On Sanctified Imagination
May 15, 2022
The imagination is a powerful tool, for good or for ill. What innovation is not the result of a spark of the imagination? If that’s the case, then all of creation is the result of the imagination of our creator! And to think—he has given us that same ability!
Sometimes we belittle the imagination. We want people to quit daydreaming and start being rational. Life is hard enough without half the people running off chasing fairy tales!
Sometimes the imagination is dangerous. We think people are saying bad things behind our backs, causing us to be suspicious of them and turn on them. We use our imagination to come up with new and inventive ways to cause harm to ourselves, one another, or creation. Or we simply get lost in the world in our minds, disengaging from reality.
But the imagination is a gift from God; it can also be a great good! We can imagine new and innovative ways to help people! And we can imagine new and better ways to live.
This last point ties in nicely with the idea of the kingdom of God. In many ways it’s imaginary. It doesn’t have a flag or geographic borders or other tangible hallmarks of kingdoms. And the “legal code” is unrealistic—the Sermon on the Mount is almost divorced from reality. Turn the other cheek? That’s a recipe for disaster! And significant portions of the rest of the writings are devoted to poetic descriptions of the way life will be when God finally institutes his reign in the new heavens and the new earth. What does that have to do with anything?
These things are written to shape our imaginations. “Love your neighbor” is an empty command, devoid of content. How? When? Who? What? All of it is unclear, which is why the question gets asked, “who is my neighbor,” which prompts Jesus to tell, of all things, a story. When we immerse ourselves in the rest of Scripture, and we see all the examples of people loving their neighbors, and we read it like a story that is supposed to be effective and useful in training us for all righteousness, then we can begin to imagine what it might look like to love our neighbor. We can begin to imagine new and innovative ways of loving that were never even imagined by the original authors.
The imagination is not foolproof, which is why we have to allow it to be sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit. It is why we have to immerse ourselves in Scripture, so that we are guided by God and not the world. When we do this arrogantly, the imagination gets twisted and deformed. When we submit to God through the power of the Holy Spirit, we may just find that God can still inspire and transform us today.
—John Coffey
