Imagination

Purging and Refurbishing the Imagination

Tony Reinke Imagination, Revelation, Richard Bauckham

Why all the imagery in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation?

This is one of the questions I try to answer in my forthcoming book.

My answer is three-fold:

  1. the imaginative literature in Scripture helps us value the gift of imagination God has given us;
  2. the imaginative literature in Scripture sparks our growth in godliness; and
  3. the imaginative literature in Scripture introduces us to a theology of our world.

In my book I tackle 1 and 2 and explain why I think Christians should read fictional books to cultivate our God-given imagination. And I explain how developing skills to read fiction literature has in turn helped me read the imagery in Revelation. But due to space in my book, and in hopes of keeping the book as simple as possible, I was unable to deal with 3 and I want to more fully explain this point, with help from a few paragraphs out of Richard Baukham’s The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge University, 1993). In that book Bauckham explains that the Apostle John does not write in the imaginative form to dazzle us with his literary skill, but he writes in imaginative form to exercise theological motives.

The power, the profusion and the consistency of the symbols have a literary-theological purpose. They create a symbolic world which readers can enter so fully that it affects them and changes their perception of the world.

Most ‘readers’ were originally, of course, hearers. Revelation was designed for oral enactment in Christian worship services. Its effect would therefore be somewhat comparable to a dramatic performance, in which the audience enter the world of the drama for its duration and can have their perception of the world outside the drama powerfully shifted by their experience of the world of the drama. Many of the apocalypses could have something of this effect. But Revelation’s peculiarly visual character and peculiar symbolic unity give it a particular potential for communicating in this way. It is an aspect of the book to which we shall return. (10)

He returns to this “symbolic world” point just a few pages later.

We have already noticed the unusual profusion of visual imagery in Revelation and its capacity to create a symbolic world which its readers can enter and thereby have their perception of the world in which they lived transformed.

To appreciate the importance of this we should remember that Revelation’s readers in the great cities of the province of Asia were constantly confronted with powerful images of the Roman vision of the world. Civic and religious architecture, iconography, statues, rituals and festivals, even the visual wonder of cleverly engineered ‘miracles’ (cf. Rev. 13:13–14) in the temples—all provided powerful visual impressions of Roman imperial power and of the splendor of pagan religion.

In this context, Revelation provides a set of Christian prophetic counter-images which impress on its readers a different vision of the world: how it looks from the heaven…The visual power of the book effects a kind of purging of the Christian imagination, refurbishing it with alternative visions of how the world is and will be. (17)

So what’s the point? What is Revelation teaching us today? In the conclusion to his book, Bauckham wraps these points together.

We have suggested that one of the functions of Revelation was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms.

Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. (159–160)

In the previous paragraphs Bauckham helps us answer these important questions: What is the purpose of our God-given imaginations? And what is the function of Revelation’s images?

The book of Revelation engages our imaginations until we see the world in new and radical images. These images help us see past the dominant ideologies of our loud culture, the everyday ideologies that we simply assume and ingest daily like thoughtless breaths of air. The images in Revelation expose us to the world again, but in new and shocking ways, breaking into our imaginations and offering us a new alien way of looking at the world.

God has given us the gift of imagination. The book of Revelation comes alongside us to purge and refurbish that imagination, providing us with a profoundly fresh theological angle on the world that we have grown familiar with.

The Priority of Divine Words

Tony Reinke Idolatry, Idols, Imagination, Word of God

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, 6:50-51:

“The Bible at the very beginning emphasizes that God is not merely an acting God of deed-revelation, but a speaking deity also who shapes language as a medium of intelligible communication with man made in his image. Words are the means of transmitting ideas from person to person: it is not centrally in symbols and visions, but especially in words, that the Old Testament focuses its account of divine-human relationships. Moses the lawgiver reports the Word of God; the prophets impart the revealed Word of Yahweh. The Gospels record three occasions on which the invisible God spoke from heaven to acknowledge Jesus as his unique Son: at his baptism (Mark 1:10; cf. Matt. 3:16 f.; Luke 3:21 f; John 1:32 f.); at his transfiguration (Matt. 17:5; cf. Mark 9:7; Luke 9:35; cf. 2 Pet. 1:17); and shortly before the crucifixion (John 12:27–39). Jesus Christ, moreover, commissioned disciples to “preach the word” (Matt. 10:7, 20, 27:20; John 6:63). The secret of Christianity’s expansion was growth of the apostolic word (Acts 6:7, 12:24, 19:20). The orally proclaimed biblical truth, together with the subsequently published Gospel of Christ or teaching of the Bible, was the message of the early Christian church (Rom. 10:17; Gal. 3:2 ff.); the authoritative source of that message was, is and forever remains the transcendent God (1 Thess. 2:2, 13; Gal. 1:11 f.).”

Imagination

Tony Reinke Imagination

The gospel incorporates various strands of detail. Included in the gospel is a complex string of genealogies that run together the most unlikely of folks into a most unlikely ancestry for the Savior. The gospel is also comprised of ancient prophecies often fragmented and scattered throughout the OT and often veiled in obscure language not immediately clear to the eye. All these centuries of time and genealogies of people and prophecies of intent are all interwoven by God into one cohesive plan that points directly to Christ, a plan so subtle and so complex that even man and Satan allied to thwart the Messiah’s progress was nothing more than a self-defeating push that further hastened the Savior’s death, burial, and victorious resurrection. This entire plan was conceptualized by God before sinners sinned, before the world existed. The gospel, it seems to me, is the most glorious expression of imagination.

Image vs Word

Tony Reinke Imagination, Reading

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 2005) p. 9:

“‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth’ [Exodus 20:4]. I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as a part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.”

Reaching our cities with the Gospel

Tony Reinke Contextualizing, Culture, Gospel in Culture, Imagination, Local church, Promotions, Relationships

 

 

I think most pastors would admit that our churches can improve when it comes to reaching our community. Some of the most community-centered and creative ideas I see originate from the Acts 29 Network. Here in my home city of Omaha, NE the Acts 29 network planted a church East of 108th street, where Gospel-centered churches are quite rare (Core Community Church). Core ministers to the unfortunate, homeless and those wanting to learn English. They are doing tremendous work in the Eastern half of Omaha often neglected.

Recently I came across another impressive Acts 29 church: Oikos Fellowship in Washington. The church is producing an excellent monthly magazine for the lost of their city. As you will see the magazine is a creative way to gauge the local thoughts about Christianity and communicate the message culture needs (like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God). The magazine also highlights local ministries. It appears all their writings, photos and graphics originated from their own people, too. You can download the August magazine here.

In a church culture often centered around programs for Christians, this ministry philosophy goes a long way, I think, in pressing the church from its comfortable weekly activities out and into the community.

Anyways, grace-centered props to Oikos Fellowship.

The overwhelming influence of the media and earnest preaching

Tony Reinke Banner of Truth, Biblical Quotes, Culture, Earnestness, Fresh preaching, Great Quotes, Imagination, John Angell James, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral Ministry, Preaching, Pupit Seriousness, Spiritual Warfare, Worldliness

We don’t live in the Stone Age or Bronze Age, our era is rightly called the Information Age. We are buried alive in books, blogs, emails, websites, magazines, etc. And so are the hearers of our sermons. So why is the message of the Bible more important than the latest war headline from CNN? The listeners to our sermons may not see a big difference between the two, especially as the Middle East is birthing the next world war and gas prices close in on $4 a gallon. And those seem to have more ‘real’ impact today on sinners then dangers of a spiritually loose life now and eternity to come. What is needed (no, required!) in the Information Age is earnest preaching. Long before blogs and websites John Angell James wrote the following:

“Will anyone deny that we want an earnest ministry to break in some degree the spell, and leave the soul at liberty for the affairs of the kingdom which is not of this world? When politics have come upon the minds, hearts, and imaginations of the people, for six days out of the seven, invested with the charms of eloquence, and decked with the colors of party; when the orator and the writer have both thrown the witchery of genius over the soul; how can it be expected that tame, spiritless, vapid common-places from the pulpit, sermons coming neither from the head nor the heart, having neither weight of matter, nor grace of manner; neither genius to compensate for the want of taste, nor taste to compensate for the want of genius; and what is still worse, having no unction of evangelical truth, no impress of eternity, no radiance from heaven, no terror from hell; in short, no adaptation to awaken reflection, to produce conviction, or to save the soul; how can it be expected, I say, that such sermons can be useful to accomplish the purposes for which the gospel is to be preached? What chance have such preachers, amidst the tumult, to be heard or felt, or what hold have they upon public attention, amidst the high excitement of the times in which we live? Their hearers too often feel, that listening to their sermons on the Sabbath, after what they have heard or read during the week, is as if they were turning from brilliant gas-light to the dim and smoking spark of tallow and rush [a candle].”

– John Angell James, An Earnest Ministry: The Want of the Times (Banner of Truth, 1847/1993) pp. 194-195.

“And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:3-5, ESV).