Preaching the Imagination

theological imagination

In a pastors' private group recently, a question was asked. That question revolved around whether an idea was a theological stretch. Context is always helpful and when dealing with pastors it helps to understand the timing and general assumptions we can make. The question was centered on the story of the Magi visiting Jesus as a child. The context is that the question appeared around epiphany in which the Church celebrates the Magi as a symbol of the Gospel going to all humanity. So, we can assume a few things in general, the question is asked in preparation for preaching/teaching or for reflection after the fact. The preaching part is important as preaching requires us to love into theological imagination.

The question paraphrased is: did the Magi, having encountered Jesus, went home in a different way both literally and metaphorically a theological stretch? Were the Magi changed in that interaction? That’s a good question and a friend had preached on that very idea. But the thread did what threads often do and became an interesting contrast in the way clergy approach preaching. It almost felt like the Nate Bargatze Saturday Night Live sketches where George Washington shifts the questions about equality with completely unrelated comments. “You asked about weights and measures…”

Yes, that criticism is tongue in cheek because the contrast is about two linked processes for the preacher; exegesis and proclamation. Exegesis is a method of revealing the truth of a text based upon that text. Many preachers, myself included, use a primarily exegetical style of preaching. However, that exegetical preaching can include the imaginative theology of the text as well. When the preacher reveals the truth of the text, is she or he transformed or inviting others to transformation? Good solid exegesis of the text is important, but I wonder if insisting on the theology being so tied to the exegesis that if a concept is not literally in the text is a flip side of fundamentalism. The truth of the text ,in the context of interactions with Jesus, allows us to imagine that the hearts of the Magi are transformed in their interaction.

I fear we all too often want to make certain people have the right knowledge rather than right hearts. This is the curse we are still overcoming from modernism. I believe it incredibly important for those of us in Wesleyan contexts to dip into the pool of imagination when we proclaim the message of God. Truth exists in liminal spaces as well as overt spaces. Preaching requires a narrative of invitation that makes the complex simple and the theological relevant. John Wesley was much more open to the imaginative than his brother Charles. In the great Christmas hymn Hark the Herald Angels Sing, John included additions of George Whitefield that make the hymn what it is. Charles did not like the line “hark the herald angles sing” because the text only mentions “an angel of the Lord.” Charles may have also been a bit jealous, but I won’t speculate. John understood that the truth of the proclamation of invitation was important and even if the text said angel, the ideas of angels in the heavenly host singing was perfectly fine. John was more interested in the right heart than the right mind.

While getting the exegesis right is important, even more important is getting the truth proclaimed in ways that people can embrace it. That’s where our imagination becomes important. To borrow Zack Hunt’s ideas of being Godbreathed, I will lay down what we as clergy are doing in preaching. We are all Godbreathed people encountering a Godbreathed text that is living and breathes back into us through the Holy Spirit as we read and study. Proclaiming the truth of the text extends to imaginative thinking about what may be happening with the characters in the story or passage we are preaching. Another friend has an incredibly engrossing back story to the “Good Samaritan” that is not part of the text, but helps to paint a picture of the contextual truth of the characters we meet. That back story is not a theological stretch, nor is the idea that the Magi left their encounter with the young Jesus transformed.

Forced inerrancy of the text sucks the life out of sacred and Godbreathed text. Forced literal exegesis sucks the life out of the truth of the text just as much. My friend Gabriel Gordon rightly states that many of our problems go back to the fact that we are all so influenced by the enlightenment that we lose track of the mystery of God. He also points out that fundamentalists and progressives are two sides of the same modernist coin, but that is a longer story to tell. I look around and think there is no wonder people are not drawn to Christianity. We seem to be stuck in a lifeless rut of demanding right thinking to the detriment of right hearts. While doctrine and theological centering are important, is it a stretch to reflect within theological imagination?

Doing the work of Theology is so much more than gaining knowledge. As Dr. Tim Gaines writes:

The theological life stands open to you, not because you have mastered every point of doctrine or taken in every fact of Christian history but because God is catching you up in the divine work of making all things new through the way of a crucified and resurrected carpenter. Describing and proclaiming that work will call for us to be certain kinds of people, steeped in the virtues of speaking and embodying the gospel. Gladly, we have exemplars in that work who have come before us, and to their lives we now turn.

Are we being caught up into the work of New Creation, or are we grasping at Old Creation?

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Gaines, Timothy. Walking the Theological Life: Discovering Method for Theology in the Lives of Biblical Characters (p. XVIII). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

Gordon, Gabriel. The Fundamentals of a Recovering Fundamentalist: Reorienting Towards the True, Good, and Beautiful. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2024.

Hunt, Zack. Godbreathed. Herald Press, 2023.