The Role of the Imagination in Theology

The Role of the Imagination in Theology • The Role of the Imagination in Theology Pavol Bargár Theology, poetry, imagination The relation and interplay between poetry and theology had until relatively recently been by and large underexplored by theologians.1 Indeed, one can argue that a major shift only came in 1976 with Amos N. Wilder introducing the notion of “theopoetic” or “theopoetics” into theological discourse.2 Theopoetics is, I would like to suggest, an important term for our discussion here. Construed as a complementary concept to theology, it strives to understand and experience God, and things related to God, in a participative and aesthetic, rather than an abstract rational way. To pursue this manner of experiencing God and the things related to God, the imagination is of key importance. Theopoetics, as Sandra Schneiders maintains, is first and foremost the matter of the imagination proceeding participatively; to be sure, theopoetics “embraces both the process of creating aesthetic mediations of the God-human encounter (sometimes called theopoesis), and 1 2 This work has been supported by the Charles University Research Centre program no. 204052. See Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1976), especially chapter 1. See also Rubem A. Alves, The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet (London: SCM Press, 1990). 213 Poetry and Theology the experience of God in and through such mediations.”3 To support the legitimacy of this approach, one does well to remember that the Bible as the foundational textual mediation of divine revelation in Christian tradition largely consists of theopoetic, rather than theological, texts, such as poetry, hymns, epics, myths, etc. A robust argument for the theological appreciation of poetry is made by Paul Avis. Drawing from St Augustine, J. G. Hamann, and William Blake, Avis proposes understanding God as a poet since: “God creates in a ‘poetic’ way and communicates God’s presence and truth through images, especially through the medium of metaphor, symbol and myth, images that are transparent to the divine because they participate in the reality that they signify.”4 For Avis it then follows that humans are to respond to this presence and truth of God also primarily in the “poetic and imaginative mode,” while it is equally essential to maintain that faith emerges as a combination of poetic (or imaginative or aesthetic), cognitive, and ethical dimensions.5 This insight, as one can see, has profound implications for theological anthropology. At the same time, however, it also opens the issue of the imagination. Like Avis whose emphasis on the “imaginative mode” in theology and faith we have already noted, Schneiders also insists that the imagination is as crucial in theopoetics as the intellect is for discursive ways of theologizing.6 The question for us here, then, is, how is one to understand the imagination? And, to be sure, what is its role in theology? 3 4 5 6 214 Sandra M. Schneiders, “Biblical Spirituality,” Interpretation: A Journal for Bible and Theology 70:4 (2016): 417-430, here 424. Paul Avis, “Editorial: Apologetics and the Rebirth of the Imagination,” Ecclesiology 9:3 (2013): 303-310, here 308. Avis, “Editorial,” 308. For a book-length treatment of this argument see Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London/New York: Routledge, 1999). Schneiders, “Biblical Spirituality,” 424. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology Exploring the imagination from a theological perspective Being an ultimately elusive term, Sr Mary Karita Ivancic wittily remarks that the imagination can be more easily described that defined.7 Ivancic herself describes the imagination as “a complex activity that engages body, mind, and affect,” drawing upon “a person’s past history, present experience, and future projections in an effort to know and make meaning of reality.”8 This wholistic accent is even reinforced by John Milbank who interprets the imagination as “the whole force of the mind”9 that enables people to relate to the whole and make meaning of it. Finally, a new aspect is added to this holistic emphasis by William Lynch, SJ, who asserts that the imagination is not a separate faculty, like the intellect or the will. Rather, the imagination is a kind of mediator, bringing all these faculties as well as one’s experiences, feelings, beliefs, and convictions to relate the outer world to one’s inner world. For Lynch, “the task of the imagination is to imagine the real.”10 While acknowledging, and, indeed, drawing from this poetic, participative, and holistic nature of the imagination and its prime importance for theology, I would like to take the argument further to include the category of the social. I believe that the latter, i.e., the whole realm covering both personal and structural relations among people and their implications, ought to necessarily be an inherent part of theological explorations. For this purpose, I would like to bring to this discussion Paul Ricoeur who introduces the notion of the “social imagination.” Thought-provokingly, Ricoeur understands this notion as a dialectic between 7 8 9 10 Sr Mary Karita Ivancic, “Imagining Faith: The Biblical Imagination in Theory and Practice,” Theological Education 41:2 (2006): 127-139, here 127. To be precise, Ivancic in particular discusses the biblical imagination in her article which is, nevertheless, understood as “the human imagination in a theological mode,” drawing from the Thomistic dictum of the relation between nature and grace (127). Ivancic, “Imagining Faith,” 127. Quoted in Avis, “Editorial,” 307. William F. Lynch, SJ, Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 23. Lynch credits Martin Buber for this insight. 215 Poetry and Theology “ideology” and “utopia”. These two hermeneutical constructs can be perceived as the poles in between which one (either an individual or a community) is seeking to find (or create) meaning of and in relation to the reality. Ricoeur reflects on the notion of the social imagination as follows: There is no answer [...] except to say that we must try to cure the illness of utopia by what is wholesome in ideology – by its element of identity, which is once more a fundamental function of life – and try to cure the rigidity, the petrification, of ideologies by the utopian element. [...] My more ultimate answer is that we must let ourselves be drawn into the circle and then try to make the circle a spiral. We cannot eliminate from a social ethics the element of risk. We wager on a certain set of values and then try to be consistent with them; verification is therefore a question of our whole life. No one can escape this.11 As the latter part of the quotation above shows, this notion is not only of philosophical and, possibly, political but also of ethical importance. Moreover, thanks to its existential focus there also is a certain theological affinity. To couch it in a more familiar theological discourse, a different terminology can be used instead of that of ideology and utopia. Elsewhere I used the dialectic of “perfection” and “possibility.”12 Another alternative is that of “order” and “hope,” perhaps, even those of “law” and “gospel.” What is important is that the two poles need to be in constant creative tension. “Whatever maintains an order, hierarchy, and tradition, whatever strives towards perfection and implies the idea of totality (i.e. ‘ideology’), must be corrected and balanced by something new, open, alternative, and containing hope for a change (i.e. ‘utopia’).”13 Both are necessary, as Laurence Coupe shows very conveniently: 11 12 13 216 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 312. See Pavol Bargár, Narrative, Myth, Transformation: Reflecting Theologically on Contemporary Culture (Jihlava: Mlýn, 2016), especially 97-102. Bargár, Narrative, Myth, Transformation, 173. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology Without the first kind [i.e., ideology], we would have no sense of society or tradition; without the second kind [i.e., utopia] we would simply equate the given society and tradition with eternal truth, never challenging or reforming them. Utopia prevents ideology becoming a claustrophobic system; ideology prevents utopia becoming an empty fantasy.14 In light of the discussion above we can assert that Ricoeur turns to the social imagination as the dialectic of ideology and utopia to define the “boundaries” of the space in which one positions oneself in the narrative of faith and tradition, significantly also vis-à-vis a broader society. Or as Julie Clawson has put it, “[t]he function of tradition to ‘preserve and conserve’ and of utopian visions to rupture the status quo by projecting alternatives serve to create a dynamic narrative of faith.”15 Having come to this theological insight, we can now turn to our original question, exploring the role of the imagination in theology. Drawing on Ricoeur and the others, I would in the rest of this paper like to suggest that the imagination plays a significant part in theology as it enables self-reflection (transgressive imagination), challenges totality and fosters diversity (deconstructive imagination), and engenders hope (eschatological imagination). Transgressive (self-reflective) imagination In a recent article Gordon Mikoski reports on his research in the ways 19th-century mainline theologians treated the topic of race and race equality. Mikoski’s finding is that despite their theological ingenuity and erudition, these authors were prisoners to their cultural norms and limitations of their contemporary context to such an extent that “their ideas on slavery and race from our twenty-first century vantage point 14 15 Laurence Coupe, Myth (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 96-97. See also Julie Clawson, “Imagination, Hope, and Reconciliation in Ricoeur and Moltmann,” Anglican Theological Review 95:2 (2013): 293-309, here 301. Clawson refers to Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 7. 217 Poetry and Theology positively shocks the conscience.”16 Concerned for our theological (and, to be sure, Christian) integrity, Mikoski urges that we cannot wait for future generations to tell us we are/ were wrong. Instead, he pleads for the developing of what he calls a “transgressive” imagination in theology.17 Such transgressive imagination gives one an opportunity to look at oneself with critical eyes. This self-reflection is an outcome of the engagement with the Scriptures, on the one hand, and contemporary culture, on the other hand. The latter includes literature, the visual and performing arts, and social media. This two-fold perspective is very important. While the Scriptures help us see the reality through the hermeneutical lens of the coming God’s reign of justice and peace, culture offers theologians opportunities to engage people and ideas belonging to the contexts different from their own. In this way, the imagination helps the theologian to transgress his or her usual frame of reference, disclosing new dimensions of the reality and helping to make sense of it. To better understand this accent on the transgressive or selfreflective imagination, one might turn to what Gianni Vattimo has to say on the relation between reason and the imagination of mythical thought, describing it as the shift from the modern to the postmodern: [T]he idea that the course of history could be thought of as enlightenment, as the liberation of reason from the shadows of mythical knowledge, has lost its legitimacy [...] When demythologization is revealed as myth, myth regains legitimacy, but only within the frame of a generally “weakened” experience of truth. The presence of myth in our culture does not represent an alternative or opposing movement to modernization, but is rather its natural outcome, its destination, at least thus far. The demythologization of demythologization, moreover, may be taken as the true moment of transition from the modern to the postmodern.18 16 17 18 218 Gordon S. Mikoski, “On Cultivating a Transgressive Theological Imagination,” Theology Today 70:2 (2013): 105-108, here 106. Mikoski, “On Cultivating a Transgressive Theological Imagination,” 106-107. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992), 39 and 42. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology This observation refers to what Paul Ricouer introduced to philosophical discourse as “second naiveté” and what is of much relevance also in our discussion on the transgressive imagination as it leads one to acknowledge that one can never construct one’s identity or interpret a text, including the Scriptures, without taking into consideration a broader cultural context, including its imaginative (or, as Vattimo says, mythical) dimensions. Vattimo continues: The secularization of the European spirit of the modern age does not consist solely in the exposure and demystification of the errors of religion, but also in the survival of these “errors” in different, and in some sense degraded, forms. A secularized culture is not one that has simply left the religious elements of its tradition behind, but one that continues to live them as traces, as hidden and distorted models that are nonetheless profoundly present.19 For the aim of this paper, this statement is important, I would like to suggest, for at least two reasons. First, it shows that secularized culture and thought are not devoid of the same fallacies religion has been and is prone to. One can, therefore, argue that it is one of the tasks of theologians to employ the imagination to unmask these errors. And second, it supports our argument above in building a case for including various interlocutors in our theologizing in order to treat our tradition faithfully, yet creatively. Interpreting Vattimo, this is what Richard Kearney points out when he says: Post-modernism, understood in Vattimo’s sense of a non-foundational and non-functionalist theory of interpretation, solicits an ethical task of remembering that is not a simple repetition of tradition but its joyous re-creation. Such remembering emancipates tradition from servile conformism, transposing it into a historical transmission of overtures to possible modes of being-in-the-world.20 A mode of theologizing that employs the imagination in its hermeneutical process represents one of the ways of such “joyous,” creative treatments of tradition. Contextualizing the interpreted, one is at the same time involved in creating new links in the chain of tradition. In this understanding, to 19 20 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 40. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 185-186. 219 Poetry and Theology be sure, adding new links to the tradition that entwines as a chain through history is not merely “hermeneutic cloning,” the repetition of the past. Rather, it represents an active contribution to discussion. A very important element in this process is the Ricoeurian dialectic of ideology and utopia, or perfection and possibility, as discussed above. Tradition intuitively strives toward perfection, struggling to include all forms of existence into itself and thus creating a unified reality, a unified system. If this tendency prevails, there is an imminent danger of totality, an annihilation of alterity, a terror of the identical, as the implementation of various ideologies in history have shown us. Therefore, this imaginative potentiality must have its counterpart in the other potentiality, namely, utopia or possibility. This pole facilitates the “other,” enabling another interpretation, another view of the reality, or another vision of the future. Thus, it fosters diversity. Deconstructive imagination The concluding observations in the previous section have led us to a second type of the imagination I would like to discuss here. It is liberation theologians who have reminded us that theology can be understood, alternatively to the view that had been dominant for centuries, as “a space for creativity, where all voices are heard and where the discursive frameworks are meant to encourage experiences and not to tie them down in rules.”21 This understanding of theology, nurtured by everyday experience, draws from the open, creative, and pluralistic potential of the imagination. In this liberationist perspective, the imagination is understood as an awareness, to quote Rubem Alves, “of what is absent, of nostalgia for that which is not yet, the declaration of love for things that are yet to be born.”22As such, imaginative dynamic theologizing is instrumental for deconstructing the 21 22 220 Nicolás Panotto, “Otherness, Paradox, and Utopia: Theological Imagination and the Deconstruction of Power,” The Ecumenical Review 69:1 (2017): 45-59, here 57. Rubem Alves, El enigma de la religion (Montevideo: Tierra Nueva, 1979), 27. Translated by and quoted from Panotto, “Otherness, Paradox, and Utopia,” 56. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology oppressive structures of the environment people live in. It seeks to understand the revelation of the divine in midst of the multiplicity of otherness that appear in our world, thus effectively disarming any individuals or groups that lay claim to an absolute form of power.23 As Nicolás Panotto argues, theology inspired and driven by the imagination deconstructs all closed discourse about God that is the basis of those forms of power that stifle innovation. It aims to seek out the new, and to be surprised at the continuing manifestation of the divine in its constantly manifested otherness. It involves a commitment to the quest for truth, truth as an ongoing journey where it is only a waymark on the path enabling us to look at experiences, listen to stories, and feel the constant movement of the Spirit in every believer, community, and historical event.24 From an ecclesiological perspective, this imaginative theologizing is of much importance as it regards theology as a communal business endowed to all members of the church of Christ. This is in line with what many contemporary sociologists assert when they insist that all functioning communities are characterized by several typical marks.25 First, a community intentionally shares a similar reference framework that leads them to view the reality in a similar way and to construe the symbolic world they live in using similar elements of culture. Second, there is a shared sense of group identity among the members of a community, directing them toward the group and fostering a group solidarity. And third, there also is a “person focus” within a community, outweighing the “group focus,” and thus offering the members an opportunity for self-realization. These features undoubtedly are relevant for the reflection on the church as community. However, the church as community also has a set of special characteristics that can make a unique contribution to the challenging of totality and the 23 24 25 See Panotto, “Otherness, Paradox, and Utopia,” 58. Panotto, “Otherness, Paradox, and Utopia,” 58. These features are adapted from Stanley J. Grenz, “Ecclesiology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 252-268, here 253-254, who draws from a broader sociological discussion. 221 Poetry and Theology facilitating of diversity. First, the church develops and fosters a special solidarity. This goes beyond the sense of solidarity among group members. Rather, finding its identity in “sharing together in a storied life of obedient service to and with Christ,”26 the church seeks to become an “alternative community [that] gives the world reason to hope.”27 This observation leads to a second point, namely, that the church is the only group of people in the world that primarily exists for the sake of those who are not its members.28 Nevertheless, such a commitment and task comes with a risk of the “pro-existence” syndrome when one feels one best knows what is good and appropriate for the other, therefore trying to mold the other to one’s own likeness. Instead, the church is called to coexist with fellow humans in midst of culture in its diversity. As such, the church as community follows the model of being-with-others,29 accompanying and living together with fellow humans in their various contexts. Using true community as a measure for all human relationships, third, the church helps us understand the potential every social grouping has as “a contribution to, prolepsis of, or signpost on the way toward human participation in the destiny God intends for creation.”30 At the same time, however, the church as community makes us aware that all social groups fall short of such role model, leaving true community as an eschatological ideal. Finally, the church as community is endowed with the call to embody the foretaste of the imago Dei, God’s image in humankind. As Stanley Grenz says: “The church is to be a people who reflect in relation to each other and to all creation the character of the 26 27 28 29 30 222 James William McClendon, Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology. Volume 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986), 28. Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 192. See David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 375. Bosch acknowledges Archbishop William Temple as the author of this dictum. See Bosch, Transforming Mission, 368-389. Grenz, “Ecclesiology,” 260. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology Creator and thereby bear witness to the divine purpose for humankind.”31 Practically, the reflection of the divine character means showing love and acts of mercy not only to each other within the community but to all humankind and creation, again, without trying to convert it into a single, unified mode of thought and action. All these marks, both those applicable to human social groupings in general and those unique to the church, are, I would like to suggest, implications of the imagination that seeks to maintain unity and diversity in balance. Nevertheless, what I would call the deconstructive imagination can also be engaged from yet another angle. Interpreting the cinematic vision of Guillermo del Toro, the writer-director of films such as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) or The Devil’s Backbone (2001), David Congdon points out that for del Toro’s work it is essential to foster a counter-imagination that would disrupt and reorder the taken-for-granted view of the world.32 Congdon does not even hesitate to formulate a thesis that the imagination is, for del Toro, “a kind of aesthetic-anarchic uprising against the powers and principalities.” As a way of re-describing the world it engenders “an alternative politics.”33 A theological link to this anarchic vision of del Toro is provided by the concept of the “theopolitical imagination,” as suggested and elaborated by William Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh’s point of departure is that the imagination controls human society, including politics and religion. Therefore, it is not as if politics deals with reality, while religion has to do with something imaginary. For him, both are forms of imagination. Cavanaugh’s concern is, then, to deconstruct the “false theologies” of the state.34 His proposal for how to go about it is to turn to the alternative imagination of the Eucharist as a politically subversive act. 31 32 33 34 Grenz, “Ecclesiology,” 267. David W. Congdon, “’A Beautiful Anarchy:’ Religion, Fascism, and Violence in the Theopolitical Imagination of Guillermo del Toro,” Cultural Encounters 6:2 (2010): 43-67, here 44. Both quotations are from Congdon, “A Beautiful Anarchy,” 44. William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2002), 4. 223 Poetry and Theology He describes the Eucharist as a “counter-politics,” saying that it is precisely in the Eucharist that: “Christians participate in a practice which envisions a proper ‘anarchy,’ not in the sense that it proposes chaos, but in that it challenges the false order of the state.”35 One practical example of this power of the Eucharist is rendered by Martin Junge. Recounting his experience of a minister to a poor and marginalized church community in inner-city Santiago de Chile, Junge explains that for his congregants, “lastingly marked by daily exclusion and marginalization, Holy Communion had become a festival of inclusion, of unconditional acceptance and of the overcoming of structures of marginalization.”36 The Eucharist was intuitively acknowledged by these Christians as the great gift that the people of God had been endowed with to enable them to both withstand the “false theologies” of powers to be and embody the foretaste of God’s reign. As Junge puts it: “The group of the ‘damned of the earth’ is at the same time the community of those accepted by God, and Holy Communion is a key place to both receive and claim this new sense of citizenship.”37 In this way, the human responsibility of both an individual and a community is liberated and the power to act is restored. To put it into theological terms, the totalitarian nature of the power is challenged and the diversity in unity, as envisioned and effected by the Eucharist, is fostered. Eschatological imagination While earlier public theology in the 1980s, with figures such as Max Stackhouse and Linell Cady, emphasized the 35 36 37 224 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 119-120. Martin Junge, “Reformation and Enculturation: Toward the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation,” Word & World 34:2 (2014): 109-122, here 117. Junge, “Reformation and Enculturation,” 117. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology rationality of theological discourse, outreach beyond the academy and church, and a concern for res publica,38 and were critiqued for being theological only incidentally, rather than substantively,39 more recent movements of public theology assert that “[t]he church owes the powers of the world a ministry of social imagination.”40 This highlights a particular utopian nature of such theology. As John de Gruchy, one of the proponents of this approach, says, “public theology is utopian in the sense that it keeps hope alive for a better world.”41 This brings us back to Ricoeur’s concept of social imagination, not only in a terminological sense but also because hope is of utmost importance for Ricoeur. One can, I would suggest, turn to story as a category that helps understand what the French philosopher has in mind. Christian tradition can be viewed in terms of a story in which each member of the believing community has an active place and voice. One enters this story through an act of the imaginative interpretation. As Julie Clawson remarks with reference to Ricoeur’s thoughts on the topic: “The story is never co-opted by the extremes of ideology and utopia, but allowed to unfold and continually reveal ways of being in the world.”42 Faith thus imaginatively and creatively narrate the story in ways that affirm and engender hope. Hope enters and transforms the reality when one imaginatively puts oneself into “a dynamic 38 39 40 41 42 See Philip Ziegler, “God and Some Recent Public Theologies,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4:2 (2002): 137-155, especially 146, and Linell Cady, “H. Richard Niebuhr and the Task of a Public Theology,” in The Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr, ed. Ronald Thiemann (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991), especially 126. See Ziegler, “God and Some Recent Public Theologies,” 148-152. James V. Brownson, Barry A. Harvey, Inagrace T. Dietterich, and Charles C. West, StormFront: The Good News of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 101. John de Gruchy, “Public Theology as Christian Witness: Exploring the Genre,” International Journal of Public Theology 1:1 (2007): 26-41, here 28. Clawson, “Imagination, Hope, and Reconciliation in Ricoeur and Moltmann,” 304. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics: Ideology, Utopia, and Faith,” The Seventeenth Colloquy of The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modem Culture, The Graduate Theological Union & The University of California, Berkeley, CA, November 4, 1975, 17. 225 Poetry and Theology story that does not simply reiterate tradition or dream of the beyond.”43 This understanding of the imagination as an eschatological imagination in which hope plays a central role has important ramifications for theology. Indeed, as Jürgen Moltmann proposes, “theology is not a church dogmatics, nor a doctrine of faith. It is the imagination for the kingdom of God in the world, and for the world in God’s kingdom.”44 The symbol of the kingdom of God is important to our purposes for yet another reason. A notion that brings the eschaton to the immanent reality, the kingdom of God as heralded and inaugurated by the Christ-event lays the very foundations for Christian theologizing. In this perspective, human existence and even creation as such are interpreted from the vantage point of the kingdom of God through the lenses of the eschatological imagination. Opting for a narrative approach to the imagination, analogical to the one introduced earlier in this section, Choan-Seng Song explains it as follows: “In God’s image” means that God has endowed human beings with the imagination of the soul and the facility of words to tell over and over God’s story of creation as part of our stories and to integrate our stories into God’s story. God’s image in human beings is thus the power to tell stories – the power of imagination and the power of words.45 In this interpretation, the creation of the human in the image of God means that the human has been endowed with a share in God’s imagination. People are called to use their gift of the imagination; they have a mandate to be artists carrying on with the ongoing work of God’s creation. There is an analogical relationship between the divine and human imagination; more precisely, the human imagination is derived from God’s imagination. God’s imagination does not only have its imaging but also its verbal aspect. The latter finds its specific form in God’s story in and with the world. God is not only an Artist but 43 44 45 226 Clawson, “Imagination, Hope, and Reconciliation in Ricoeur and Moltmann,” 308. Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), xiv. Choan-Seng Song, The Believing Heart: An Invitation to Story Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 65. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology also a Teller as well as a Protagonist of God’s Great Story. Similarly, the human imagination has an affinity with the capability of creating words and, by implication, of writing not only one’s own story but also of taking part in embodying the Great Story of God. To be able to pursue such embodiments, the human is endowed with the imagination. There are not only explicit retellings of God’s story by religious specialists, such as clergy and theologians. God’s story has also become part of many human life stories. From a Christian perspective, one’s task is to integrate one’s story into the story of God. God’s image in humans, Song believes, consists in the power to tell stories – the power of the imagination and the power of words. However, Christians of all traditions confess that God’s image in human beings has been corrupted since the Fall. If one perceives the notion of imago Dei in terms of the power of imagination, then one must clearly say that this image is indeed broken and corrupted in the sense that the human imagination is far from perfect. This statement has two implications. First, one can imagine the perfect and desirable, which one is to strive toward and which is to be the horizon of one’s all efforts, only partially and as if through misty glass. Both colloquial and technical languages are capable of mediating it only occasionally. The flashes of the perfect and desirable are more often and more helpfully apprehended through the images and metaphors, given to mystics, poets and artists in the inspiration of the Spirit. Second, the human imagination also has its dark side. One can imagine and, even worse, put into effect not only beautiful, true and good things but also those that are horrible, destructive and hideous. Kenneth Burke pertinently points out that one can envision not only a perfect age but also a perfect atomic warhead.46 Over the image of New Jerusalem there constantly hovers the smoke rising from the chimneys in concentration camps. The human imagination is, therefore, a highly ambivalent matter. It brings the human closer to God, mediating some bits and pieces from God’s image and likeness and making the human “a little low46 See Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 22. 227 Poetry and Theology er than God,” yet it also abysmally separates and alienates people from the Great Artist. Nevertheless, God-human Jesus Christ has bridged this great divide. He was able to identify perfectly with the vision his Father had had for this world and to integrate himself into God’s story completely. God’s story became his story. Through his incarnation, life, death on the cross, and resurrection he has overcome all human perceptions of who and what God is. The human imagination was shattered in Jesus’ story only to acquire a completely new quality and an opportunity for a brand-new beginning. This transformation of imagination takes place thanks to God’s mercy; the human obtains it as a free gift. It is through imagination that one can integrate God’s story to one’s own story, thus reflecting God’s image in which one has been created. It is thanks to the Christ-event that the human imagination can witness to what is already here as a “guarantee” but the fullness of which is yet to come. Thus, a hope for another, more diverse and inclusive world can be nurtured. Conclusion This paper explored the role of the imagination in theology. Employing Ricoeur’s concept of social imagination, it argued that theologizing informed and driven by the imagination takes place in the dynamic field between ideology and utopia (or perfection and possibility, or order and hope). Three specific findings can be proposed in conclusion. First, this understanding of the imagination helps one appropriate one’s tradition faithfully, yet creatively. Using the discourse of narrative, or, even more precisely, narrativist, theology47 this finding can be expressed in terms of one being able to integrate one’s own story in God’s story with and in the world while maintaining the respective uniqueness of them both. Second, it celebrates diversity, thus providing an alternative for the responsible life in the polis. In the framework of narrativist theology this claim means that one is able to bring one’s story into a constructive, critical, yet respectful 47 228 For my case for narrativist theology see Bargár, Narrative, Myth, Transformation, 27-30. Pavol Bargár: The ole oo tte Iaggnatgon gn Theology dialogue with other stories. And third, it engenders a hope that has the potential to bridge the dichotomy of “already” and “not yet” of the coming reign of God. In other words, imaginatively appropriating Jesus’ story one maintains the creative balance of perfection and possibility (or, ideology and utopia) in one’s own story, both individually and communally. 229