“You have no imagination,” is a very nasty indictment on any follower of Christ. C. S. Lewis maintained that children don’t need to be told to use their imagination. But most adults need regular exhortations in this area of their lives. That, in some ways, is the focus of this article; it’s an exhortation for Christians to rediscover their imagination as the wonderful gift from God that it is. But before we do that, we’ll need to define the imagination; locate it within God’s design; and ask what’s gone wrong with it. At the close, we’ll consider God’s glorious promise for the new creation and what our imaginations have to do with that.
What Is the Imagination?
There’s no shortage of definitions online, but in keeping with the theme of this article, I’ve picked those that are a little more, well, imaginative. First up, John Piper calls imagination “the ability to see the value or the wonder or the glory of things for what they are. In other words, you see ordinary things for the wonder that they are.” He goes on, “you see connections between things that aren’t normally seen. You see oddities that are not often perceived.”
It’s what happens when we go beyond observation and analysis.
Next, Einstein contrasted it with blank thinking. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Imagination is everything. It is a preview of life’s coming attractions.” Thirdly, Mark Twain said, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.” Finally, one dictionary defines imagination as “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality…imagination is creative ability… the ability to confront and deal with a problem…resourcefulness…the part of the mind that imagines things.”
Taken together, we might say that imagination is what happens when we go beyond observation and analysis. It explores the unseen. The future. Possibilities. On the other hand, it’s also when we portray something that exists in a novel manner, as in the case of creative writing, music and art.
The Creator God and Our Own Limitations
As we’ll see below, our imaginations are part of what it means to be made in the image of God. However, as with every good gift, humans tend to distort and abuse it.
Today, we regularly hear different versions of this humanistic, new age gospel: “imagination creates reality.” Nonsense. Go outside and imagine the sky to be a different colour. Did it change? No. Only, there is a partial truth here. We simply need to change the tense. Imagination created reality. In the past. Allowing for an anthropomorphism, God’s creative work in the beginning made something out of nothing—well, from his mind. “By the word of his power,” one psalmist puts it, “God created” (Psalm 33:6). However, this wasn’t anything random; it was that which God determined beforehand to create.
Imagination did create reality. In the past.
Try to imagine absolute nothingness. Try. Right now. Our minds go into a flat spin. We can’t imagine nothing. It’s impossible. Now, consider the grand universe we inhabit; our planet and all creatures great and small who live here; all realities, visible and invisible. Now try to conceive the humungous difference between nothing and everything. Next, picture going from absolutely nothing to everything. That came about by the knowledge, insight and power of God. He brought it all into existence. Creation is the product of the awesome and creative imagination of God. From eternity to eternity, before creation and beyond its consummation. God knows everything.
The Image of God and Imagination
Because God made man in his image, we possess the wonderful faculty of imagination. One of the first duties God gave his divine image bearers was to use it. For God commanded man to name the animals (Genesis 2:19-20). Do yourself a favour and listen to Bob Dylan’s version of this. Men, made in the image of God, are intrinsically creative. We imagine things and turn those imaginations into creations and inventions. But ours is a derived imagination. It isn’t pure imagination. We never create ex nihilo. Yet Piper says this is “perhaps the most God-like” aspect of our being and work. “It is the closest,” he goes on, “we get to creation out of nothing.” Our imaginations have been the great source for ingenuity in countless fields: science, technology, music, art, construction, mechanisation and literature.
Fallen and Malfunctioning
Sadly, our imaginations aren’t all that they could be. For despite being image bearers of the Creator God, our imaginations are distorted. We are sinners.
Our imaginations are distorted. We are sinners.
“Although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21). At the fall, our healthy God-designed imaginations were marred by sinful, twisted and corrupted desires. True, humans remain incredibly creative; however, we are also self-deceived. Added to that, we’re easily deceived by the evil one, who also loves distorting God’s glorious design.
As usual, D. A. Carson nails it. He writes, “Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore, what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.”
Motivational gurus and life coaches all sing the same chorus: ‘if you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.’ Rubbish! The self-help gurus and the multi-trillion-dollar advertising industry tap into and exploit our ruined imaginations. Part of the reason they’ve had so much success is actually the Church’s fault.
The Death of the Imagination Among Evangelicals
As Kevin Vanhoozer remarks, many Evangelicals are suffering from malnourished imaginations. We might call the Evangelical imagination emaciated, stunted. Why? A few reasons:
- The hyper-fundamentalist stream of Evangelicalism tends not to appreciate the scope of common grace. Remedy: read Calvin’s Institutes, the first couple of sections; and the Bible, which sheds a lot of light on the Institutes
- The latent Gnosticism (and Neo-Platonic dualism) that underlies much of Evangelicalism, which treats spiritual realities as far more important than physical ones
- Technology causes us to be dull. It flattens out our worlds. Choosing a cool emoji option is often the height of our imaginative abilities. What a shame. Linked with the above is our entertainment, particularly the movies and series we consume. Because all most of these ever do is recycle tropes and themes, our imaginations are starved
- Imagination isn’t being modelled in homes, at school or in varsity; and perhaps especially not at church.
The imagination is like a muscle. We need to stretch, build and exercise it. This can be difficult. But a well-developed imagination will go some way towards correcting its common distortions in our culture. As Francis Schaffer remarked, “the Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.” Likewise, Douglas Estes says, “the Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils.”
Redeeming Our Minds
Something needs to change. Perhaps a lot. In a second article, I hope to develop some of the above in application for preachers, myself included. But here I want to encourage every believer. All of us need to nurture and discipline our imaginations, bringing them within God’s liberating and sanctifying work. There are a few ways we might do this.
All of us need to nurture and discipline our imaginations.
Reading is one wonderful means. It’s a bit like strength-training for the muscles of our imagination. Consider the great communicators of the gospel. Without exception, they had this one thing in common: they read, and read, and read. So read outside your comfort zone. Don’t neglect the dead in your reading. And read the Bible, more and more. It’s certainly one of the most imaginative books of prose in the world; not because it creates reality that isn’t there, but rather because it turns that reality into so many surprising expressions.
Next, a healthy imagination is contagious. When you’re around someone—alive or dead—who uses it a lot, you can catch it. So hang out with some imaginative people. Pay attention to the ways creatives express things.
Linked with the above point, develop the discipline of observation. Notice things. Reflect on happenings. Wonder as you let your mind wander. Piper talks about marvelling at the mundane. One of Christianity’s most imaginative teachers was C. S. Lewis, who is often described as having an omnivorous attentiveness. He was awake to the wonder of things; he also saw more in ordinary things than most of us. Lewis might’ve called boredom with our world a sin. And he was probably correct, since that insults the glory of God’s creation.
The Unimaginable End
The extent of God’s grace towards us exceeds our ability to imagine it. So says Paul. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). “But,” as he writes elsewhere, “as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him'” (1 Corinthians 2:9). In the age to come there will be nothing ordinary. Nothing average. Nothing boring, nothing mundane or dull. It will be a glorious. A gracious sensory overload. And it will far surpass all our expectations.
