What is Christian Imagination?

When we speak of a Christian imagination, we’re not talking about making stuff up or some niche, newfangled angle on faith. Rather, we’re referring to the very heart of what it means to be humans made in the image of God. C.S. Lewis referred to our baptized imagination and pointed to our imagination as the “organ for meaning,” that uniquely human capacity to put all the pieces together. Imagination is how we make sense of the world. Everyone has an imagination. Without it, we can’t make sense of Scripture, ponder an ineffable God, or carry hopes for our future or our children’s future. Imagination is essential to what it means to be human.

The question, however, is whether our imagination is being shaped by the author of the truest story–God–or left to be deformed by dimmer lights that degrade our capacity to encounter God’s true world. Whenever Jesus told a parable, spoke to us about the Father, or invited us to “consider the lilies,” he evoked our imaginations. Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, and the gospel writers all invite us to engage God’s reality, even if we can’t exactly see it. Older Christians referred to this as “seeing with the eyes of faith.”

“Without an adequately imagined theology, spirituality gets [easily] reduced…and [flattened]. The Trinity reveals the immense world of God creating, saving, and blessing in the name of the Father and Holy Spirit, with immediate and lived implications for our way of life and spirituality.” – Eugene Peterson

Eugene Peterson spoke often of our imagination. For Eugene, imagination refers to “the large country of salvation,” where our vision expands past the small vistas toward the wideness of God’s active presence in the world. Imagination is the word we use to describe the ability to see with God-attuned eyes how things “fit together” and how God’s grace is far more active than we’ve previously noticed. In his crowning work Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene sought to help Christians regain “an imagination large enough to accommodate our life.” And this imagination is distinctly Christian and Trinitarian–not any willy-nilly way of “imagining.”

And all this, Eugene believed, was essential for pastors hoping to recover our holy calling amid all that’s crumbling around us, all that seduces us, all that might crush our souls. What we need is a renewed pastoral imagination, where our vision for what God is doing with us–what is possible for the Church–is defined by God rather than by the powerful, idolatrous forces of our age. We need a holy imagination to do this. Eugene put it this way:

What is critical [for pastors] is an imagination large enough to contain all of life, all worship and work as prayer, set in a structure [askesis] adequate to the actual conditions in which it is lived out.

Recovering a Christian imagination and a pastoral imagination is not an artsy side project. This work is at the core of revitalizing our hearts, churches, and pastoral vocations.

Impact of Fostering Christian Imagination

“Just got home from a great few days of Doxology. It is one of the most soul-filling experiences of my year. Instead of most conferences’ loud, busy, crowded schedules, Doxology is slow, reflective, and spacious. I hope this becomes an annual gathering of scholars, artists, and friends who deeply love Jesus.” – Doxology 2023 Participant

“In the past few months, I have been praying as I’ve not prayed before. I am ministering as I’ve never ministered before. I feel transformed from the inside out. I am fixing my attention on God and, to my profound surprise, encountering God.” – Pastor & Doctor of Ministry Student

“There’s a wonderful community developing that feels safe, creative, and generative. I have become accustomed to feeling out of place most of the time (partly as a woman but also as a contemplative, introverted artist). I don’t feel out of place in this place, which is refreshing.” – Pastor