Religious Imagination

Summary

In some recent theological writing, imagination is presented as a power of the mind with crucial importance for religion, but one whose role has often suffered neglect. Its fuller acknowledgment has become a live issue today. ‘Theologians’, wrote Professor J. P. Mackey, ‘have recently taken to symbol and metaphor, poetry and story, with an enthusiasm which contrasts very strikingly with their all-but-recent avoidance of such matters’ (1986, p. 1). As well as relevant writings by Eliade and Ricoeur, there have been treatments of religious imagination by Professor John McIntyre in his Faith, Theology and Imagination (1987) and in J. P. Mackey's composite volume entitled Religious Imagination.

What is beyond all question is that in the field of religion, imagination must be accorded an enormous role, seen as an indispensable agency without which the claims and teachings of religion could never be communicated at all—far less arrestingly or memorably expressed. It is imagination that carries the worshipper from the crucifix held in his hand, from the icon on the wall, from the fragment of bread and the sip of wine—to the thought of salvific events and transactions, on a cosmic scale and with a cosmos-transcending being. Imagination can, nevertheless, also be an all too willing religious worker, too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation over contestable religious concepts and claims.