Theology and Imagination

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Theology and Imagination

F. Thomas Trotter

raduate of Occidental College (AB) and Boston University (STB, Ph.D), Trotter was Dean and

fessor of Theology at the Claremont School of Theology. Later he was General Secretary of the

ard of Higher Education and Ministry of The United Methodist Church and President of Alaska

ific University. His special interests are in religion and the arts and religion in higher education.

s essay appeared in Loving God With One's Mind, by F. Thomas Trotter, copyright 1987 by the

ard of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. Used by permission. This

ument was prepared for Religion Online by William E. Chapman.

ng Lardner, uponthe occasion of his first visit to the Grand Canyon, remarked,What a marvelous place to throw old razor blades." He was not usually a

respectful person. But the sight of that incredible canyon, with the amazingt of color and space, so overwhelmed him that he could not find words to

atch the experience. A wry, humorous aside sufficed. Most awe-inspiringents are so vast that words are inadequate for our response. So it is thateachers and pastors, who risk growing familiar with the mysteries of God,en are reduced to speech that may sound trite or at least (what is the word?)

eachy. Words are the tools of our trade, so to speak. We are frequently invited"say a few words." At public gatherings, we are expected to be profound andver at the same time. Often we retreat into the formulae and well-testedpressions, the language of the religious professional.

e persistent dilemma of religious thought and speech is the struggle forequacy in forming language about the things of God. This may be called the

Moses Syndrome" -- the more overwhelming the task of preaching the moreadequate we feel (Exodus 4:11-17). But speak we must. Experience of Godquires reflection on the things of God, and reflection requires communicationthe power of experience. Some religious traditions are moved to silence and

eechlessness. Advanced forms of some eastern religion focus on soundsthout voice -- like the "oom" or the tinkle of temple brass. But theology tosterners necessarily has been expressed in verbal statement.

this mode of communication we are a part of the larger western sense ofowing. Because the western way of knowing and speaking has involvedilosophical models and the use of syllogism, story, metaphor, andopositional statement, theology has followed these forms, especially the latter.perience reduced to propositional language has led to propositional theology.affirm the creed is to affirm the existence of the Holy One. To deny the creedo place oneself outside the community of faith. Orthodoxy becomes

reement with propositional statements, often conditioned by less than ultimatensiderations. The enormous philosophical reliance of theology can be noted in dependence of Augustine on neo-platonism, Aquinas on Aristotle, Luther onminalism, Lutheran confessionalism on scholasticism, and, since 1800, liberal


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ology on Kant.

t, by and large, theology is "church theology," that is, despite the fact that itaws heavily on general philosophy, it tends to become the speech of thenfessional enclave. Gerhard Ebeling has said that people have a "troubledation with a speech they do not understand." To the extent that religiouseech in our time is a speech of the enclave, the evangelistic (telling the story)ssion is going to be difficult.

t there has been a resurgence of cultic or enclave-type speech in recent times.e revival of Islam is startling because of the political possibilities inherent inident fundamentalism. The Vatican also has attempted to interfere in theological work of Hans K. Kung and other prominent liberal Roman Catholicologians. We have seen a woman excommunicated from the Mormon Church

cause she challenged its theological traditions. The growing political power ofmerican fundamentalism is also a part of this phenomenon.

hile the religious groups seem to be speaking more stridently in their ownnguages, there is a realization that the grant of authority to the churches to

eak definitively about the "things of God" has largely been withdrawn.meone has said, "A few groups huddle closely around a creed, but, for theost part, creeds have no standing." Church leaders, bureaucrats, opportunists,e those occasions to reassert the ancient authority of their dogmas.

e way out is not to abandon the theological enterprise, but to reflect on thepropriate language for and forms of talking about God. Given the history ofstern philosophy, words have been thought to be not simply the mostpropriate language for theology, but the only language in whichmmunication is possible. For the West, the Word is exhausted in words. Butuch of life is lived beyond words. In this vast web of our common life words

seized and shaped to the expressions required of them. They aredispensable instruments of our being human. But human life is not exhaustedwords. Marianne Moore once remarked: "Expanded explanation tends to spoil lion's leap."

a fine essay in Theology Today, Roland M. Frye notes that the Renaissance'seat achievements in perspective and mathematical precision created andition in which it became possible to make literal descriptions of reality.evitably, where it was impossible to provide a literal description of reality, itcame fashionable to assume that one should stay silent, or deal only instractions. (Frye recalls a television show in which David Frost was

erviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury. Asked to describe God, thechbishop began by citing, "Something with one and beyond one that fills oneth awe, and reverence, and gives one a sense of supreme obligation. . . ." Ats point Frost interrupted to comment, "That could be the Internal Revenuervice.") In that cultural setting, understanding was largely narrowed to aoice between expression in a literal sense or through cloudy abstraction. Largeas of meaningful human experience were thus relegated to over-simplificationher through blatant literalism or vague transcendentalism. Metaphor, analogy,age, music, had all lost credibility.

e closer we get to the edges of the mystery of things, the less adequate our


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planations become. The word mystery has its root in a Greek word that meansshut one's mouth." There is no way we can abandon words in theology, butre may be required of us a new modesty about the meanings of words. That is,

hat Frye calls "blatant literalism" and "vague transcendentalism" must beplaced by a new sense of the vitality of words and their use in other contextsan propositional arguments. Meaning becomes attached to words. Dictionaries codified collections, not of meanings, but of uses of words. We assume thatfind meanings in dictionaries. We find only the consensus of the uses of

rds. How words are used is the problem of preaching and theology. Paullery once remarked that "words are planks of wood we place over chasms tooss over. If we try to dance on them in the middle of the journey, we will notoss over. Words have more uses than meanings."

at phrase of Valery's suggests the poet's conviction that the vocation of theet is to create language, not to codify it. The root of the wordpoetry is theeek word to make and it has reference to the making of pots and pans anduses and barns and fences and other utilitarian objects. How have wederstood poetry to be a matter of abstractions? Thepoetand the preacher!ologian have a common vocation of finding the words to communicate the

wer of experience without codifying it and bending it into dictionaryfinitions.

e religion of Israel exercises this modesty in its care for the naming of God.name something is to own it, to control it (cf. the Genesis story).Also, the

ophetic tradition in Israel seemed consistently to treat Yahweh assubjecther than object -- that is, wordsfrom God expressed the will of God, not theapes or meaning of God. So iconoclasm -- the abhorrence of the use of opaqueages -- became a permanent feature of the religious tradition. And it continuesour period as aProtestant principle (e.g., Tillich).

e dominance of word in our religious history has led us to the conclusion thatople without history (words to explain themselves) are no people at all. One of important achievements of recent scholarship has been the recovery ofigious traditions of subdued cultures. What we may once have heldumphantly to be unique elements in our Judeo-Christian tradition now can been to have roots in despised cultures like Ugarit. These discoveries do notmage the power of religious insights. They do, however, suggest a new joy at discovery of the human religious enterprise. So liberation theology has on its

enda the recovery of a history of religious identity that had become obscurederased by the dominant culture. The intense current interest in the history ofmen in religion is not an idea exercise, but of the essence in establishing theegrity of our religious history. Part of our new modesty about the authority ofrd in theology is the willingness to live into the experience of other traditionswe plumb our own theological sensibilities.

e role ofimagination in religious thought and experience therefore takes onw urgency. In addition to words, form and movement and sensibility andund shape our vision of the world. Most human experience is affected by theseodalities. We make images with these elements, we draw analogies, we tellries, and we grow uneasy with religious language that seems sometimes tontradict these modalities.


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agination is the process by which we make a language out of the shapes ofents -- the concrete elements of our own experience and the experience of ourmmunities. Often it accomplishes this by using overlooked and even despisedgments of personal and cultural experience. As John Dixon has suggested, art of Israel's tradition was blood and smoke, not only prophecy.

hat was forming and decisive for religion in that understanding is also part ofho we are. We are more likely to find such themes in dance or music or poetryan in systematic theology. Innovators like Stravinsky relied not so much oneaking with convention and tradition, but with identifying the power ofcarded traditions. He once remarked that his work was built on the detrita --andoned ideas of others who went before. The innovating newness is aalling to our senses of a wider world than our current orthodoxies normally

rmit. This has been the special vocation of the artist in a post-Reformationtory of religion. R. G. Collingwood, in a famous phrase, has suggested thate artist prophesies, not in the sense of foretelling, but by telling us the secretsour own hearts, at the risk of our displeasure. Art is the medicine for the worstease of the mind -- the corruption of the consciousness."

yond the use of the imagination in widening our experience of the world andfining our consciousness, the use of the imagination in religion can save usm another problem -- namely, the tendency to take pleasure in cruel things.stractions are the refuge of the scoundrel. Concreteness is the environment ofman sympathy. Vietnam was the season of growing up for most of us

mericans. We were saturated with euphemism -- body count, mega-death, andundred other cruel words to separate us from our humanness. To get inside other's world is to share something of a wider humanness than one's own. We then candidates for what the hymn writer called the "wideness in God'srcy."

nother use of the imagination is the recovery of narrative and story as the modereligious expression. For Christians to speak of God only in precisescriptions and formulations is to risk making the formulations God. Bordenrker Bowne, one of my early heroes, was once asked if he had the "secondssing." He replied, "No. I have had the first, the third, the fourth, the fifth, butbe damned if I've had the second." The statement of the experience of

merican Wesleyan holiness had become an absolute; and, although heofoundly exercised piety, Bowne refused to be told what forms of piety werermative. So the re-telling of the story gets us on our way behindnormativepping points and suggests fresh beginnings. There is a fine Hasidic tale of a

bbi who went to a place in the forest, lit a candle, said a prayer, and told ary.His student could not find the place in the forest, but did light a candle, sayrayer, and told a story.His student could not find a candle, but he said a

ayer and told the story.His student forgot the prayer, but he told the story.

annery O'Connor, remarkable in that she was at once profoundly orthodox andaginative, suggested that her vocation as an artist was to re-tell the gospelrables in startling and shocking ways. "For the blind one has to write in largeures and for the deaf, one has to shout," she said. Her letters, recentlyblished, have been named by Sally Fitzgerald, the editor, The Habit of Being.e word habitis used in its Catholic meaning -- the discipline of life -- a life

cused on the being of things as primary revelation.


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ur time has a passion for surety, for security, for simplicity. These thingsobably have never existed -- save for brief moments when they wereablished by denying them to some other community. Theology in these daysrisky business. It walks between the presumed at-homeness of the past and thexieties of the future. Our concern for opening the boundaries of the mind inr religious language requires love and imagination. Our theological work in school and parish will be informed, hopefully, by a new modesty that valuesagination.

allace Stevens was one of the remarkable poets of our period. In his poem "Agh-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens suggests that religionists "Take theoral law and make a nave of it/And from the nave build haunted heaven." But rationalists "Take the opposing law and make a peristyle,/And from the

ristyle project a masque/Beyond the planets." But "fictive things," saysevens, "wink as they will." What wry humor. Despite all our energetic effortsorganize the universe and human events, those wonderful things simply areere, in their concreteness, winking at us!

is habit(to use O'Connor's phrase) is present in the biblical tradition and has

en lifted into systematic theological method by the United Methodist Churchelf. The latter is to be noted in the quadrilateral definition in the Disciplinarytement that insists on scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as elementsour theological work. I think this 1972 statement will have long-range

fluence in our work in coming generations in the church. But it did notossom full-blown from abstraction. It grew out of the creative concentration of ways we perceive the things of God. And that perception (itself an act ofagination) is a frequent accent in both tradition and scripture. Hearing andeing, speaking and keeping silent, building and tearing down -- the rhythms ofth seeking understanding.

nce Flannery O'Connor was attending an affair with what she called "bigellecturals," Catholic writers and commentators. This is what she remembersher letter to a friend:

Having me there was like having a dog present who had beentrained to say a few words but, overcome with inadequacy, hadforgotten them. Well, toward morning, the conversation turned onthe Eucharist which I, being a Catholic, was obviously supposed todefend. Mary McCarthy said when she was a child she had receivedthe Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, being the most

portable person of the Trinity. Now she thought of it as a symbol

and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said in a very shakyvoice, "Well, if it is a symbol, to Hell with it." That was all thedefense I was capable of, but now I realize that this is all I will ever

be able to say about it outside of a story except that it is the center ofexistence for me. All the rest of life is expendable.

gma that is not experienced in one's guts is not helpful -- it is abstraction.ncreteness is the beginning of poetry. Experience is the context ofagination. Scripture is the seedbed of language of faith. Religious speechght to keep us in reality, not otherworldliness.


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e words of Jesus to the theologians and bureaucrats in the Temple aretructive. The gospel story recorded in Mark 12 includes the elements of the

es and misuses of religious speech. Jesus was involved in a discussion therpose of which was entrapment. That remains a lower form of the uses ofigious speech. To the Herodian, how he replied to the question about taxess politically interesting. To the Sadducee and Pharisee, how he responded to question about the woman married to seven brothers was professionally

rilous. To the proof-texter, how he responded to the question "What is the

eatest commandment?" would test his orthodoxy. Jesus first suggestedodestly that his colleagues did not understand either the scriptures or the powerGod. Bound to the tradition, they could not be free of the tradition toperience the power latent in trust in God.

t Jesus did recite the great Deuteronomic confession. There is one God, andu shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with allur mind, and with all your strength. (And the second is equal to this. You shallve your neighbor as yourself.)

Deuteronomy 5:45, from which Jesus was quoting, the phrase "love God with

one's mind" does not appear. How more serious researchers provide reasonsthis puzzle is for further research. But what about this as a possibility?ustrated with theological method as entrapment and proof-texting, andgmatic self-assurance, Jesus inserted a new word by adding "loving God withe's mind." That made the proof-texters and traditionalists sit up and taketice! The Greek word here is dianoia -- a word with more uses than meanings.has more to do with coherence, seeing through the poetic mode, putting eventsd concepts together. It is not simply rational work, although it includes that.at would be the appropriate response to folk who had grown unimaginative in

nsing both the scripture and the power of God.

en, for good measure, recalling the questioners to the genius of propheticdaism, he said: The second commandment is this: you shall love your neighboryourself. All this enterprise is focused finally on the love of God aimedough the faithful toward the neighbor. And who is my neighbor? "The poor, broken-hearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, the outcasts, the persons

ho have no hope" (cf. Luke 4:18).

tably, this Markan episode ends with the phrase, "No one dared ask him anyore questions."

us' method was to call us to the uses of imagination in crafting the meanings

words. That is why the religious community must do its own research andagining and forming because it necessarily grows out of the context ofcounter of faith.

w risky this always is. Joseph Heller's comic novel Good and Goldsuggestsr human equivocation:

Gold never doubted that racial discrimination was atrocious,unjust and despicably cruel and degrading. But he knew in hisheart that he much preferred it to the old way, when he wassafer. Things were much better forhim when they had been


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much worse.

l his words had a starkly humanitarian cast; yet he no longer liked people.

eology in our time will require more, not less, scope. Problems will bereasingly angular. Shapes will inform and frustrate. But we will in faith

ntinue to shape new ways of speaking about the things of God informed byents that spill out of our own histories and self-consciousness. Our pastoralology will find allies in other modes of seeing and hearing the Word of God,

d we will wait with patience and modesty for the appropriate definitions ofhat it means to love God in the world.

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