At times, Jesus’ teaching was quite accessible by way of cognition. When He told his audience to love their enemies (Matthew 5:44), they were able to cognitively
grasp the idea, though it may have been a difficult truth to accept. But when He called them the light of the world (Matthew 5:14), their imaginations would have engaged.
III. Our Need for Imagination
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his highly influential work of literary criticism, Biographia Literaria, states that “[T]he primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”4 Thus Coleridge, a founder of the Romantic movement in England in the first half of the 19th century, clearly states his belief that at its core, imagination is driven by God, who is thus at the back of how we perceive all things. It is notable that Coleridge is not seen as religious in his art; rather, he believed that God the “I am” of the scriptures and not some nebulous deity was the originator of the imagination. In turn, this belief suffused his literary works.
Coleridge’s rejection of the rationalism of his day allowed for the mystery without which the Gospel is left stripped of its power. Moving ahead to the 20th Century, C.S. Lewis found himself in a quandary as he struggled to understand the place of mystery in his own life. Looking back at his atheistic days at Oxford in the 1920s, he wrote:
The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.5
In The Weight of Glory, Lewis speaks of the longing we have for a “far-off country.” It is what some would call romanticism or nostalgia, a fond remembering of days gone by. But what if we could somehow go back to those days of long ago? Would it be as we remember it? No, for even then the longing was for something we did not possess, something beyond our realm of existence. This yet-to-be-experienced thing is an elusive object for which we have no name. It is ultimately a longing for something in a sense remembered but not yet realized. It is in fact both past and future, and our life in the present is locked up in the realization of its absence. This thing is “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard…”6 And without the imagination, we can neither apprehend that void nor what is required to fill it.
We get a sense of this longing when the writer of Hebrews writes that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
Throughout history, God has allowed humanity glimpses of those things that are yet to
be. This is the beauty of Advent, when we remember those promises made so long ago, promises that were finally fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. In the same way, we now hope for things yet to be. We hope for ultimate healing, for the renewal of all things under the lordship of Christ, for a new heaven and a new earth. Those unseen things are what we hope for, long for, and have faith that God will bring about. Imagination carries us along in the journey, convinced of God’s faithfulness in accomplishing His perfect plan in the fullness of time.
As we recognize this built-in longing for what we cannot fully take hold of, we move toward the recognition that we have been imbued with it by another source. God sets eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and there it remains, giving us pause as we traverse the path of our incomplete existence. As Christians, of course, we know the source. And we, as inheritors of this nature, create in response to what God has given us. We “imagine forth” words, sounds, and images in a sort of mimicry of our Creator God. Shakespeare gives us this from the mouth of Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(Act V, scene 1)
Malcolm Guite elaborates on the way in which Shakespeare uses “bodies” as a verb. We “body forth” things, using our imagination to bring into being that which was not, to make visible that which was invisible. The artist must be an active observer, giving heed to both what is seen and unseen.7 This “local habitation and a name” becomes the necessary locus of imagination. Imagination is for the here and now. It is for the earthbound, the temporal. It is humanity signaling her response to the divine. It is not a detour from the humdrum of daily life. It is instead the inescapable way we perceive and process everything. Broadly speaking, imagination allows us to synthesize and integrate information, to take in visual, audio, and tactile elements and make any sense of them at all. This is how God made us; it is part and parcel of the human condition.
I think it may be helpful at this point to pause and consider what amazing beings we are. If the imaginative process is this much a part of our daily life, that says a lot about our creative, good, and powerful God. We don’t need to step back, consider what we’re observing, then actively turn on the switch of imagination. It simply happens. For that
matter, we have the creative hand of God to thank for any observation or cognition at all. What William Blake asked about the tiger we ask about man: “What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
The fact that we create ought to drive us to ask the inevitable “why” of it all. Is it not because we instinctively know that we have in us something eternal, something that must be perpetuated? These creative acts are the way we reproduce our conception of God’s world, even as the sexual act is the way we reproduce our physical bodies. This is not to say that everything we create is an accurate image of either the divine nature in us or the external world around us. Because of our fallenness, we will never create perfectly. Moreover, the world of art and creativity is full of ugliness, extremes, and perversion. Suffice it to say that, because of our sin nature, the imago dei in us is never fully and accurately expressed. But we go on expressing, and this should tell us something.
IV. The Roots of our Current View of Imagination
Two Lines of Thought
Two basic schools of philosophy have informed our understanding of imagination and art. The first is the classical model, which had its roots in Greek philosophy and was later adopted by the medieval scholastics, who developed the concept of the transcendentals (truth, goodness, and beauty).
The second school of philosophy is modernism, a broad philosophical and artistic movement birthed in 18th century Europe and largely informed by the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire. Another influential philosopher of this era was Immanuel Kant, and it was his particular strain of modernism that disconnected the transcendental elements of goodness, truth, and beauty from art. Thus unmoored, the conversation of art hinged more on the subjective emotions of both the artist and the viewer than on anything objective. With this philosophical underpinning, art became merely a luxury.
Out of this school of modernism emerged the Enlightenment, which in many ways set the stage for how we view culture, religion, nature, and humanity today. The scientific method, and the Enlightenment thinking from which it came, gave rise to what we loosely term “modernity.” The empiricism of John Locke and David Hume put a premium on sensory experience. If a thing was not perceived via the senses, how could it be worth accepting? This in turn produced a skepticism which “cast a long shadow over other important areas of human life.”8
Though some traditions of Christendom have retained much of the classical model, others have tended more toward modernism. And even though some churches have a liturgy strongly rooted in the classical model, the question as to whether this model is followed outside their houses of worship is a very real one. Do the ideas of truth, goodness, and beauty ideas firmly supported by Scripture really permeate our lives?
When we claim that the knowledge of God is obtained primarily by logic by plugging variables into equations in order to obtain some irreducible and irrefutable answer we display an appetite for logic and reason which eclipses any allowance for the unknown. Desiring to know God but averse to mystery, we play into the hands of the modernism borne out of the Enlightenment. We elevate our minds above the ineffable “I Am,” and our reason extinguishes the flames of the burning bush. At this point rationalism has won the day.
Flannery O’Connor, a mid-twentieth-century American novelist and essayist known for her Southern Gothic style, knew how this Enlightenment thinking could play out. Writing about the lack of God-consciousness in our world over the last few hundred years, she asserted that “the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man.”9 May God have mercy on us when we do that, for we are playing the game of Babel.
God did not create the brain as a meat computer, processing information in some matter-of-fact input/output fashion. Strictly speaking, our thoughts do not always proceed sequentially. The ideas going through our mind are not limited to enumerated lists of consecutive objects. This is not to say that our minds operate irrationally. However, they often operate on a suprarational level, i.e., while not excluding logic from the thought process, we formulate ideas that exceed logic, that go outside its boundaries without denying the part it plays in the process of thinking.
Danger often lies in the realm of the extreme. To say that our minds are not completely limited by strict logical thinking is quite true. However, Christians cannot claim that their faith is somehow exempt from the same lucid thought process they apply to all other aspects of their life. Holding solely to the bumper sticker theology of “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it” only serves to provide an excuse to abandon their faith when the god they once readily confessed turns out to be an idol of their own making.
In concluding this brief overview of philosophical models, I think it will be helpful to insert a bit of a caveat. We can go too far in discarding elements of the Enlightenment. This would be a mistake. The writings of Locke, Voltaire, Kant, and other such figures should not be cast off completely. Wisdom can be gained from them. Modern science, for example, owes much to the empirical method. Additionally, important questions posed by historical studies may never have been asked were it not for this movement. It is nonetheless helpful to realize that some strains of Enlightenment thinking completely discount the validity of knowledge gained by non-empirical means. In his book, Simply Jesus, N.T. Wright reminds us to be “grateful to the whole post-Enlightenment movement we loosely call ‘modernism’ for reminding us that [these questions] matter, even as we should firmly decline the same movement’s unwarranted restriction of the kinds of answers it is prepared to accept.”10
Modernism in our Midst?
When God created the heavens and the earth, He did not do so with a strict eye to usefulness. Thus, to look at the Sangre de Cristo mountains and ask, “what is their purpose?” would be absurd. They simply are, and that is enough. God’s creativity is an outgrowth of His nature. To demand an explanation from creation, a reason for its existence, would be missing the point on a grand scale.
Of all people, Christians should be the ones to properly understand imagination as imitative rather than didactic or pragmatic. We have the scriptures to tell us of a God who defies logical explanation, who makes a habit of operating outside the realm of what we might consider reasonable. Yet the church often fails to deal with imagination in a biblically integrous way. This is due in part to our lack of philosophical understanding. Hopefully, the brief background just given will help make up some of what we lack in that regard. For to rightly deal with imagination, we must understand how our cultural milieu has been philosophically shaped.
Not unsurprisingly, this lack of understanding has often led to an absence of vibrant Christian faith. Janine Langan argues that “there is nothing more fundamental than the imagination, and…our loss of respect for it is directly linked to religious apathy.”11 To reject the place of the imagination in the Christian life leads to a defective reading of the Scripture, the type of reading that perpetuates a facile understanding of God’s Word. It becomes insipid and powerless rather than living and active (cf. Hebrews 4:12), and our commitment to it becomes marginal.
Scripture aligns more closely with the classical model than the modernist one. This ought to be self-evident. Yet when the church views imagination through a pragmatic
lens, as many faith traditions have done over the centuries (especially since the Reformation), it plays into the hands of the modernists. The church acquiesces to the concept of imagination as a luxury; art can be either disdained or embraced, depending on our subjective assessment. As Bruce Benson puts it, “the fact that much art has come to be seen as marginal in people’s lives is the result not of the modern theory of art’s having lost the day but of its having won it.”12
Though most Christians would recoil at the thought of being labeled a modernist, their pragmatic approach to imagination betrays them. They may claim to adhere to the transcendentals of the classical model, yet at the same time assign worth to a piece of art based solely upon its value as a vehicle for the Gospel. This assignment of value is essentially modernist: a work of art is deemed valuable not because it imitates the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation, but because it serves a purpose. We embrace a false concept of art’s purpose, insisting that it be explicitly evangelical in order to be of value. Instead of being a gift, it too easily becomes a tool. Instead of being an extension of who we are creative beings made in the image of God it becomes a pragmatic means of bringing souls into the Kingdom. Its ability to perform a didactic function is paramount and we lose all sense of imagination as a means of worship. Thus, we label art and artists as “Christian”, believing that in so doing we are engaging in the required separation from the world. We are, in fact, doing no such thing.
This misunderstanding of imagination has not only the philosophy of modernism to blame, but also the dichotomist view of human nature. Anti-scriptural at its core, this view follows the dualism of the Gnostic heresy, which found its way into the early Christian church. It carried with it the idea that the material world was essentially evil. In his book, Art and the Bible, Francis Schaeffer notes that the very idea of the lordship of Jesus does away with this artificial division or hierarchy and brings under its rule all things, including art. God made the whole man, body and soul, and in the end, Christ will return to redeem the whole man.13 Thus, when we compartmentalize art as either sacred or secular, we are taking a step toward this dichotomy. We are saying that a landscape painting by Turner may indeed be beautiful, but not near so much as a painting of Jesus. This is foolishness.
The compartmentalizing of sacred and secular naturally leads to assigning terms such as “immoral” or “pagan” to certain artistic styles. Though a work of art can rightly be labeled profane or immoral, it is important to realize that a style itself has no innate moral quality. You may find abstract expressionism repulsive, but you would be hardpressed to prove that it cannot convey truth, or accurately reflect the state of man. Likewise, to argue that rock music is immoral because the phrase “rock and roll” originally had sexual overtones is to display a serious lack of logical reasoning. Most
likely, such an argument originally had more to do with the rejection of certain cultural components than anything else. One simply cannot find biblical guidelines for musical elements such as rhythm and melody, and the reasoning behind any claim to the contrary all too easily drifts toward cultural hegemony or xenophobia.
Though it should not be presumed that our imagination (even under the lordship of Christ) will always produce religious art, it should nonetheless be informed by a biblical worldview. That is, it should accurately depict both the condition of man and the character of God. At times this may take the form of ebullient praise. At other times it may look like a song of distress or a tragic stage play. We must remember that the Scripture is full of characters who cried out to a seemingly absent God amidst intense suffering and confusion. It is wrong to assume that the art which exudes praise is somehow more valuable than the art which lays bare the brokenness of the human condition. The life of a Christian is often marked by blurred spiritual vision, a path clouded by sorrow, anger, and uncertainty. Art that arises from such a place can accurately reflect the fallenness of humanity as we try to embrace the mystery of God’s interaction with us.
Kant’s modernist view of the artist as genius has done much to skew our current concept in an unhealthy direction. In the Kantian sense, a “true” artist is peculiar, unique, and sometimes strange and unrelatable.14 By design, such a perception distances the art and the artist from the world, producing though perhaps unwittingly an unhealthy result. Yet if we take our cue from the biblical model, this world is precisely that to which the artist ought to connect. We have no business distancing ourselves from it and feeding the notion that we are unique in some misunderstood and mystical way.
Thus, when we demand that Christians engage in “Christian art” (either primarily or exclusively), we play into the hands of this modernist conception of the imagination. Not only have we distanced art from the world and given it a false ethos all its own, but we have disconnected it from truth, goodness, and beauty. The only thing to be done at this point is to create a limited and constrained rubric for it, granting it validity only insofar as it meets our narrow criteria of evangelism and edification. This is a decidedly un-Christian thing to do.
If one gauges the worth of imagination by the pragmatic value of a product the function it serves or the revenue it generates one has misunderstood its very nature. However, this does not mean it should be confined to contemplation. There is no value in artistic naval gazing. Rightly understood, imagination will always produce something. It may be a fresco, a symphony, a novel, or a piece of performance art. It
may also be the way in which we conduct the business of our workaday world, especially as we see it transformed by the beauty of imaginative thought.
In his book, Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts, Steve Turner shines a light on the need for Christians to be involved in the world of the arts because of “our mandate to look after and care for the world rather than because of the command to make disciples,” asserting that we “are not entering the debates to tell people what to believe. Art tends to show rather than to tell.”15
In closing this section, these words from Jacques Maritain may more eloquently make the point I’ve been driving at:
By the words “Christian Art” I do not mean Church Art… I mean Christian art in the sense of art which bears within it the character of Christianity… Christian art is defined by the one in whom it exists and by the spirit from which it issues: one says “Christian art” or the “art of a Christian,” as one says…the “art of man.” It is the art of redeemed humanity. It is planted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amidst the breezes of the seven gifts of the Spirit. It is natural that it should bear Christian fruit… Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane.16
V. Moving Forward
Knowing what we do about the imagination, it is now time to think about how it intersects with our day-to-day existence. What sort of difference does the imagination and by extension its creations make in our lives? Along with Francis Schaeffer, we need to ask, “how should we then live?”17 How can we use our imagination to the glory of God? This section is not a playbook on the use of imagination, nor is it intended to be a thorough treatment of the various aspects of the arts. It is instead a brief look at how we can think proactively and specifically about the doing of it. For better or worse, this will include things to avoid as well as things to embrace.
We began by defining imagination, not only by identifying what it is, but also what it is not. The same approach will be helpful in determining how we exercise our imagination, as well as how we become intentional consumers of the products of imagination.
Malcolm Guite argues for a “recovery and reintegration” of reason and imagination as being co-operative in our process of knowing and understanding, asserting that this can be found squarely in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.18 This was what C.S. Lewis was finally convinced of by the likes of Tolkien. This mythos, this story of dying and living again, having occupied the minds of poets down through the millennia, was made fact. Here was the uniting of reason and imagination. This is precisely what we need in order to have the freedom to work imaginatively, to create art that reflects its divine origin and is fleshed out in us.
When we as Christians understand the philosophical underpinnings of art, as well as the need to see it as imitative rather than practical, our use of imagination can actively engage our world and address the issues of the day. As Chaim Potok’s character, Asher Lev refused to paint the world as a beautiful place when he was confronted with evil, we too must be adept at imaginatively dealing with the ugliness of humanity. Several fine examples of this can be found in the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Dealing as she did with themes of bigotry, racism, and hypocrisy, her imagery and characters were often harsh and grotesque. Known for being a Christian, the question arose as to why she chose to write this way. Her response was telling:
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.19
Notice that O’Connor highlights the importance of understanding the beliefs of the audience. There are some in the church who believe they are called to reach unbelievers, while there are others who believe their job is to edify or challenge the saints. There is no right or wrong choice in this. Yet we must be aware of our audience, and it is advisable to shape the art accordingly.
In closing his letter to the church in Philippi, Paul enjoins the believers there to dwell on things that are true, honorable, right, and of good repute. “If there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” (Philippians 4:8) This passage can too easily be viewed as a prohibition against those things not explicitly listed. We ought
instead to primarily view it as an encouragement to focus on the things which meet the criteria that Paul sets forth. Being “in the world” as we are, we must necessarily do this while at the same time being exposed to things that fly in the face of such criteria. Paul’s exhortation should thus not be taken as an injunction against exposing ourselves to “worldly” things. To be sure, there are plenty of warnings against worldliness, both in the writings of Paul and other New Testament authors. But in the final analysis, this passage is pushing us toward something, not warning us against something. Such an understanding ought not to lead us to sin, but rather to such a familiarity with goodness that we are able to deftly use it as a standard whereby we judge all things.
In his book, Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts, Steve Turner essentially makes the same point. His experience with art as a young believer reflects his exposure to illconceived notions that had been formed by poor applications of scripture. “Like drunkenness and promiscuity,” Turner says, “involvement in the arts was something best spoken of in the past tense…Not knowing what God’s tastes were but expecting him to be a bit prudish, it seemed best to play safe. Additionally, art was considered a waste of time. All we needed to know about life was in the Bible. Anything else was superfluous. What could these spiritually dead people teach us that we didn’t already know?”20
This sort of dismissive attitude is harmful to true interaction with the culture. But what does interaction look like for the Christian? How can we be “in the world but not of it”? Is it possible to participate imaginatively in this culture to the glory of God?
In his classic work Christ and Culture, Richard Niebuhr addresses this issue, noting three basic approaches to culture. Christ can be seen as a part of culture, against culture, or above culture. Most of Christianity what he terms “the church of the center” has opted for the third approach. With the acceptance of the orthodox belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who created heaven and earth, the Church can naturally move into a discussion about nature as that which is good and well-ordered, and upon which all culture is founded. “Where this conviction rules, Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. Neither can the ‘world’ as culture be simply regarded as the realm of godlessness; since it is at least founded on the ‘world’ as nature, and cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.21
This third group (Christ above culture) sees Christians living paradoxically in a temporal world, one in which they become neither partakers of the totality of culture nor antagonists to it. It is not their final home, but one in which they must perform the tasks of daily existence, whether mundane or extraordinary, all the while interacting with the existing culture. Within this group are both dualists and synthesists. The
former focuses on the tension between Christ and culture, while the latter sees Christ as the fulfillment of culture.
For either of these sub-groups perhaps more for the synthesists than the dualists there is an openness to cultural influences, a freedom to accept the artistic output of sinful humanity as that which has merit precisely because its ultimate source is the God of creation. It is that openness that allows one to see the products of imagination not necessarily as idols set up in defiance to God, but rather as indicators of God’s interaction with man, and vice versa. Niebuhr notes that “the synthesist affirms both Christ and culture, as one who confesses a Lord who is both of this world and of the other.”22
We are not to align our faith with the current cultural milieu, forcing the fit when it isn’t there. Neither are we to do the reverse, dressing the spirit of the age until it resembles our comfortable concept of a Christian worldview. This is the mistake of the “cultural Christian,” and Niebuhr states that “reconciliation of the gospel with the spirit of the times is made possible by its presentation either as a revelation of speculative truth about being, or of practical knowledge of value; but the true synthesist will have nothing to do with easy subordinations of value to being or being to value. He sees Jesus Christ as both Logos and Lord.”23
It is precisely this sort of Christian, the “true synthesist” whose view of Jesus as Logos and Lord translates naturally into their use of imagination, who has a biblical understanding of what it means for an artist to live as a stranger in a strange land. O’Connor believed that those enlightened by their Christian faith are often the ones with “the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.” This is the sort of enlightenment we need, for we live in a culture that sees little need to be redeemed from anything. “Redemption is meaningless,” she writes, “unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.”24
In reading this, some may come to realize their calling as an artist is to reveal the world’s fallenness. In such a stripped state of vulnerability, their audience may begin to see as never before the beauty of God and the desperate need for redemption. Others may choose to “body forth” their subject in a more pastoral way, harmonizing with what is best in God’s created order.
It is not necessarily an either/or scenario for the artist. The musician who plays the haunting strains of a Rachmaninoff concerto one night might play the dissonant tunes of Sondheim the next. The actor cast in a tragic film this year may just as easily be cast
in a comedy next year. The painter experimenting now with realism may decide next month to play in the blurred and abstract world of expressionism. There is not one universal calling that God places on all artists, but rather freedom for the redeemed under the lordship of Christ. Let us exercise this freedom in the world of our particular calling, knowing that God has gifted us for the purpose of reflecting the truth, goodness, and beauty of His creation.
END NOTES
1 Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Chicago: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1986
2 Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. pp. 88-89
3 Ryken, Leland, ed. The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing. Colorado Springs: Shaw Books, 2002. p. 64
5 Lewis, Clive Staples. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1955. pp. 209-210
4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817). Biographia Literaria. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6081/pg6081-images.html
6 Lewis, Clive Staples. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1980. p. 7
7 Guite, Malcolm. Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God. Baltimore: Square Halo Books, 2021. pp. 19ff
8 Guite, 14
9 O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. p. 158
10 Wright, N.T. Simply Jesus: Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. p. 22
11 Ryken, 63
12 Benson, Bruce Ellis. Liturgy as a Way of Life. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. p. 25
13 Schaeffer, Francis A. Art & the Bible. Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 1973. pp. 7-8
14 Benson, 52ff
15 Turner, Steve. Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts. Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2001. p. 21
16 Ryken, 53
17 How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture was both a book and documentary film series by Francis Schaeffer first released in 1976.
18 Guite, 16
19 O’Connor, 33-34
20 Turner, Steve. Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts. Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2001, pp. 40-41
21 Niebuhr, Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1951. p. 117-118
22 Ibid, 120
23 Ibid, 121
24 O’Connor, 33
