From the journal, Communique, a perceptive article on the imagination and the arts as God’s ordained channels of grace:
The Truth of the Imagination
Thus far I have spoken of how the Bible endorses artistic creativity and encourages us to believe that artistic form and beauty have value in themselves as gifts from God. We might view this as the nonutilitarian side of the artistic imagination. But the imagination is useful as well as delightful. This brings us to the question of truth in art, or the imagination as a vehicle for expressing truth. This, too, is a value of the arts. The imagination can express truth in its own unique way for the glory of God and the edification of people. Before I defend that statement, I need to delineate what this unique way of expressing truth is. The imagination images forth its subject matter. It does not work primarily by abstractions and propositions but by concrete images and experiences and sensations. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “Imagination demands an image” (37). The arts take concrete human experience rather than abstract information as their subject.
How can we be certain that the imagination can express truth? We can look at the example of the Bible. The Bible is overwhelmingly literary in its form. The one thing that it is not is what we so often picture it as being–a theological outline with proof texts attached. When asked to define “neighbor,” Jesus told a story. He constantly spoke in images and metaphors: “I am the light of the world;” “you are the salt of the earth.” The Bible repeatedly appeals to the intelligence through the imagination. Its most customary way of expressing God’s truth is not the sermon or theological outline but the story, the poem, the vision, and the letter, all of them literary forms and products of the imagination.
Think of how much biblical truth has been incarnated in character and event. Then recall the poetry of the Bible, including the heavy incidence of image and metaphor in the prose of the New Testament. The point is not simply that the Bible allows for the imagination as a form of communication. It is rather that the biblical writers and Jesus found it impossible to communicate the truth of God without using the resources of the imagination. The Bible does more than sanction the arts. It shows how indispensable they are.
Earlier I noted the prominence of music and visual art in the worship described in the Bible. If we doubt that truth can be embodied in visual, nonpropositional form, we need only look at the Christian sacraments. They use physical images that enable us to experience spiritual realities.
We know that the imagination is a vehicle of truth from sources other than the Bible. Recent brain research shows that the two hemispheres of the human brain respond to stimuli and assimilate reality in different ways. The left hemisphere is active in logical thinking, grasping abstract propositions, and dealing with language. The right hemisphere is dominant in processing visual and other sensory experiences, in seeing whole-part relationships, in grasping metaphor and humor, and in experiencing emotion. The arts and the imagination are essentially right-brain media. We need to express and receive God’s truth with the right brain as well as the left.
The tendency of our evangelical subculture is overwhelming to assume that truth is conceptual and propositional only. But the arts, with their emphasis on imagination, remind us that there is a whole other type of truth, or at least a whole other way by which people assimilate and know the truth. Just compare the experiences of listening to a Christmas sermon on the theological meaning of the incarnation and listening to a performance of Handel’s Messiah. We need both approaches to the truths of our faith.
We erroneously think that our world view consists only of ideas. It is a world picture as well as a world view, that is, set of ideas. It includes images that may govern our behavior even more than ideas do. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith propositionally as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This is one way by which we can know the truth about faith–the way of theological abstraction. But our understanding of faith is also based on images of the characters and stories of faith that Hebrews 11 proceeds to evoke.
A Christian world view consists of the doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed, but equally important is the Christian world picture that guides our life. We are influenced in our Christian lives by pictures of Cain and Abel, Mary and Martha, Ruth and Boaz, as well as doctrines of providence and justice. The Westminster Confession of Faith defines providence thus: “God the Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence.” That is one way to grasp providence. Psalm 23 fills our imaginations with the images that comprise the daily routine of a shepherd and his sheep. That is another way by which we grasp providence.”