I’ve been thinking about imagination. Here are some thoughts …

I’ve been thinking about imagination. Here are some thoughts …

Last Sunday was Pentecost, the day when we remember the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (Joel 2:28). The prophetic imagination belongs to both men and women, it will be a time of dreams and visions. In a world that feels like it is losing its sense of beauty, truth, and goodness we are in need of more creative, innovative, imaginative prophets.

Writing, not as a Christian, but rather as a political theorist and philosopher, Hannah Arendt tells us that, “Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. … Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable” (The Origins of Totalitarianism 376).

The artist - the prophet - the artistic prophet may be the greatest threat to those who believe that their way is the only way. Any vision that broadens the horizon, even a little, must be crushed as a threat. It’s no wonder the prophets of the Bible and Jesus were rejected.

I’m thankful to Walter Brueggemann for reminding us, “The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined.” Then, like Arendt, he reminds us that “every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one” (The Prophetic Imagination 40).

The Church has spent some 2,000 years articulating the vision of the kingdom of God. It’s a long way from being implemented in the world, but the vision of the kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of Jesus, and the call to develop the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives, is a thoroughly disruptive vision to the narrative of this world. It doesn’t need to be fully implemented to disrupt, it simply needs to sow the seeds of imagination to threaten the principalities and powers that seek to control us. Just proposing an alternative vision is a threat.

Jesus tells us that we need to have the faith of a child. That faith is naturally an imaginative faith. No one is better at imagining than young children. Theologian and poet, Malcolm Guite speaks of the, “Child-like soul of the true artist, the child within each of us, to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs and who can still see heaven even when the adult has forgotten how to look!” (Lifting the Veil 26). He would also point out that the gospel, “is so real and so true that need every faculty of mind and body, including the imagination, to apprehend it. In an age of linear, one-level readings of the word and the world, we need to recover confidence in the baptised imagination as a truth-bearing faculty” (27).

None of us should say we are unimaginative. We may have dulled that faculty, but our life of imagination is part of what it means to be created in the image of God. Creation itself was imagined before it was made. Makoto Fujimura says, “God the Artist communicates to us first, before God the lecturer” (Art and Faith 7). There is in all of us an imaginative artist, capable of seeing a vision of God’s kingdom in all of its fullness and working towards living that vision today.

Imagination has implications for morality. The moral imagination matters. Guite defines the moral imagination as that "exercise of imagination which enables you to stand in another person’s shoes, to go out from your life and place into theirs, to imagine and even re-imagine the world from their perspective” (65). How different would the world be if those of us who have privilege could use our imagination and enter the life of the immigrant, the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, even those we think of as our enemy? That certainly ought to change things.

Peacebuilder and reconciler John Paul Lederach leans heavily on the moral imagination for creating peace. He sees it, “As the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist. In reference to peace-building this is the capacity to imagine and generate constructive responses and initiatives that, while rooted in day-to-day challenges of violence, transcend and ultimately break the grips of those destructive patterns and cycles” (The Moral Imagination 29).

Imagination changes the world.

Imagination tears down the walls of injustice.

Imagination opens space for grace.