Most of us likely associate the imagination with things that aren’t real. If I describe a child as “imaginative,” for instance, the assumption would be that I’m referring to her rich world of make-believe. An imaginative adult, on the other hand, might be someone who works at Pixar studios or has a workspace filled with action figures. These examples tend to perpetuate the assumption that the imagination is the exclusive province of children and “creatives.”
In fact, this default assumption is nothing more than cultural prejudice. As we’ll see, imagination is an integral part of how everyone makes sense of the world. In his marvelous book Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Malcolm Guite defines imagination as “an active, shaping power of perception exercised both individually and collectively, and as a faculty that is capable of both apprehending and embodying truth. Like reason, its twin faculty, our fallen imagination is shadowed and finite, but like reason, it is also, under God’s grace, illuminating and redemptive.”
In other words, the imagination helps us make sense of our lives by synthesizing the countless fine 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 rather abstract patterns in an X-ray, but a doctor or a technician can 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, as the x-ray example shows, it’s also helpful to dwell on more mundane instances of the working imagination in order to shed light on its practical reality. In this sense, consider a couple buying a “fixer-upper” and seeing past the dilapidated interior to a finished home. Or think of an engineer staring at a blueprint or a web developer writing code. These, too, are examples of the imagination at work.
For our purposes here, we’re going to make a meaningful distinction between imagination and fantasy. By fantasy, we mean to indicate a narrow form of escapism that can include everything from idle daydreams to full-blown sexual fantasies. Unlike the imagination, fantasy, in this sense, has only a superficial connection with reality and is chiefly motivated by a desire to seek instant 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 especially accomplished works of high fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Far from constituting a flight from reality, fantastic stories such as these represent a deep engagement with it, often giving us timeless visions of friendship, bravery, and perseverance. (They also tell us a good deal about our own world. The Lord of the Rings is, among other things, an extended 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.
Speaking of fantasy stories, C.S. Lewis, in one of the many 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, part of what Lewis seems 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 hollow and lifeless. For Lewis, the skeptical view is, among 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 certainly not due to a lack of information. Indeed, every day brings a veritable deluge of information. Where we struggle, however, is in making sense of it all. Worse, many of us continue to deal 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, however, the feeling of meaninglessness is driving many to search for answers everywhere, from psychedelic drugs to new-age practices and the occult. Everywhere, that is, but Christianity. Why? In short, Christianity comes with a lot of cultural baggage. We need to see it from a fresh perspective.
How might Christianity address this deep-seated need? To begin to explore that question, we need to seek to remove the “film of familiarity” and encounter Jesus once again in all of his invasive strangeness. The word is invasive is carefully chosen because when we look at John’s gospel, we’re confronted with a story, not of intrepid human explorers “discovering” God but rather 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 perspective is to see things otherwise—to see that our world, far from being hollow and devoid of significance, is, in fact, shot through with God’s glory in every detail.
But the ultimate picture of the imagination as embodying meaning comes to us in Christ’s incarnation, 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.
Finally, if we want a clear picture of the redemptive use of the imagination, we ought to turn to the parables of Christ. As Gregory Wolfe has aptly observed, they are “marvels of compressed meaning.” Why would this be so? For one thing, Jesus uses rich imagery, much of it agrarian, in order to keep the moral urgency of his message firmly grounded in the everyday world of his listeners. Skilled poets and storytellers do much the same thing.
He doesn’t simply say, “Love thy neighbor.” He gives us a scenario involving a man beaten to a pulp and left for dead, naked and bleeding in 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 extra mile. He puts him up in an inn and ensures that there’s enough money to cover any additional needs he may have. With this twist, Christ offers a radical picture of neighborliness that explodes the cultural prejudices of his Jewish audience.
Every one of our Lord’s parables brings together vivid imagery and deep moral urgency, bringing to life the colossal fact that God is love and that the good life consists in loving him supremely and our neighbor as ourselves.
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Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, 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 in 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.