The Theological Importance of Imagination

Imagination is essential to Christianity.

Now, I realize most of us have had it drilled into our hearts and minds that imagination equals irresponsibility:

“Don’t tell me stories! I want the truth.”

“Stop daydreaming your life away.”

“Don’t be naive. This is life, not a fairy tale.”

Imagining is for children, so the story goes, and perhaps it is exactly the child-like quality of imagining that makes the practice essential to Christianity. Of course many of you are familiar with when Jesus said, "Truly I say to you, unless you repent (change, turn about) and become like little children [trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving], you can never enter the kingdom of heaven [at all]" (Matt 18:3 Amplified).

I submit to you that imagination is vital to the Christian disciplines of being trusting, lowly, loving, and forgiving. In JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement speech, the writer of the imaginatively (and christianly) rich Harry Potter series asserts,

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
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Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

Imagination is not inherently evil in adults; it can be used virtuously or viciously. Used virtuously, imagination is the engine of human empathy, which is a sort of love-induced, love-inspired understanding of another human being. Love-infused understanding is the kind of knowledge we are called to embody as believers. Consider the words of the apostle Paul in yet another familiar passage:

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge... but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. (1 Cor 13:2 New Living, emphasis mine)

In other words, we cannot know another person without love---not really, not in any way that's constructive or virtuous... or in any way that really counts for anything. That passage goes on to assert just exactly what Christian love looks like:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (4-7)

If we are going to “never give up” on another person, we have to see in them something more than the flesh and blood standing before us. We have to see their potential beyond their failings. We have to see their image-of-God-bearing good will in the face of their hurtful words and actions. We have to see what is unseen. In other words, we have to see with eyes of faith.

We cannot, however, see through eyes of faith if we lack the "capacity to envision that which is not;" we cannot see truly if we lack imagination. Caroline J Simon, in her excellent book, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination, puts it this way:

Perhaps, then, love can be a source of insight. In fact, I think that genuine love, in all its forms [neighbor love, romantic love…], provides insight into the loved one’s true self [the untainted Image-bearing self God created and Christ redeemed us to be]. In order for this to occur, however, our hearts must be trained and disciplined… The undisciplined heart is prone to whimsical reaction and wishful, self-interested projection; it confuses love with love’s counterfeits: infatuation, manipulation, and sentimentality. (12-13)

Simon goes on to distinguish between virtuous imagining as “the capacity to see what may not yet appear but should" (emphasis mine)---should as in, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven” --- and vicious imagining which demands my kingdom come, my will be done.

So what does virtuous and vicious imagining look like? Vicious imagining happens when a white woman sees a black man and clutches her purse. It happens when a young man creates a false notion of the young woman in the next cubical and reacts in bitterness when she does not act like her Invented Self would. It happens anytime anyone puts another person on a pedestal. And when we're content to see people by labels instead of names.

Virtuous imagining happens when a teacher believes there's more beneath the surface of the trouble-maker sitting in the fourth row; when he values her and therefore expects more of her than anyone ever has before. Virtuous imagining happens when a teacher or parent or friend believes in, encourages, and nurtures their student/child/friend's work and abilities. Virtuous imagining happens when friends and lovers bring out the best in us, when they encourage and nurture the beautiful parts of us we are scared to show or didn't even know were there. It happens when we see what the Good Samaritan saw: he saw a human being when others saw an inconvenience and a social faux pas. A virtuous imagination sees beyond the foibles of the church and sees Christ in the church. 

I could go on and on, but here's the point: if we want to be a song to the world and to one another, rather than unmitigated noise (see 1 Cor 13:1), we must learn to channel knowledge through love; we must learn to connect to one another's humanness, to empathize. And in order to empathize, we must relearn how to imagine.

Art as Mirror & Bridge

Art is extremely helpful to us as Christians. I see that look of incredulity on your faces. Hear me out. Learning how to understand and engage with art should be important to us because art serves as both a mirror of society and a bridge to the other. As a mirror, art serves as a finger on the pulse of our particular culture or subculture: What do we (as a society) believe? What do we value? What’s happening historically, and how is that affecting what we believe and value? Often, art can even answer the question: Where are we heading? Christians are regularly interested in these questions, but we generally ignore art even though art is a major informer of the answers Christians are looking for in these regards.

Art as a bridge serves several purposes. As a bridge to other people, art helps us understand and empathize with individuals and people groups we don’t understand, whether because of long distances of time and space or because of long distances between their ideology and ours. This is huge. What we don’t understand we fear. When we act out of fear, we fail to live by faith and to act out of love. Conversely, understanding brings connection and the ability to empathize. Empathy, or compassion, or love-induced understanding, is a pillar of our faith. How can we show Christ’s love to people we choose not to connect to and empathize with (whether by willful choice or lazy neglect)?

Finally, art serves as a bridge to the Other, to God. We need imagination to envision the Kingdom of God, a world which Jesus said was here but not yet fully here. We need our God-given imaginations to pray, Father, make it on Earth as it is in heaven. Art helps us go there, helps us engage our imaginations. It can take us to otherworldly places like Narnia and Hogwarts and Middle Earth. In a painting, lovers can float happily above the world of cares and woes, as if in heaven. When art depicts light and life and love through colors and lines and shapes (and cinematography and dialogue and chord progressions), art is, whether we realize it or not, whether the artist intended it or not, pointing us to the Source of light and life and love, to Light and Life and Love himself!

Even when art shows us the shadows, when we’re forced to face all that is dark and dead and ugly in the world (and in our hearts), this too points to God and to Christ. Like the negative of a photograph shows us what should be fully there but isn’t, this kind of art shows us our fallen condition, often pointing to the reality that begins to take shape when God is taken out of the picture, when sin has pushed him out of the framework of our lives.

With these concepts in mind—art as mirror and bridge—let’s practice engaging with art with one of my favorite painters. The paintings of Marc Chagall are characterized by his use of rich, vibrant colors; floating, elongated figures; and life-bearing imagery and symbols: such as fruit, flowers, streams, trees, chickens, bulls, lovers... In 1914, Chagall was in his hometown Vitebsk, Russia with his fiancee Bella Rosenfeld, with whom Chagall intended to return to Paris, but was prevented from doing so when the Great War broke out. This war-affected stint in Russia resulted in a major shift in Chagallʼs paintings. Gone are the vibrant colors. Gone are much of the influences of cubism and the life-bearing images and symbols. All these are replaced with browns and greys, downcast figures, and a thematic and stylistic shift toward realism — Paris is exchanged for Russia, peacetime for wartime.

We can see this shift notably by comparing Chagallʼs Paris through the Window of 1913 to his work titled, Father, from 1914. Note in Paris through the Window the rainbow-like reds, greens, yellows, blues, and oranges. Note the fanciful and strange (but wondrous-strange) figures and goings-on: the upside-down train, the man floating down from the Eiffel Tower, the couple floating horizontally in head-to-head conversation, the colorful cat with the human face, the cheerful bouquet of flowers, and finally, the two-faced figure looking out the window into the city (and looking back, presumably to Vitebsk).


Paris through the Window, oil on canvas

All this vibrancy and fancy and glorification of the realm of imagination is abandoned as the weight of war forces Chagall, even Chagall who was so resilient against his contemporaries’ compulsions toward total abstraction, to morph from a bridge between reality and imagination—a soul connecting body and spirit—into a mirror of the reality of Chagallʼs war-burdened world, bringing the everyday and the ordinary into perspective.

Father, tempura on paper

In Father, three somber figures—man, woman, and cat—sit at a flower-less table, their backs to the closed window. Fanciful happenings aren’t happening. Laundry is. The cat and the woman, whose face is rather like the cat’s, look to the larger, principal figure of the father, leading our eyes to the father's own despairing and downcast eyes. Instead of wistful wildflowers, there is a nondescript, white cylinder which might be a plain, ordinary cup, perhaps even an empty cup. Grittiness of tempera on paper replaces the smoothness of the oil on the canvas of Paris through the Window.

When we look at Chagallʼs Father with 21st century eyes, the piece serves as a bridge: the gap is bridged between 21st-century America and early 20th-century Russia as we understand WWI Russia a bit better, as we understand Chagall a bit better (the painting is of his father and grandmother), and most significantly, as we empathize with the double burden of war and poverty. For many it no doubt also serves as mirror: we can see our own present economic struggles in the slumped shoulders, downcast eyes, and barren table. Contextual specifics do not cloud universal translation—that’s good art. Father is the two-faced figure from Paris through the Window looking back to itʼs own wartime context and looking out into our present one.