The Crisis of Christian Imagination

For generations, many churches treated imagination like a theological liability instead of a spiritual necessity. This essay argues the opposite: Jesus himself formed people through imagination-capturing images, stories, and metaphors that re-enchanted reality. Maybe the church's deepest evangelistic failure isn't lack of truth — but failure to make truth imaginatively compelling. ⁱ

But imagination doesn't merely inspire wonder — it trains faith to perceive possibilities beyond visible circumstances. This reflection explores “theological imagination” as the God-given capacity to trust divine realities before evidence appears. Scripture's heroes weren't simply obedient people; they were people able to envision God's faithfulness when fear threatened to undermine belief.

Then comes the unsettling conclusion: many modern churches may actually deform imagination instead of disciple it. Drawing from art, architecture, liturgy, and virtue formation, the book discussed in this review argues today's spiritual crisis is ultimately imaginative. Consumer Christianity shrinks the soul. Recovering Christian formation may require recovering beauty, symbolism, wonder, and holy vision itself.

i.   Numbers of folks have read Genesis 3 as a rebuke of curiosity. But of course it's not. The ‘knowledge’ that is forbidden us is first-hand participatory knowledge of sin — cruelty, greed, deceit, vengeance. The irony is that no one in Israel was more inquisitive or curious or engaged in argument than the rabbis who endlessly argued about the meaning of the text.