Faith Requires Imagination
When I was a kid, the last thing I wanted was for an adult to praise me for my imagination. In my mind, imagination was for the weird kids—the ones drawing by themselves during PE while the rest of us played football. Imagination, to me then, offered a means of escaping the real world for a fantasy. It championed make believe over real, fiction over fact, and for a long time, I found little value in that, to my own detriment. While Christian writers of fiction like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Marilynne Robinson eventually taught me the value of this kind of imagination to the life of faith and virtue formation, I’ve also benefited from an expanded understanding of “imagination.”
Eugene Peterson encouraged the cultivation of imagination as a key for Christian discipleship. For Peterson, however, imagination was much more than “made-up reality.” He defined it as “the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future.” For him, the imagination enables the Christian to embody two worlds at once, the world of God’s kingdom and the world of this age. Peterson continues, “For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context.” The distinction Peterson makes with his reliance on the imagination is not between reality and made-up reality, but between invisible reality and visible reality.
The problem with the world, according to Peterson, is that “the modern majority naively assumes that what they see and hear and touch is basic reality…and think that the visible accounts for the invisible.” To approach the world without the imagination is to approach the world based only on what can be seen with the physical eyes. The gospel, however, invites believers into the invisible but real world of God’s kingdom. The follower of Christ is called to interpret what can be seen on the basis of what God has revealed but remains physically unseen. The imagination, for Peterson, is essential for envisioning the world truthfully and living in the world faithfully. Human imagination is the means through which we can enter into the divine imagination in order to see reality accurately, from God’s perspective. The imagination, informed by faith in revelation, recognizes God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
In fact, for Peterson, the Apostle Paul’s admonition to walk by faith instead of by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7) requires the imagination. In a 2007 interview at Point Loma Nazarene University, Peterson makes this connection between faith and the imagination unmistakably clear: “But the imagination is almost, not quite, the same thing as faith. It’s that which connects what we see and what we don’t see and pulls us through what we see into what we don’t see. Now when that imagination involves trust and participation in the unseen, it’s faith. But imagination is the training ground for that. That’s why I think novelists, poets—we should ordain them. They are very important to the life of the faith, the life of the church.”
For Peterson, one could develop imagination without having faith, but the possession of faith is inconceivable apart from the ability to see the world imaginatively. Envisioning God’s invisible promises requires the imagination. However, fully entering into that drama and actually experiencing the salvation promised requires a further step of trusting in the God who makes the promises. The imagination is not synonymous with faith, but actively cultivating it holds great value for the training of faith.
We see an example of this kind of imaginative faith in 1 Samuel 26:10. David has a golden opportunity to kill Saul and end his nightmare of life on the run in the wilderness. But he refuses. He knows it’s wrong to kill God’s anointed king. Instead, he says, “As the LORD lives, the LORD will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish.” Do you see his imagination at work in faith? I don’t know how, David says, but God will do what he promised. Dale Ralph Davis says of this episode, “Note that faith sets imagination to work.”
We’re in desperate need of this kind of imaginative faith in our own day. We need the kind of faith that recognizes that God will do what he promises even if he doesn’t do it in a way that any of us would have ever predicted. We need to stop saying things like, “This is the most important election in history. If this candidate doesn’t win, we’re doomed.” If you are in Christ, you are never doomed. You can’t lose. God is not limited by our small-minded outlooks. He does not fit within the small confines of our expected outcomes. In Acts 8:1 a great persecution results in the church in Jerusalem being scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. Sounds like a doomsday scenario. It wasn’t. “Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). God always wins. Jesus was raised from the dead. You’ll need imagination to feed your faith to live in light of it.
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