Imagination & Hearing From God

In the teaching last Sunday about hearing from God, Adey used the word “imagination.” The use of imagination in terms of our faith may raise some questions. Doesn't imagination mean making stuff up?  If we imagine God speaking to us, is it real?

Walter Brueggemann is a biblical scholar who published a book called The Prophetic Imagination 40 years ago. In the book, Brueggemann describes the crucial role that imagination plays in the biblical prophets’ ability to envision the new world that God was bringing into being. Without imagination, Brueggemann argues, the prophets would not have been able to see or hear from God. It’s not that the prophets were making up reality so much as they were entering into the new reality of God by using all of their human gifts, including the gift and power of imagination.

Here’s one longer quote from Brueggemann:  

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Today, the prophets’ direct experience of God is available to us all. Everyone who wishes to nurture a vibrant faith life with Jesus can use their imaginations to help see, hear, and know God.

Some of us may need to give ourselves permission to try things out, to trust the Spirit’s ability to speak more than we distrust our ability to hear. We may also need to deal with any alarm or anxiety we might feel when engaging the part of our brains and bodies that channels imagination.

And if we ever have an experience with God that we’re not sure about, we can always check it out with Scripture and with friends to make sure it’s on track with what we think God is like.

The great journey and invitation in life is to come into a more full relationship with God, and we can do this by using every aspect of ourselves that God made, including our imagination.