A man’s view of God (and the world), his worldview, rests in the lap of the imagination; his worldview is expressed by the imagination through action. While the world’s unhealthy imagination is of importance, the purpose of this blog post is to feed the Christian imagination and bring it under Christ’s sovereign rule: “the task for the Christian student of literature remains that of grounding his or her thinking in the history of Christian thought. And one place for the Christian to begin thinking about literature is with the conviction, held by Christians through the ages, that in a universe created and ruled by a sovereign God all things are meaningful.
The Scriptures proclaim that, in creating the world, God gave order and purpose to it, that in the Incarnation he sent his Son to redeem our fallen state, and that at the end of the age he will judge the nations and disclose the meaning of history in its fullness” (Gallagher and Lundin, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith). Christians must have a view of the world and God’s workings in the world that is anchored in Scripture and they must incarnate a meaningful theology that reflects this worldview.
If our Christianity is shaped by the predominant egalitarian and individualized modernity more than it is by the hierarchical and communal Judeo-Christian faith, then it will likely raise children whose imaginations do not reflect a belief in opposing teams and are, therefore, trained by and for the wrong team. If our Christianity is more Universalist and anti-antithesis, then we will likely rob ourselves and our children of an entire tradition of literature that is richly rooted in Christ and His Church as it has stood against the world and death-dealing paganism. Unfortunately, we raise the children on beats and rice-cakes and are surprised when they grow up intellectually gaunt and morally enervated.
A.W. Tozer remarked once in A Gift of Seeing that, “as God created us, we all have to some degree the power to imagine. That imagination is of great value in the service of God may be denied by some persons who have erroneously confused the word ‘imagination’ with the word ‘imaginary.’…The most realistic book in the world is the Bible. God is real. Men are real and so is sin and so are death and hell! The presence of God is not imaginary; neither is prayer the indulgence of a delightful fancy. The value of the cleansed imagination in the sphere of religion lies in its power to perceive in natural things shadows of things spiritual. A purified and Spirit-controlled imagination is the sacred gift of seeing; the ability to peer beyond the veil and gaze with astonished wonder upon the beauties and mysteries of things holy and eternal. The stodgy pedestrian mind does no credit to Christianity.”
As Lewis, Langan, and others have enumerated, the Christian imagination does not fly from physical reality, even when engaged with a book; reality is always on the mind and a return to the sidewalks of this world inevitable. He reads, however, that he might avert the stodgy pedestrian mind that so often encumbers the courage and agility of what might well have been the very best runners. Though Hamlet called his world a prison, and though we are tempted to echo his sentiments, the “Christian imagination does not see the world as a prison from which the soul must escape, but as the stage of humanity’s interaction with its God” (Langan). Stories are the telling of that interaction with God; even when God’s name is never mentioned, His shadow is everywhere spreading across her pages. We too are on that stage and if we view our little plot as a prison, then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were correct for once and all the world is, indeed, a prison.
But this life is not a prison and history is not an enclosed history. Too many of us have forgotten that God’s story is not yet finished, though the ending is roughly known, and we imagine ourselves floating somewhere in a world that simply does its thing until God pops out from behind a cloud accompanied by loud noises. This kind of wait and see thinking is nothing but theological and imaginative porridge; perhaps enough to get us from day to day, but certainly nothing in which to exult and nothing that drives us to make a dent in things.
So we need the kind of imagination that gives us purpose to transform culture and help Christians make a dent in all the work that is yet to be accomplished.
