Most of us likely associate the imagination with things that aren’t real. If I describe a toddler as “imaginative,” as an example, the idea can be that I’m referring to her wealthy world of make-believe. An imaginative adult, however, could be someone who works at Pixar studios or has a workspace full of motion figures. These examples are likely to perpetuate the idea that the imagination is the exclusive province of youngsters and “creatives.”
In fact, this default assumption is nothing greater than cultural prejudice. As we’ll see, imagination is an integral a part of how everyone is sensible of the world. In his marvelous book Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Malcolm Guite defines imagination as “an lively, shaping power of perception exercised each individually and collectively, and as a college that’s able to each apprehending and embodying truth. Like reason, its twin faculty, our fallen imagination is shadowed and finite, but like reason, it is usually, under God’s grace, illuminating and redemptive.”
In other words, the imagination helps us make sense of our lives by synthesizing the countless advantageous details of our world. While reason allows us to isolate and analyze those details, the imagination helps us to make sense of them. For instance, most of us can’t decipher the relatively abstract patterns in an X-ray, but a health care provider or a technician could make sense of the pattern.
It’s easy to point to artistic examples involving sculptors freeing shapes from stone and filmmakers giving tangible shape to inner visions. But, because the x-ray example shows, it’s also helpful to dwell on more mundane instances of the working imagination as a way to make clear its practical reality. In this sense, consider a pair buying a “fixer-upper” and seeing past the dilapidated interior to a finished home. Or consider an engineer watching a blueprint or an internet developer writing code. These, too, are examples of the imagination at work.
What Is the Difference between Imagination and Fantasy?
For our purposes here, we’re going to make a meaningful distinction between imagination and fantasy. By fantasy, we mean to point a narrow type of escapism that may include every thing from idle daydreams to full-blown sexual fantasies. Unlike the imagination, fantasy, on this sense, has only a superficial reference to reality and is chiefly motivated by a desire to hunt fast gratification and avoid responsibility. It is a diversion at best, an immoral flight from reality at worst. It goes without saying that such a definition excludes the literary genre of fantasy and particularly completed works of high fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Far from constituting a flight from reality, unbelievable stories reminiscent of these represent a deep engagement with it, often giving us timeless visions of friendship, bravery, and perseverance. (They also tell us a very good deal about our own world. The Lord of the Rings is, amongst other things, an prolonged meditation on the ravages of the Industrial Revolution in Tolkien’s native England.) All that to say, the negative connotations surrounding the imagination are more accurately directed at fantasy.
What Did C.S. Lewis Say about “Baptized Imagination?”
Speaking of fantasy stories, C.S. Lewis, in one in every of the various provocative moments in his spiritual memoir Surprised By Joy, declares that it was George MacDonald’s novel Phantastes that “baptized” his imagination. Though much ink has been spilled on the precise meaning of this passage, a part of what Lewis appears to be saying is that MacDonald’s deeply Christian vision reframed the world for him in redemptive terms. It was this reframing that was instrumental in bringing Lewis to his knees before Christ. The barrenness of atheism had long been a thorn in his side, forcing upon him an uneasy conflict between the enchanted realm of gods and myth that he cherished and the staunch atheism that felt hole and lifeless. For Lewis, the skeptical view is, amongst other things, a failure of the imagination. The richness of our world and human experience cry out against it.
At present, our culture is experiencing a profound crisis of meaning. This crisis is actually not as a consequence of a lack of awareness. Indeed, every single day brings a veritable deluge of knowledge. Where we struggle, nevertheless, is in making sense of all of it. Worse, lots of us proceed to cope with the nagging suspicion that deep down, none of it really matters—that there’s no abiding sense of significance to life. Since we perish without meaning, nevertheless, the sensation of meaninglessness is driving many to look for answers in all places, from psychedelic drugs to new-age practices and the occult. Everywhere, that’s, but Christianity. Why? In short, Christianity comes with a number of cultural baggage. We have to see it from a fresh perspective.
Can Our Imagination Lead Us to Christ Jesus?
How might Christianity address this deep-seated need? To begin to explore that query, we want to hunt to remove the “film of familiarity” and encounter Jesus once more in all of his invasive strangeness. The word is invasive is fastidiously chosen because once we take a look at John’s gospel, we’re confronted with a story, not of intrepid human explorers “discovering” God but relatively of “the Word made flesh,” invading our little world and pursuing us like a heartsick lover. We don’t find God; God finds us. To see the world from this angle is to see things otherwise—to see that our world, removed from being hole and devoid of significance, is, actually, shot through with God’s glory in every detail.
But the final word picture of the imagination as embodying meaning involves us in Christ’s incarnation, essentially the most profound affirmation of humanity and the created order ever displayed. To understand the majesty of our Lord and his good world, go to John’s gospel with fresh eyes.
How Jesus’ Parables Ignite Faith through Imagination
Finally, if we would like a transparent picture of the redemptive use of the imagination, we should turn to the parables of Christ. As Gregory Wolfe has aptly observed, they’re “marvels of compressed meaning.” Why would this be so? For one thing, Jesus uses wealthy imagery, much of it agrarian, as a way to keep the moral urgency of his message firmly grounded within the on a regular basis world of his listeners. Skilled poets and storytellers do much the identical thing.
He doesn’t simply say, “Love thy neighbor.” He gives us a scenario involving a person beaten to a pulp and left for dead, naked and bleeding on the street. Both a priest and a Levite—the moral exemplars of their culture—hurry away from the scene of the crime, prioritizing self-preservation. But then Jesus has the audacity to make a Samaritan the hero of his story. Not only does this Samaritan rescue the victim, but He goes the additional mile. He puts him up in an inn and ensures that there’s enough money to cover any additional needs he can have. With this twist, Christ offers a radical picture of neighborliness that explodes the cultural prejudices of his Jewish audience.
Every one in every of our Lord’s parables brings together vivid imagery and deep moral urgency, bringing to life the colossal indisputable fact that God is love and that the nice life consists in loving him supremely and our neighbor as ourselves.
Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/Tetiana SHYSHKINA
Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
Cameron McAllister is the director of content for Reflections Ministries. He can also be one half of the Thinking Out Loud Podcast, a weekly podcast about current events and Christian hope. He is the co-author (along with his father, Stuart) of Faith That Lasts: A Father and Son On Cultivating Lifelong Belief. He lives within the Atlanta area along with his wife and two kids.