Scripture constantly prompts us to use our imaginations, and this is not accidental. As the wonderful new book Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind shows, imagination is central to the whole project of Scripture—and therefore to living as Christians. But the role of imagination has been neglected and, in many cases, misunderstood. Gene Veith (professor of literature at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia) and Matthew Ristuccia (pastor of Stone Hill Church in Princeton, New Jersey) show with beautiful simplicity why imagination matters so much, and how God uses our imaginations to draw us ever closer to himself and to one another.
Today, if we hear Christian discussions of imagination at all, they are usually talking about specialized professionals like artists, writers, and entertainers. Imagination Redeemed is about something much more fundamental:
We ordinary folks are exhorted to “be creative!” and to “use your imagination!” But, failing to measure up to the great poets and inventors, we might reasonably conclude, “I don’t really have much imagination.” But you do! If I say, “think of a tree,” and you can do that, you have imagination. (14)
Once we realize we are all constantly using our imaginations, all day every day, we see that our imaginations absolutely must be taken captive to Christ. This is not some special activity for the master class; this is essential to everyone’s daily walk with God.
Imagination Redeemed is written with an innovative structure that blends theoretical insight with practical guidance. Readers will be richly blessed by this unique approach. Each chapter consists of three parts: first Veith unfolds a vision of the role of imagination in Christian life; then Ristuccia demonstrates these lessons in action by exegeting one of Ezekiel’s visions; then, in a “colloquy,” the two authors provide specific advice the reader can put to use in his or her own life.
How Imagination Glorifies God
Imagination was given to us so we could love God. He is invisible, but his qualities are made known to us by that which is visible (Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:20). Through the imagination we retain these visible things in our memories and recall them to our minds. Likewise, we come to know God by seeing his image in Christ (Col. 1:15). So we cannot love God in a sustained or rightly ordered way without constantly using our imaginations rightly.
Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind
Gene Edward Veith Jr. and Matthew P. Ristuccia
Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind
Gene Edward Veith Jr. and Matthew P. Ristuccia
Imagination was given to us so we could love each other. Imagination Redeemed showed me something I had never realized: practically every aspect of neighbor love involves imagination. We cannot do to others what we would have them do to us without first imagining what we would have them do to us. Or if we wish to obey God’s command to respect the “image of God” in all human beings, we must have a well-developed and disciplined power of grasping images. What is that but imagination? Paul commands us to bear one another’s burdens and consider the interests of others; how do we know what others’ burdens and interests are, except by using imagination to place ourselves in their shoes?
Imagination was given to us so we could live through a Christian worldview. It is a fatal mistake to think that a worldview can be reduced to a set of explicit cognitive propositions, or that worldviews are constructed mainly through formal, cerebral reasoning. Even the current Christian vogue for “narrative” isn’t enough; there is more to a worldview than a story. Worldviews “are mental models, creatively assembled to make sense of life. . . . Worldviews are generally communicated and transmitted by works of the imagination” (92).
Imagination was given to us so we could practice hope. We walk by faith, not by sight; we value what is unseen more than what is seen. How can we firmly and consistently look beyond the world we see, if not through active and well-trained imagination?
When Imagination Malfunctions
Alas, the fall has comprehensively distorted our imaginations. All sin is at some level an attempt to live in an imaginary world rather than the real one (where God is in charge). Wrong use of imagination, then, is as essential to sin as right use is essential to godliness (Gen. 6:5; Jer. 13:10; Rom. 1:21). Hence the importance of idolatry—worshiping images—in Scripture’s understanding of sin. I especially appreciated the connection Veith draws between the role of imagination in sin and Reformation theology—our sin problem is not just particular sinful acts, it is “the twisted proclivity of our inner lives” (62).
Profoundly, the authors point out that sin not only damages our imaginations as well as our reason and will, but it also disconnects these three things from one another. They were made to work in perfect harmony and interdependence, as they do in God. Now, however, they work against one another more often than not, with many evil and painful consequences.
Renewing Our Imaginations
Our only hope to reorient the bulk of our daily lives toward God is the restoration of our imaginations by the Holy Spirit. He has many means, such as Christian community and edifying cultural products. But his primary means is Scripture, and this is the focus of Imagination Redeemed.
That Scripture prompts us to use our imaginations is obvious in some places, such as when we read historical accounts of great events or prophetic visions. But we tend to assume our mental images aren’t important; what really matters is the information and exhortations in the text. And when we’re not reading these great historical or prophetic passages, we probably aren’t aware we’re using our imaginations at all.
But Imagination Redeemed transforms our perspective by showing that every page of Scripture prompts us to use our imaginations, and this is one essential way the Spirit uses Scripture to form us as Christ followers. We don’t passively sit under Scripture. We are being trained to use our imaginations actively in right ways. Veith and Ristuccia contrast the reading or hearing of Scripture with the viewing of images on a screen; when the images are supplied to us, rather than constructed in our minds responsively, we are passive and don’t learn to use our imaginations actively.
Imagining Exile
As Veith and Ristuccia show, great theologians have always given an important place to imagination. Yet Imagination Redeemed also shows how and why a renewed use of imagination is essential to our cultural moment. This is where Ristuccia’s contribution to the book especially shines.
To understand God’s calling for our time, the church today must use its imagination to recapture the experience of God’s people during the Babylonian exile. Then we must learn to present our faith with appeals to our neighbors’ imaginations, for the moral and intellectual decline of our culture has left too many people deaf to rational argument. Most profoundly, however, the church must recapture a profound vision of God. As Ristuccia emphasizes, Ezekiel’s visions of political, sociological, and artistic restoration among God’s people are preceded and comprehensively shaped by a vision of God as he is in himself.
Between Rationalism and Relativism
The authors do go wrong in one important respect. In several places, they talk as though imagination were not just coordinate with reason and will, but superior to them:
[Imagination] runs deeper than logic and reason—you could almost say it runs behind them—connecting our rational powers to the emotional and volitional centers of our souls. If you capture someone’s imagination, you capture his mind, heart, and will. (29)
This is a bridge too far. If reason is subordinate to imagination rather than coordinate with it, there can be no valid reason to insist it’s right to follow a vision of the true God and wrong to follow a vision of false gods, or none. Veith and Ristuccia back up their claim by pointing out that companies spend millions on advertising that appeals to the imagination, but those same companies also spend millions on lawyers, lobbyists, spokespeople, and others whose job is to appeal to reason. We don’t want to jump out of the frying pan of Cartesian rationalism into the fire of Nietzschean relativism.
But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding book. In every age, godly imagination is as important to Christlikeness as godly reason and godly will. In our age, when we are surrounded by informative resources but famished for edifying images, the hunger for redeemed imagination is especially acute. Imagination Redeemed is a timely help for an urgent need.
