Imagining God (Part 3)

How do we grasp who God is? It’s an impossible task. We must use all of our faculties, both Reason and Imagination, to grasp as much as we can.

I was on a recent phone call with a friend who said this about God speaking through prayer: “My understanding of revelation at this moment is that it’s mostly right-brain work.” So that’s my challenge to you: engage your whole brain.

In my last essay, I promised you a Scriptural example of what it means to imagine God. In the spirit of imagination, I invited our imaginary guest lecturer here at Ransomed Imagination to help illustrate. I present to you Professor Duck’s Psalm 91, a poem chock full of imaginative language.

Those last words are a letter to you from your loving Father.

And see how the first paragraph and the last paragraph parallel each other? They are both someone speaking to another, as in a dialogue. But the first is the writer speaking to God, and the last is God speaking to you. That’s imaginative dialogue. And then there are all of the metaphorical images running throughout as well.

Now, you may be cautioning me right now, “Scripture alone is allowed to venture out on those bridges of metaphor. What we need are nice, sturdy facts about God. We can be led astray so easily by our imaginations.”

Precisely! Now you’re coming around. The imagination is powerful. Oh so powerful. Your imagination is working in you and on you, whether you know it or not; better to grapple it and influence it in the direction you believe is true.

Professor Duck has a word to say about this, too:

“If imagination in relating to God still feels shaky, remember that Reason is just the same. It’s a human faculty, and therefore vulnerable as well. Valid arguments (logically true) are easily misled by wrong information, which results in unsound conclusions. In fact, a robust imagination may be what is needed to keep your logic from spiraling into errors, such as despair. After all, “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.” (Heb. 11:1 NLT)

Faith is a flashlight. It shows what our darkened eyes cannot see.

One guardrail against going off the road and into a surly valley of imagined untruths is this: stay close to scripture. The Psalmist is maintaining high fidelity to truth while engaging with God imaginatively. This allows the writer to grasp a fuller picture of the truth about God.

A term which expresses God’s providence for me comes from backpacking culture. As a hiker, I’m reliant on someone who has gone ahead of me and cut the path. I’ve been in many a forest and forgotten to look up for the trail blazes. I know (from experience) that trying to bushwhack my own path is exhausting. And even when I do stay on trail, some climbs can be scary (i.e. Fourteeners in Colorado!!). Yet my soul is not a trackless wanderer. God is faithful to cut the path for me. Even when the future is mortifying, uncertain, laced with dread - I can trust that He has gone before me up the mountain. The caked dirt I tread is already imprinted by His day old boot marks. And when I am obedient to His blazes, I do not fear getting lost. Even when I do wander, His mercy has already cut a crossing path back to the main route. He’s the Trailblazer of my life.

Now, I must check myself lest I wreck myself. Is this scriptural? Proverbs 3:5-6 would say yes.

This trailblazer language is metaphor. But it is important not to just stop at metaphor. There is a truth in the image of a good trailblazer that reflects a truth about God’s character. But metaphor is a mirror - it may show a true picture of your face, but only one side at a time. God is more than metaphor. God is He who transcends the imaginative and thunders into reality; He will always be bigger than our imaginations of Him. Keep your eyes up: God loves to surprise us.

God has the power to walk out of the Fantastical into Fact. He has done it many times in miracle and prophecy.

Imagination and Logic are separate faculties which can both point to truth. The surprising thing is that sometimes they can be true in the same way, at the same time. At certain historical turning points, God has transcended the metaphorical things (the fantastical, which dwell in the realm of the imagination) into the world of factual things. These events are called miracles.

Professor Duck says,

“The miracles of God are an evidence of His sovereignty over the realms of both Imagination and Logic. They are the proof of His imaginative claims.”

The hope in all of this is that we are reminded of the true story: the one in which the captive is set free and all things are mended. This is what we continually must be reminded of, we who are in the middle chapters of this book of history. Herein lies the best evidence that we were made to use our imaginations to commune with God. The universal way He speaks to Christians: through the narrative of scripture. Didactic teaching didn’t come first. Poetry did. Imagery did. True myth of galaxies and gardens. Serpents apostate from the order of heaven. A world flooded and a ship that preserved a gene bank for all life. A man who obliterated death with his foot.

Dear Christian, I hope that you see narrative and aesthetic as part of our whole-hearted relationship with God. We must till up the deep parts of ourselves to allow Him to plant new things. But if we withhold our imaginations because we believe they cannot be a way to grasp truth, we withhold a part of ourselves from God.

Don’t hold anything back.

Love Him with all your heart, reason, and imagination - love Him with your whole mind - and watch how loving Him shapes your story.