Christianity is a religion of metaphors, analogies, types, and shadows. All these are only understood by imagination and for this reason, “imagination is indispensable to theology” (John M. Frame). And theology is indispensable to imagination. The doctrines of the Christian religion are theological boundaries that keep the imagination synthesizing and pointing in the right direction. More than that, to imagine is to perform a theological activity because every faculty of the mind participates in divining the divine from what we experience. To imagine, to synthesize, to integrate experience into a whole, to find correspondences in the world—all these are theological activities because God is calling to us through our imaginations. He has given us the means by which to see as He sees and by which we might move toward Him. “We know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding to know him who is real; indeed, we are in Him who is real, since we are in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, this is eternal life” (1 John 5:20).
Since we are pilgrims in search of home and since our home is found in God, it behooves us to find the directions He has given to us. Christianity, as it abides by the Scriptures, has an unswerving commitment to God’s Truth. It is utterly dedicated to the myth that is as true as any fact, and as hard as a rock; namely, that the God of the mountain has come down and taken on human flesh so that He might die for His people and, thereby, appease His own holy wrath for their revolt against him. The Gospel, the godspell, is the good story of God bridging the divide between the infinite and the finite. We were in rebellion and would not, could not, bridge it on our own. Jesus Christ, the son of God, is that bridge and because he is both the image of God in flesh and “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, He is the means by which the imagination is trained and the only way for it to flourish. The entire Old Testament points to Him with every detail and every metaphor and every song. The entire New Testament points back to Him with every exhortation and metaphor and story. The imagination needs the Scriptures as a prevention against self-destruction. Thankfully, my mother and father taught me this concept my whole life and I will teach my children the same.
After three years in Africa, we came home for a brief furlough. I was seven, maybe eight, and I was on U.S. soil for the first time in three years. There was plenty to keep a boy’s imagination active in Africa, but having limited exposure to television or movies, I was unprepared for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was but a child whose senses had never so vividly encountered the skeletons around every corner or the melting off of a human face by the spirits of the dead.
We were staying with my grandparents in Pennsylvania at the time and we were sleeping in their basement. After watching that movie, I could not bear to go downstairs at night or in the day. I began to see those faceless faces everywhere. The fear paralyzed me for at least six weeks. My wise mother sat by my bed and read from the Psalms while I stared at the ceiling and begged for every single light to be left on. She wrote a verse on a sheet of paper each evening and taped it above the bed where I slept. Because we were traveling on furlough, the bed was a new one almost every day, but God’s word remained a firm bedrock during a tumultuous season of life.
“May the Lord answer you in the hour of trouble!
The name of the God of Jacob be your strong tower.
May He give you help from the sanctuary and send you aid from Zion!” (Psalm 20).
“God is our shelter and our refuge,
a timely help in trouble;
so we are not afraid when the earth heaves
and the mountains are hurled into the sea,
when its waters seethe in tumult…” (Psalm 46).
“Be gracious to me, O God, be gracious;
for I have made thee my refuge.
I will take refuge in the shadow of thy wings
until the storms are past” (Psalm 57).
Suddenly I remember baby chicks and a furious hen. I will hide beneath those wings, for only beneath them will I find safety. The Truth has begun to work, slowly, upon my imagination. The Truth replaced one picture with another one.
Vestiges of that fear still linger with me in my adulthood. The old fears will crawl up to the surface of my imagination, restoring to me the images of death, if I simply hear the soundtrack to that movie. The John Williams theme song, musically wonderful and adventurous, can nonetheless pull me down into a vague creepy-crawly terror. The verses that Mom read to me were not like magic pills. I wished they were magic pills, of course, but the fear did not leave me the first or second night, nor even after a few weeks. Still, the Scriptures worked upon me gradually. The verses soaked into my imaginative bones until I could decipher the pictures that were false and believe those that were true.
