Reviving Faith: The Role of Imagination in Christian Belief

When I graduated from seminary I was a wreck. I had become spiritually destitute. I came within one heartbeat of losing my faith. 

I had enrolled to learn about God, to grow my love of Christ and to learn how to help others love him too. But all the study, the chapel services, the spiritual formation, even the rich conversations with fellow believers had somehow done nothing to draw me closer to a living faith in God. Instead they had masked a deep deterioration.

A couple of months after graduation I was sitting on the side of my bed, mulling, looking at the floor. I thought, “What if, after all, there truly is no God?” A feeling burst through me, a feeling and something bigger than a feeling. I saw, almost but not quite with my eyes, a black circle appear on the floor under my feet, a hole, a spreading gulf that I would soon fall into. If there was no God then there was nowhere to stand: no meaning, no future, no personhood, no love. The final grain of sand in the hourglass of faith was bouncing its way toward final descent. I felt terror, genuine terror.

What kept me from falling was a sudden realization. Even in that doubtful moment I actually did believe in God. Somewhere in my core I knew that God exists. If I hadn’t at heart believed in him I would not have been terrified by the thought of losing faith. I knew with some part of my inner self that God exists, but some other components of faith, whatever they might be, were missing, eroded and decayed almost to nothing.

It wasn’t so hard to understand. I had just spent six long years studying God. As I moved through the seminary curriculum I had learned two ancient languages, analyzed sixty-six books of Scripture, read endless commentaries, developed positions, and written papers. I had memorized the taxonomies of theology—soteriology, eschatology, hamartiology, angelogy—grasped orthodoxy and learned to recognize what is heterodox. In the realm of apologetics I had wrestled with intellectual objections to faith and their rejoinders. My mind had been given a long, intense workout, and it was happy. It had grown and strengthened and enjoyed growing and strengthening.

But the rest of me—whatever else there might be to a person except for the mind—had lain neglected. Whatever else there is to faith, not to mention to living and enjoying and strengthening, had withered and very nearly died.

What else is there to a person other than the mind? We speak of “heart,” “soul,” and “spirit,” but these are abstractions, metaphors standing in for something else. And as abstractions they are easily overlooked. We know how to feed a mind, to give it learning and knowledge, facts and concepts, skills and insights. But how do you feed a heart or a soul? How do you know when your spirit is being well-nourished, is fattening and muscling up in healthy ways or shriveling in atrophy?

I wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. I couldn’t even clearly name what part of me had died. Whatever it was, its death had led to this moment, to this feeling of all-but-absent faith. And I knew I had to find it and figure out a way to bring it back to life.

I tried to think of a guide, someone who could help me enrich this neglected part of my faith. I didn’t want to run to extremes, however. I still loved the mind and didn’t want to throw away everything I’d learned; I didn’t want to neglect or sacrifice the mind in pursuit of heart or soul or spirit or whatever-it-was. I needed a guide who honored the mind—someone who was logical and incisive, a no-nonsense thinker—but who also grasped the more evasive and spiritual aspects of faith.

C. S. Lewis, naturally, came immediately to mind. The author of The Problem of Pain on the one hand and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on the other clearly knew how both to reason and to feel. I had enjoyed his books since childhood. He had been frowned upon, for some reason, in the seminary I attended, and I hadn’t touched his works recently. Perhaps a dip into his writings would help to “baptize my imagination,” as the writings of George MacDonald had once baptized his.

Imagination. That was the word I’d been looking for. The thing I had lost in those years of seminary, the thing I lacked as I struggled to hold onto my faith in God on that bedside, was imagination. It’s one thing to analyze a story like the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It’s something else to truly imagine it, to enter into it with that part of us that sees, connects, cares, feels.

As I read Lewis in the months that followed my imagination came back to life. Imagination in turn fed my heart and soul and spirit. My shriveled faith began to fill out again, to become stronger, to become a whole and complete thing.

But why is imagination so essential to the life of Christian faith? And why, if it is essential, is it so often neglected? Why, for example, had my seminary called for one hundred and twenty credit hours of study but assigned none of them—not one—to the development or practice of the Christian imagination? And why had my seminary worried about Lewis (or others like him), even excluding him from the syllabus?

I had the inkling of an answer. There is something dangerous about imagination in application to the Christian faith. The danger is not illusionary: it is genuine. What it is exactly is not easy to say. But identifying it, I now realize, is necessary. Because like many good and necessary efforts, the practice of imagination in the Christian faith comes with dangers that can be succumbed to or, with skill, avoided. Riding in a car is dangerous but it is also sometimes necessary.  Undergoing surgery is dangerous but it is also sometimes necessary. The Christian imagination is dangerous but it is also necessary. We must learn to use it well.

• What is the imagination?
• What does it accomplish for us?
• Is it truly necessary? Why?
• Can it actually be dangerous to imagine, or to imagine in the wrong ways? If so, how do we avoid or mitigate those dangers?
• How should Christians engage in imagining in fruitful, even necessary, ways?

In coming posts we’ll pursue these questions. My goal is to follow the guides of the past to join the positive aspects of intellectual comprehension—logic, exegesis, analysis—with the positive aspects of imaginative apprehension. We want to forge a model of Christian knowing that is neither “too dry” nor “too wet,” so to speak, but sustains both a truthful and heartfelt faith.