Why are the Reformed so unimaginative?
[from Auburn Avenue blog]
The Christian imagination
Each semester at the Bucer Institute we have a course we call “The Church and Culture” which is basically a catch-all for any topic we’d like to talk about. Our “Church and Culture” class for this semester was held this past Saturday on the topic of “The Christian Imagination” and it was outstanding. (Check out the MP3s when they are ready for downloading, you won’t regret it.).
Too many good things were said to repeat them all, but here are a few of them:
- A woman living on the frontier in the 19th century commented on the quilts she made: “I make them warm to keep my family from freezing; I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.”
- Poetry humbles us by giving us more than we can understand. It’s “bigger” than we are.
- Why are the Reformed so unimaginative? Artists tend to arise from traditions that allow mystery, not from traditions that see mystery as a threat to the “system” and therefore always seek to explain (or define) it away.
- The literal is too skeletal and minimalistic to carry the grand load of truth that the poetic can easily transport.
Some of the things covered were: the importance of the imagination; the imagination and theology; how to cultivate a sanctified imagination; a primer on poetry; and the deeper meaning of watching the dead bodies of plague victims being catapulted over the walls of a besieged city. All in all, it was more fun than ought to be legal.
