Imagination & trust
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve been dipping into Kevin Vanhoozer’s book First Theology recently, which has been great. One comment triggered an old thought whihc I never got around to writing about (I don’t think?) The quote is this:
…the imagination, formed and guided by the canon may be an organ of truth. It may be that some of our perspectives – the biblical “world views,” to be exact – allow us to imagine reality rightly.
This connected, for me, with the process of making art as a Christian. We often seem tentaive about truly letting our imaginations go. Christian art often appears to be tied to images and metaphors taken directly from the Bible, as if only these images are allowed. Or it is tied to explicit expressions of Christian belief which can be imaginatively flat and almost border on propaganda in their lack of subtlety. (Probably being over dramatic here, but you get the drift.)
It’s struck me before that, rather than try to control the artistic output by making it conform to a restrict image/idea set, we need to allow our grasp of the Christian story to sink in deep, to affect our worldview, so that when we act creatively/imaginatively the output is saturated in that view whether or not this is explicit. Bouncing off Vanhoozer, we have to trust that our imaginations can produce images in line with reality.
Perhaps we are scared of our imagination and scared that imagining reality rightly cannot happen? Interestingly, Vanhoozer points out that this was Nietzsche’s problem:
Ironically, the self-proclaimed champion of creativity turns out to have a low view of the imagination: imaginative projections are fictive constructions an do not correspond to the way things are.
If our minds are truly ‘being renewed’, then we should expect that our imaginations and artistic output will be increasingly conformed to God’s story without us constantly trying to exert control. (This reminds me of someone who told me that the longer he was a Christian the more morally he acted in his dreams.)
The observations from Tom Wright, Brian Walsh and others that Paul used Empire/Cesear images in his letters when talking about Jesus should allow us to see that we can use other metaphors and images in our communication without inherent compromise. In fact, if we aren’t able to use the images of our surrounding culture — appropriately transformed via a transformed imagination — then we may alienate with our audience – either because they don’t understand the symbols we used or because they conciously reject them. Alternatively, if we can use and transform these images then the challenge to the culture may be heard more loudly and more acutely.
[I think this fits obliquely with a post from a long time ago...]
Tags: art, culture, imagination, worldview
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...