Imagination is the spice of life, and yet within the Christian subculture it has been suppressed; often out of fear. Fear that books that traffic in fantasy might open up the mind to worlds that are unsanctified and impervious to the holy heavy hand of God (or so it might go); indeed sometimes this might very well happen, but not necessarily so. But before I begin to digress into a flow of thought on fantasy literature, what I want to stay to course on with this little project is to focus on the power and fruitfulness that imagination can have for the Christian’s life and walk with Jesus Christ.

Much too often we, as Christians get caught in the trap of thinking through polarities, I know I do! Where we pit Biblical Studies, for example, against so called, Systematic Theology; the former, in the non-confessional world that we inhabit, focusing on the naturalist/historist development of the text, and the latter focusing on the philosophical/metaphysical presuppositions behind the text – or something like that! But we oughtin’ not get caught up in this transgression of fear, instead we ought to enjoy the imagination, and to do so as both biblical studies and systematic theology peoples. Imagination allows for each age of the church to re-think, along with the past, what it means to be in relation to God; what it means to sit at his banqueting table along with our forbears who sat there  before us. Being imaginative theological thinkers allows us, in fact, to be in dialogue with the past in a way that fear of imagination shuts down; fear of imagination shuts down dialogical theology and biblical interpretive development because it believes imagination allows for too free of thought, untethered, as it were, from a static orthodoxy, that such adherents believe has been handed down in an absolute static form – much like these adherent’s view of God (i.e. static and monadic), I might add!

Kevin Vanhoozer writes in this vein:

Instrumental reason results in the atrophy of the cultural imagination and a loss of contact with ultimate reality. Our modern and postmodern lives are suffering from spiritual malnutrition. We need more imagination, not less, for the best imaginative literature does not removes us from the real but allows it to take residence in it: “The play’s the thing.” Dorothy Sayers laments the amount of “slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment” that has taken the place of the divine drama and calls the church to “set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.[1]

We would do well to cultivate imagination back into the foreground of our theological and biblical considerations. Ultimately there is either good imagination or there is bad imagination (or no imagination to say it idiomatically).

[1] Kevin Vahoozer cited by Michael Horton, Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 244.