Practical Christianity: The Purpose of Imagination

The things we care about are often the things in the closest proximity. William Wilberforce uses the example of feeling more keenly the tragedy of an accident on the street just outside, than the tragedy of thousands of people being slaughtered on the other side of the world.

And the things that are in closest proximity to us do not even have to be real. Our imaginations allow us to feel more emotion for the characters in the book we’re reading than for real incidents going on farther away. In fact, because these characters in a sense live inside us, they are in the closest proximity anything could be…and therefore might be more powerful than things going on in our own homes. 

This is an illustration of how a human being has a certain power, and that power has been corrupted by sin. Imagination is not evil, but in our sinful nature we often misuse it.

“One cannot but suppose that like the organs of the body, so the elementary qualities and original passions of the mind were all given us for valuable purposes by our all-wise Creator.” 

What is the true purpose of Imagination? Wilberforce talks about how it is a tool we can use. Imagination allows our minds to make real something that is distant or otherwise incomprehensible. In a way, Imagination is what allows us to grow into Faith…the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” as Hebrews 11:1 says.

“The children of Christ are here separated indeed from the personal view of him; but not from his paternal affection and paternal care.”

Imagination is what allows us to stretch our perception of the world beyond the corporeal into the metaphysical. Nowadays I think we have the tendency to think of imagination as a bad thing, or at least childish. Having an active imagination is a euphemism for being gullible. Imaginary is something that is not real. I know that when I say that imagination is something that helps us believe in God, it may be a sort of foothold for Atheists to say “A ha! If we have to use our imagination to believe in god, that means he’s not real!” So let me clarify a little further by saying that the imagination is a TOOL that most people (such as children) use as a TOY. And when we move beyond using it to pretend things exist that don’t, we can then utilize it to believe in things that exist but are not necessarily tangible to our physical senses and limited understanding of the universe.