One of my favourite authors, Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary scholar, gave the Massey Lectures on CBC in 1962. The Educated Imagination is now in its 25th printing. In this book Frye asks a simple question: why study literature? His answer is rich with possibility. He says that the study of literature, what he calls “man’s revelation to man,” is for the sake of funding imagination. Literary studies are hard work. They require critical finesse and directed attention, but the goal is to beef – up imagination.
Frye claims that if imagination is stoked (educated) with ideas from other times and places, you quickly realize there are better worlds than the one around us right now; there are worlds we want to live in. And imagination could lead to action; it could make us so restless with the dead ends and stale leftovers of the present that whole communities could start living toward a better arrangement, a more humane option, a possible world.
What about a theologically educated imagination? What about theological education as focused critical attention on “God’s revelation to people” in Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit?
Could whole communities dare (by faith) to envision what might be because the Triune God has stoked their imaginations through prophets and poets, scripture and saints testifying to the Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven? A theologically educated imagination may envision a reconciled world, fuelled as it is with visions of lions and lambs lying down together, with visions of swords beat into plowshares, of a detoxified heaven and earth. A people could become so enamoured with these solicitous visions that they grow discontented with what is and start living toward more humane arrangements, where justice and peace embrace. And they do it not because they have to but because they may.
Subject yourself to theological education as imaginative transformation and priorities could get reversed, altered, changed. Fund an imagination with the gospel of reconciliation and the next thing you know someone says, “I have a dream …” and then audacious people—like Martin Luther King, Jr.—move non – violently toward a more humane arrangement. They just start to believe that history bends toward justice! Talk about grasped by a vision.
In the formation of theological imagination, we also want to engage the world and the big issues of our time. I think Karl Barth was right that theology ought to be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (although I am pretty sure he didn’t mean we give equal weight to the National Post and Romans in our thinking about God).
Why engage with the world? Because God is engaged with the world, because God so loves the world. God is at work in the world, God is always already active making and keeping human life human—there are little lights and parables of the love of God scattered all over the place if we will attend to the world. If we really believe that, and if we are imaginatively attentive to the world in which the suffering God is at work, we will discern what our work needs to be. Ours is no armchair religion—endlessly spinning our wheels in analysis paralysis.
Douglas John Hall in his new book, What Christianity Is Not, says the important question is not what we the church are doing but what is God doing and how do we get with God’s mission. “The question the church (and theological colleges) ought to be asking and seeking to answer in and for a particular time and place (context) is not what should we do, but rather where is God now at work making and keeping life human? The extent to which [we] determine an answer or answers to that question will determine the nature and relevance of our own activity.”
Finally, in our theological education, we are generous. And here I mean generous as the opposite of narrow and sectarian. While we love the church and actually believe the church to be an agent of God’s love in the world, we keep our eyes open for partners in our mission, including other Christians.
And the truth in our multi – religious, multi – cultural context is that we have a whole range of partners. Jesus taught us to love, not to fear or compete with our neighbours. It is a wonderful thing: to go deep in Christian faith is to go wide in the neighbourhood. I have yet to read the story in the gospels where Jesus says, “go out there and prove other religions wrong.” Instead, when the disciples object to someone who heals outside the official card – carrying Jesus movement, Jesus basically says, “if they aren’t against us, they are for us.” It was Jesus’ disciples, not Jesus, who got all proprietary about healing.
Miroslav Volf in his book, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, says that each dynamic faith tradition overlaps with others, and so there’s hope of profound co – operation for the good of the world on issues like violence and ecology.
I know that religions aren’t all the same—a Muslim friend helped me understand that. However, there is often “overlapping consensus” on the issues of our time. We can learn from our First Nations and neighbours of other faiths, but we will need to know each other well enough to do so for the sake of more humane arrangements in the world. Christians reach out to the world for the love of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, others have their own particular reasons, but we can be generous, not narrow and exclusionary, in our work in and for the mending of God’s world.
About Richard Topping
Rev. Dr. Richard Topping is principal of Vancouver School of Theology. This is excerpted from a talk he gave at his induction last year.
