Faith as Imagination

Faith as Imagination

As it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of people imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” —these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2:9.

Ortberg exclaims, “Faith is an act of the imagination.” The harshness of life has a way of killing our imaginations on the altar of being responsible and practical, or it is murdered by life’s sorrow and injustice. We can invite the Holy Spirit to reignite a sanctified imagination. Imagination moves into a world captive to lies, evil, and the profane, and fights to restore God’s truth, goodness, and beauty. A fully engaged imagination is required of the poet, the painter, the philosopher, and the plumber.

Fantasy escapes; imagination reshapes. One engages in fantasy because he or she cannot bear the harshness or the responsibility of reality. One engages the imagination to embrace reality—with all its sorrow, struggle, injustice, death, and dehumanizing evil—to reclaim, reshape, redeem, and restore divine glory in the world. Transformative music and art come from an imagination that embraces life in all its struggle—what artist and authors call pathos—and imagines into being God’s kingdom and its king reigning even in the face of darkness.

Imagination, not information, fosters transformation. We make decisions ultimately driven by our passions not our intellect. Imagination is the gateway into our passions. Capture the imagination; change the soul. It is story, metaphor, and artistic expressions that have the most power to transform. Christ came as a teller of stories, not a systematic theologian.

Authentic worship requires engaging our imagination. This is the invitation to see the hand of God throughout each day in all manner of unexpected places and working in the life of every person you meet. Imagination transforms the secular into the sacred and redeems the mundane into the magnificent.

As Schaeffer declared, “The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.” Only by living with imagination can you trace the artist’s brush of God redeeming every tear for a testimony of grace, and every trial into a triumph of glory. The fingerprints of God are everywhere: redeeming, restoring, rescuing, and reclaiming everything back under the sovereign kingdom reign of Christ. If you fully engage your sanctified imagination, you’ll trace the artist’s brush of God all around you.

The Trinity invites you to pick up your brush, and add to the truth, goodness, and beauty of Their world. Let’s allow the Holy Spirit to enliven our imagination and become What If people…daring to dream God’s grand kingdom dreams!

Dr. Christopher English

November 2020

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