This article is Part II in a 3-part series, originally presented as a single seminar during the International Baptist Convention meetings in Sicily in the spring of 2025. Follow these links to read Part I and Part III.
Why should Christians care about the imagination?
The shortest (and perhaps most persuasive) answer is this: Christians should care about the imagination because Jesus cared. Capturing people’s imagination with God’s truth was a substantial part of Christ’s earthly ministry, and so we should expect for it to be an essential part of Christian ministry today as well. C.S. Lewis recognized the reason for this. Lewis rightly understood that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”[i] In other words, reason apprehends truth but the imagination allows us to grasp the whole, to connect the dots, to see the patterns and to make sense of all the seemingly random data points we encounter in life.
Reason apprehends truth but the imagination allows us to grasp the whole
Everyone needs imagination to see meaning, including scientists. The most skillfully crafted scientific papers and textbooks continually appeal to the imagination, employing illustrations and metaphors to help people understand scientific principles. The authors will say, “Imagine an atom is like this…” or “imagine gravity is like that…” and then give a word picture to illustrate the science. The most brilliant scientific writers always appeal to the reader’s imagination with illustrations from their everyday experience. Great teachers in every discipline know that they need to go after our imaginations (like Jesus did) because it’s the route one must take to arrive at meaning, true understanding, and the real-world application of any truth.
Secular Solutions
As I was thinking over these things, I ran across an article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Real Reason Young People Are Anxious. It was a catchy title but the longer subtitle is what really grabbed my attention. It read: “Technology is merely a symptom. The problem is the romantic corruption of imagination, and the solution lies in classic books and art.”
In full disclosure, I didn’t read the article (it was behind a paywall, and I’m cheap that way). However, it was enough for me to note that even secular scholars recognize the importance of the imagination. Even secular authorities are recognizing the imagination can be corrupted and things go badly for people when it does.
As to the secular solution—that the answer to this corruption of the imagination lies in a return to classic books and art—I’ve got one question: Whose moral imagination has been at the heart of classic books and art for nearly 2000 years now? The unsurprising but all-important answer is Jesus’.
Jesus’ Moral Imagination
Jesus’ moral imagination created the world of Jane Austen. Without Jesus, that world simply does not exist. The same is true for Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities. Without Jesus, that story’s magnificent ending cannot exist. What is true for Austen and Dickens is also true for Dante, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Tolstoy. The same is true for classic paintings and visual art. Someone once summarized the history of art in the West like this: “A thousand years of crucifixions and then stripes.”[ii] There is great truth in that summary. Most of the classic art and books we have would not have come into being without Jesus and his moral imagination.
In his wonderful book, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God, author Malcolm Guite illustrates the concept of moral imagination for his readers. “What is the moral imagination?” he asks. “It is particularly that exercise of imagination which enables you to stand in another person’s shoes, to go out from your life and place and into theirs, to imagine and even re-imagine the world from their perspective. It is this act of imagination that is at the core of Jesus’ central moral teaching, summed up in the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”[iii]
Jesus gave us the Golden Rule, but he didn’t just give it to us as a rule. He also gave it to us as a story—a story that captures our moral imaginations with the rule. Jesus burned the Golden Rule into our collective imagination with the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
In the account of the Good Samaritan, we see the brilliance of Jesus’ moral imagination on display. Once this narrative is heard, it cannot be unheard. It is a story that has so captured Western society’s imagination that we still label people who help strangers as “Good Samaritans.” My state and local governments have named certain laws “Good Samaritan” laws, which are designed to protect people from prosecution who are simply trying to help others.
The original genius of all this can be traced directly back to Jesus’ moral imagination. Yet Jesus (even more than the Wall Street Journal!) recognized there is a problem. The imagination can be corrupted. Sin has a corrupting influence on our every faculty, including the imagination. One reason why ancient Rome enjoyed blood sports and gladiator games was because that civilization had not yet encountered Jesus’ moral imagination. The reason Nazi Germany put undesirable people to death involved an intentional rejection of Christ’s moral imagination. The Holocaust was a purposeful dismissal of the Golden Rule. Sin has a corrupting effect on the moral imaginations of individuals and entire cultures, but Jesus has the remedy for our corruption.
The Remedy for our Corruption
Through his Word, God pushes back against our unfeeling hearts. Do you know one (surprising) way he does this? It probably shouldn’t be astonishing, but it is. One way God’s Spirit captures our imaginations and transforms our unfeeling hearts is through poetry.
I had a seminary professor tell me once, “It is not an overestimate to say that one third of the Bible is poetry.” Roughly a third of the book that God inspired is poetic expression. Why would God inspire a book containing so much poetry?
The role of poetry is to rinse and cleanse our vision to see the radiant realities that have always been there, only our eyes have grown too dull to notice them.
It’s probably a good question to ask a good poet. Malcolm Guite (who is a poet as well as an Anglican priest) does an excellent job identifying the purpose of poetry. He says that the aim of poetry is to remove the “veil between us and the radiant reality of things.”[iv] In other words, the role of poetry is to rinse and cleanse our vision to see the radiant realities that have always been there, only our eyes have grown too dull to notice them. We sometimes do catch small glimpses of glory as though through a veil, but poetry is meant to capture and preserve those moments. Poetry is used to record those glimpses and give them a permanent place for us to return to again and again. It is utilized to give such glimpses “a local habitation and a name,” as Shakespeare put it.
The purpose of poetry (and honestly all art) is to see the wonder of what’s really there. When you see Van Gogh’s Starry Night, its main effect is to make you actually stop and take in afresh the glory of the night sky that you’ve grown callous to seeing. Biblical poetry has the same impact. It feeds the wonder-hunger of our hearts with the wonder of common things beheld afresh in their truecolors.
(This wonder-hunger can also be a helpful bridge as we encounter others who are not yet Christians. Virtually all of us want lives filled with poetic curiosity capable of bringing true wonder into our everyday lives. The Bible offers this more than any other book and often does so through poetry—inspiring great paintings, songs, and other works of art, even among those who do not claim faith. How might this bridge be utilized by believers—those who hear his voice and have their eyes opened to the wonders of truth in the gospel and Christ—to dialogue and engage the secular world?)
When the Old Testament prophets and psalmists use poetry, they are calling us prophetically to see the world with fresh eyes. We need to see that “a vineyard, an olive grove, a wine press, a wedding, a feast, a flowering branch of almond wood, a mist upon Mount Hermon, and a tree planted by still waters can all be pressed into service in order to express something that is otherwise inexpressible.”[v]
When Jesus comes on the scene, people immediately recognized him as a prophet in this tradition. They saw him as a prophet who spoke with authority in an imaginative way and in an imagination-capturing way. For example, just take the very beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. He said:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:1-10)
We are so familiar with the Beatitudes that we forget how radically perspective-shifting they are. This is not the natural way we view the world. We naturally view the rich, not the poor, as the blessed ones. We naturally see the mighty, not the meek, as inheriting the earth. “And yet,” Malcolm Guite says, “in spite of the way [the Beatitudes] contradict our experience, our hearts leap every time we hear Christ’s words. Something in us stirs, some long-suppressed hope revives, and we know that Jesus is right.”[vi]
Jesus is right, and he is right to go after our imaginations—because to go after our imaginations is to capture our hearts. And to capture our hearts is to change our lives.
The third part and final article in this series will turn toward practical application by answering the question: How do we follow Jesus in capturing the imagination?
Notes:
[i] Lewis, C.S. Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 265.
[ii] Scrivener, Glen. The Air We Breathe (Good Book Company, 2022), p. 23.
[iii] Guite, Malcolm. Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God (Square Halo, 2021), p. 65.
[iv] Ibid., p. 12.
[v] Ibid., p. 88.
[vi] Ibid., p. 91.
