THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION IN CHRISTIAN FAITH DEVELOPMENT
Iain McKillop - DISCUSSION-STARTER-PAPER
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot on the value of the Imagination for Christians in recent months. My thoughts have developed through several retreats I’ve led, including themes like the Imagery and Titles for God is Scripture, how cultures have imagined God over the centuries and possible uses of the arts as aids to Prayer. Our combined thoughts on how imagination has helped us to develop our faith and our churches might expand our understanding of the value of developing Christian Imagination. Here are just a few disparate thoughts that might awaken discussion:
There have been several times in church history when Christians have been very wary of the Imagination:
Yet there have also been many periods when there have been huge strives forward through the application of the imagination to faith:
*NB. None of us ever think of God without engaging our imagination. We interpret ‘him’ through metaphors like ‘Father’, ‘Lord’. ‘Good Shepherd’ or relate his qualities to ones we know from human virtues: ‘love’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘caring’, ‘judging’ though God’s qualities are probably very different from the way humans display them.
THE NEED FOR THE IMAGINATION IN THE CHURCH TODAY
It seems to me that we are in need of a huge input of imagination if the Christian Church is to revive today. The Church of England and most other denominations badly need another ‘Reformation’ to shake us out of our lethargy, adherence to the status quo or spiritual arrogance and meet the real challenges that are keeping people away from faith today. Imagination should not lead to the removal of valuable traditions but should encourage us to build on what is good and truthful in them in order to refine or reinterpret them in ways that communicate faith effectively to our contemporaries. Evangelical, Catholic, Liberal and Alternative liturgy adherents are often too assured that ‘our way is right’ or arrogant in the exclusivity of our faith. We are missing-out or not reaching huge sections of the population whose imagination we have failed to engage enough to begin to think that faith might be relevant to them.
VALUES OF APPLYING OUR IMAGINATION TO FAITH
IMAGINING A GOD WE CANNOT SEE (Quotes to consider:)
“Let us evoke him as the inexpressible God, incomprehensible and unknowable. Let us affirm that he surpasses all power of human speech, that he eludes the grasp of every mortal intelligence, that the angels cannot penetrate him, that the cherubim cannot fully understand him. For he is invisible to the principalities and powers, the virtues and all creatures. Only the Son and the Holy Spirit know him. (John Chrysostom 347-407)
“We should live as if we are seeing God face to face, but we should not conceive an image of God. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension and realizing him in all.” (Thomas Merton, Hidden Ground of Love p.63-64)
“We are not trying to pronounce about what God can or cannot be, but about how God can be found in our world… God’s people have the hopeful responsibility of being the presence, the ‘findability’ of God upon earth… Our diversity should enable God to be found in all areas of life in our world… The word multi-faceted comes to mind. The Church may be a prism breaking up the white-light of God’s dazzling majesty.” (Helen Oppenheim. Theology 93 1990 p.133-141)
What do you think of when you imagine the God to whom you pray? When you worship what do you focus towards? If we imagine anything we are in danger of heresy or idolatry: God is beyond imagining or understanding. Iconoclasts from Protestant Reformers to Islamic State destroyed religious images that can lead astray. Yet Jesus taught us to imagine God. His parables are full of imagery to teaches us aspects of God, our source of life & focus of worship: the Father of the Prodigal Son; the Good Shepherd; the Wise, Wealthy Landowner entrusting stewards with his lands and wealth; the King; the Just Judge. Perhaps most audaciously, in Hebrew culture that emphasised that the God is one & that anyone creating or worshipping idols should be killed, Jesus taught us to imagine God in three distinctive ways: Father, Spirit then he claimed: “He who has seen me has seen the Father”[John 14:9]. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews was so convinced that they opened their address to a largely Jewish Church: “In various ways God spoke to our ancestors but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, who is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” [Heb.1:1-3]. It took a great leap of the imagination for a Jew to say or read that.
We are audacious in creating images, teaching ideas and methods or creating liturgies and places of worship to try to help people understand and worship God! There is a dichotomy in our understanding of God. Most mystics recognise that God is inevitably unknowable. Early Greek Fathers taught that if you imagine ANYTHING in worship you are being heretical (cf. Thomas Merton quote above).
Yet at the same time Christians emphasise that God intended himself to be found by people within his creation. God is intangible yet has revealed enough for us to have meaningful relationships with him. No imagery IS the God we worship; it is at best an insight into tiny aspects of God’s nature or character, a metaphor to reach into understanding God. It is our responsibility to keep our minds expanded, so that we do not limit our concept of God, though the ways we imagine God are hugely influenced (and limited) by our circumstances and culture. We need to find ways of imagining God as trustworthy and reliable if we are to believe, pray, worship and evangelise truthfully.
In using our imagination we need to be careful not to create a God in our own image. A key aspect of Dominican contemplation was to mistrust the imagination. Contemplatives were advised to keep returning to Scripture, not be led too far off track by personal spiritual imagination. Aquinas claimed that he learned more from contemplation than all his study of theology and doctrine. But he was contemplating what Scripture actually said about God.
AWAKENING OUR IMAGINATIONS TO BRING IMAGERY ALIVE
We mostly ‘know’ God through the metaphors which scripture uses and through any experiences in our lives. The challenge of conveying faith is to help people be open and aware, so that they are able to find the God who can be true to them in their own lives. (We need to make sure that we are constantly open and aware too, ready to respond to ways in which God might communicate to us.) Awakening ourselves and our imaginations to the potential of what we could be is part of believing in and working towards the Kingdom of God. Our contemporary world is full of scepticism, cynicism and disillusionment . It’s easy for us to adopt a similar dispirited attitude too when we look at all that is wrong with the Church as an institution and the seeming impossibilities of transforming our world. But the God we worship and seek to ‘find’ in our lives and experience is ‘Truth’ – ‘The Way the Truth and the Life’. Christ taught us hope and gave us an ideal to set our imaginations working towards. William Blake called Jesus Christ “The Imagination”, implying that Jesus was the imagination that created the cosmos and well as our imaginary vision of what a truly fulfilled human being could be… something to work towards.
AWAKENING THE IMAGINATION IN CHURCH
In creating services, designing our churches and trying to convey a truthful, transforming faith to others we need to be constantly using our imaginations to try to translate Christ’s message in as truthful and communicative ways as possible. Our imaginations are needed to help us make traditions and new ideas come alive.
No imagery we create can do justice to the religious truth it describes, but some used by Christians is weaker than others. Churches are often full of images that either help or hinder. A crucifix that gives one person comfort might seem naff or naïve to another, so it’s not easy to communicate universally. Some conventional symbolism may have lost its power and need to be reinterpreted or changed: The Cross is universal but it doesn’t communicate the full hope in Christ’s Gospel. The dove or candle flame representing the Holy Spirit are scriptural signs from the narrative of Christ’s baptism & Pentecost but they hardly carry the sense of the transforming power of the rushing mighty wind of Pentecost or the strength and wisdom forming Creation. People don’t listen to spoken sermons with the intent of past centuries. Perhaps we need to apply our imaginations to find new metaphors & ways which will convey faith today.
Even limited images can have strengths if we interpret them to people in was that awaken their imagination. Imagery may be a limited metaphor but behind it we can find religious truth if we engage with it. The dove can convey God’s gentleness, purity, the vulnerability of his trust in us and his loyalty & faithfulness in relationship with us. These are how God so often works with us – not ‘overpowering’ as at Pentecost, but gently cooing in the background (like the Turtle Dove of the Psalms), so we can’t miss his prompting. God doesn’t often destroy through violently exercising power but faithfully works at us until our lives are slowly transformed. The secret of using such imagery is to recognise its limitations, but look for the potential truths and meanings within it. The great mystical teacher on prayer Humbert of Romans insisted that all teachers of faith understand the symbols of their faith. He suggested that we cannot have the confidence to explain faith to others if we don’t. So we shouldn’t just look at a symbol like a cross or a picture of a religious subject or a Bible passage; we should spend time contemplating religious imagery unpacking what it says to us about God, salvation and our faith, so that we can bring it alive for others.
Iain McKillop - DISCUSSION-STARTER-PAPER
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot on the value of the Imagination for Christians in recent months. My thoughts have developed through several retreats I’ve led, including themes like the Imagery and Titles for God is Scripture, how cultures have imagined God over the centuries and possible uses of the arts as aids to Prayer. Our combined thoughts on how imagination has helped us to develop our faith and our churches might expand our understanding of the value of developing Christian Imagination. Here are just a few disparate thoughts that might awaken discussion:
There have been several times in church history when Christians have been very wary of the Imagination:
- Prophetic warnings against idolatry and making a false God in our own image or limited by our own imagination.
- St Paul wisely taught the early church to be wary of being blown about by every new spiritual whim.
- The Protestant and Evangelical insistence that we should only listen to Scripture. (Actually every time we read scripture or think of God we interpret them by our imagination).
- The Free Presbyterians refusing to sing anything other than Psalms because they are the scriptural form of praise.
- Refusals of some churches or individual Christians to accept that other traditions (Christian and non-Christian) may also have access to or have found ‘truths’.
- Refusals to acknowledge scientific discoveries like the Church responses to Galileo & Darwin.
- Seeing the mistakes of religious fanatics, cults and heresies which have taken the imagination too far.
- Christians refusing to read religious literature from any other tradition than their own ‘sound’ authors.
Yet there have also been many periods when there have been huge strives forward through the application of the imagination to faith:
- The imagery of the Psalms, Hebrew Prophets, Revelation and imagery for God in scripture.
- Jesus’ teaching through Parables.
- The Doctors of the Church who wrestled to express faith through inventing Doctrines, Creeds and liturgies from the little we know for sure about God and interpret from scripture.
- The design and building of architectural wonders of churches and cathedrals to elevate worship -from Hagia Sophia in Byzantium, to Abbot Suger’s plans for St Denis, the first Gothic cathedral, the Baroque extravagances of the Counter Reformation or great modernist church designs.
- Luther’s challenge to accepted Catholicism (most religious reform has happened by revolution not peaceful change.)
- The great revivals of hymnody, Christian poetry and preaching.
- Missionaries translating and interpreting scripture so people of other cultures could comprehend.
- Periods of great Christian art from the Iconoclastic Controversy, the Renaissance & Counter-Reformation to today.
- The Christians apologists who took on the creative challenge of responding to the Humanist Enlightenment.
- Modern liturgical developments (though we still need to communicate and worship more effectively & truly.
*NB. None of us ever think of God without engaging our imagination. We interpret ‘him’ through metaphors like ‘Father’, ‘Lord’. ‘Good Shepherd’ or relate his qualities to ones we know from human virtues: ‘love’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘caring’, ‘judging’ though God’s qualities are probably very different from the way humans display them.
THE NEED FOR THE IMAGINATION IN THE CHURCH TODAY
It seems to me that we are in need of a huge input of imagination if the Christian Church is to revive today. The Church of England and most other denominations badly need another ‘Reformation’ to shake us out of our lethargy, adherence to the status quo or spiritual arrogance and meet the real challenges that are keeping people away from faith today. Imagination should not lead to the removal of valuable traditions but should encourage us to build on what is good and truthful in them in order to refine or reinterpret them in ways that communicate faith effectively to our contemporaries. Evangelical, Catholic, Liberal and Alternative liturgy adherents are often too assured that ‘our way is right’ or arrogant in the exclusivity of our faith. We are missing-out or not reaching huge sections of the population whose imagination we have failed to engage enough to begin to think that faith might be relevant to them.
VALUES OF APPLYING OUR IMAGINATION TO FAITH
- We mustn’t get stuck in a rut of believing, living and practising faith in one way.
- Creativity and creative thinking encourage lateral thinking, which helps people reach beyond what we see, what we have already experienced and beyond tradition, and value what we find in other traditions.
- Imagination helps us explore understanding of ‘mystery’; it can take us further than ‘knowledge’ can. Often the greatest inventors have been the lateral thinkers. We underestimate the roles of ‘intuition’ & ‘imagination’ in faith.
- Imagination is a gift of God that has advanced human culture. Eccles.3 “God has set eternity in the human mind”.
- God is ‘unknowable’ but he is ‘imaginable’, not as an image, but through concepts and metaphors.
- We can relate to God through our imaginations and the metaphors and symbols we use to convey our understanding of God’s actions and qualities.
- We don’t know what Christ was or looked like but we can imagine him, (often in our own individual ways,) and through imagining him we come to understand more of what God is like, as he represented God most closely to us.
- Whenever we read or interpret scripture or apply it to our lives we are engaging our imagination.
- Imagination is a huge help in prayer - from Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to imagining what we would like God to do when we pray. Imagination is part of our intercession – believing in God’s abilities & trusting what God could do.
- When we imagine what God’s Kingdom could be like, we are more likely to be able to work towards building it.
- Imagination could help us make our churches and what we do in them more attractive to the contemporary visitor and more truthful in how we worship.
- Imagination is essential for effective evangelism and teaching: We need to be able to convey the abstract, ‘unknowable’ qualities of God and the values of faith in ways that bring them alive to others and enable them to engage their own imaginative faith in response.
IMAGINING A GOD WE CANNOT SEE (Quotes to consider:)
“Let us evoke him as the inexpressible God, incomprehensible and unknowable. Let us affirm that he surpasses all power of human speech, that he eludes the grasp of every mortal intelligence, that the angels cannot penetrate him, that the cherubim cannot fully understand him. For he is invisible to the principalities and powers, the virtues and all creatures. Only the Son and the Holy Spirit know him. (John Chrysostom 347-407)
“We should live as if we are seeing God face to face, but we should not conceive an image of God. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension and realizing him in all.” (Thomas Merton, Hidden Ground of Love p.63-64)
“We are not trying to pronounce about what God can or cannot be, but about how God can be found in our world… God’s people have the hopeful responsibility of being the presence, the ‘findability’ of God upon earth… Our diversity should enable God to be found in all areas of life in our world… The word multi-faceted comes to mind. The Church may be a prism breaking up the white-light of God’s dazzling majesty.” (Helen Oppenheim. Theology 93 1990 p.133-141)
What do you think of when you imagine the God to whom you pray? When you worship what do you focus towards? If we imagine anything we are in danger of heresy or idolatry: God is beyond imagining or understanding. Iconoclasts from Protestant Reformers to Islamic State destroyed religious images that can lead astray. Yet Jesus taught us to imagine God. His parables are full of imagery to teaches us aspects of God, our source of life & focus of worship: the Father of the Prodigal Son; the Good Shepherd; the Wise, Wealthy Landowner entrusting stewards with his lands and wealth; the King; the Just Judge. Perhaps most audaciously, in Hebrew culture that emphasised that the God is one & that anyone creating or worshipping idols should be killed, Jesus taught us to imagine God in three distinctive ways: Father, Spirit then he claimed: “He who has seen me has seen the Father”[John 14:9]. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews was so convinced that they opened their address to a largely Jewish Church: “In various ways God spoke to our ancestors but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, who is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” [Heb.1:1-3]. It took a great leap of the imagination for a Jew to say or read that.
We are audacious in creating images, teaching ideas and methods or creating liturgies and places of worship to try to help people understand and worship God! There is a dichotomy in our understanding of God. Most mystics recognise that God is inevitably unknowable. Early Greek Fathers taught that if you imagine ANYTHING in worship you are being heretical (cf. Thomas Merton quote above).
Yet at the same time Christians emphasise that God intended himself to be found by people within his creation. God is intangible yet has revealed enough for us to have meaningful relationships with him. No imagery IS the God we worship; it is at best an insight into tiny aspects of God’s nature or character, a metaphor to reach into understanding God. It is our responsibility to keep our minds expanded, so that we do not limit our concept of God, though the ways we imagine God are hugely influenced (and limited) by our circumstances and culture. We need to find ways of imagining God as trustworthy and reliable if we are to believe, pray, worship and evangelise truthfully.
In using our imagination we need to be careful not to create a God in our own image. A key aspect of Dominican contemplation was to mistrust the imagination. Contemplatives were advised to keep returning to Scripture, not be led too far off track by personal spiritual imagination. Aquinas claimed that he learned more from contemplation than all his study of theology and doctrine. But he was contemplating what Scripture actually said about God.
AWAKENING OUR IMAGINATIONS TO BRING IMAGERY ALIVE
We mostly ‘know’ God through the metaphors which scripture uses and through any experiences in our lives. The challenge of conveying faith is to help people be open and aware, so that they are able to find the God who can be true to them in their own lives. (We need to make sure that we are constantly open and aware too, ready to respond to ways in which God might communicate to us.) Awakening ourselves and our imaginations to the potential of what we could be is part of believing in and working towards the Kingdom of God. Our contemporary world is full of scepticism, cynicism and disillusionment . It’s easy for us to adopt a similar dispirited attitude too when we look at all that is wrong with the Church as an institution and the seeming impossibilities of transforming our world. But the God we worship and seek to ‘find’ in our lives and experience is ‘Truth’ – ‘The Way the Truth and the Life’. Christ taught us hope and gave us an ideal to set our imaginations working towards. William Blake called Jesus Christ “The Imagination”, implying that Jesus was the imagination that created the cosmos and well as our imaginary vision of what a truly fulfilled human being could be… something to work towards.
AWAKENING THE IMAGINATION IN CHURCH
In creating services, designing our churches and trying to convey a truthful, transforming faith to others we need to be constantly using our imaginations to try to translate Christ’s message in as truthful and communicative ways as possible. Our imaginations are needed to help us make traditions and new ideas come alive.
No imagery we create can do justice to the religious truth it describes, but some used by Christians is weaker than others. Churches are often full of images that either help or hinder. A crucifix that gives one person comfort might seem naff or naïve to another, so it’s not easy to communicate universally. Some conventional symbolism may have lost its power and need to be reinterpreted or changed: The Cross is universal but it doesn’t communicate the full hope in Christ’s Gospel. The dove or candle flame representing the Holy Spirit are scriptural signs from the narrative of Christ’s baptism & Pentecost but they hardly carry the sense of the transforming power of the rushing mighty wind of Pentecost or the strength and wisdom forming Creation. People don’t listen to spoken sermons with the intent of past centuries. Perhaps we need to apply our imaginations to find new metaphors & ways which will convey faith today.
Even limited images can have strengths if we interpret them to people in was that awaken their imagination. Imagery may be a limited metaphor but behind it we can find religious truth if we engage with it. The dove can convey God’s gentleness, purity, the vulnerability of his trust in us and his loyalty & faithfulness in relationship with us. These are how God so often works with us – not ‘overpowering’ as at Pentecost, but gently cooing in the background (like the Turtle Dove of the Psalms), so we can’t miss his prompting. God doesn’t often destroy through violently exercising power but faithfully works at us until our lives are slowly transformed. The secret of using such imagery is to recognise its limitations, but look for the potential truths and meanings within it. The great mystical teacher on prayer Humbert of Romans insisted that all teachers of faith understand the symbols of their faith. He suggested that we cannot have the confidence to explain faith to others if we don’t. So we shouldn’t just look at a symbol like a cross or a picture of a religious subject or a Bible passage; we should spend time contemplating religious imagery unpacking what it says to us about God, salvation and our faith, so that we can bring it alive for others.