Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was but imaginative education reads toward unthought possibility, irrefutable surging of newness that is inherent in God's ordering of Creation

 Sixth.  The triad of fidelity majors in imagination whereas the triad of control specializes in explanation.  Of course we need both as we learn from Humboldt and Diltaie (?) [I am unfamiliar with this name, if someone thinks they know who the far more erudite than I  WB means, please tell me].  But in a world of technological reductionism, positive reason explanation comes to contain everything and education consists of mastering the rules and procedures for linear clarity in order to get ahead in the current system. Explanation is a strategy for accumulation of what the system offers.

And imagination is the contrast, is the capacity to host a contrast world.  So, in my discipline of Old Testament Studies historical criticism has been a long-term German enterprise to fit The Bible to the present age. But now we are being led to this post-critical move to discover that the text is so subversive in its imagination. It turns out, as Michael Walzer has shown that the Exodus narrative is not a report on some ancient happening and it does not really matter if Pharaoh is Ramses or Merneptah, as we bicker about, because Pharaoh is whoever sits on top of the pyramid. It turns out that the Exodus event was a divine stirring in South Africa with Egyptian names like Nelson and Desmond.  

It turns out that the script of steadfast love justice and righteousness eventuates in freedom, dignity and equity and continues its transformative work.  It turns out that the manna story is not simply an ancient story about bread in the wilderness but it is an act of recognition that all bread is not the property of the cartel who own the granaries and the bakeries.  

Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was but imaginative education reads toward unthought possibility, irrefutable surging of newness that is inherent in God's ordering of Creation.

So our contemporary marching, as they did in Exodus has run from the Freedom Rides to the Velvet Revolution to Yeltsin on top of the tank to the march in Selma to hope-filled Cairo and now to the 99 Percent, we are marching, we are marching we are marching in the light of God.  And the narrative is not only performed in the streets, it is performed wherever decision makers gather.

But what a vocation for the university to be a school of imagination. To nurture imagination out beyond the blueprints and the programs to new ways of being in the world together.  

In the past two decades, since I went online a lot, several things have changed drastically about the way I think.  One of those I can directly attribute to reading the 4th century theologian Gregory of Nyssa and, through him, a deeper reading of scripture in regard to The Creation and how time and history work, that God created the Creation to change and never to go back, to move toward whatever God's future is to be, taking us and our contrary and evil actions and the results of those into that future but always having the upper hand, God's results not deterred by us though the history before that future culmination or culminations are to be.  

Nostalgia as a plan,  as well as being futile because the remembered or imagined past cannot be brought back in our future, it is wrong, both in its imperfect and incomplete memory and in its total effect.  We can't know the past comprehensively, we can only imagine that we do.  

If, as Brueggeman probably correctly says, "Explanatory education always reads backward about how it was . . . "  unless it is admitted that the how it was is only a model and not how it really was, that education produces a lying fiction and not accurate information that is any kind of a reliable means of planning the future.   Though he concentrates on the kind of explanatory education that is provided by universities, colleges, high schools, etc. the most potent and powerful and dangerous explanatory education is provided by movies and TV and Broadway rap and boogy shows and "historical" novels and on down.  

Those account for the difference between the education that produces Black Lives Matter and the program of marching, marching, marching Walter Brueggemann cites and the opposing movements of the billionaire AstroTurf Tea Party, white supremacist, Republican-fascist, Trump rally, Gadsden Flag carrying, anti-mask-anti-vaxx alternative which is rather completely a product of the explanations of Hollywood, Broadway, TV, Facebook, etc.   The entertainment media is our most ubiquitous educational institution swamping the universities on down.  It inevitably educates in the explanatory mode that Brueggmann warns of, even it's ersatz imagination is planned to have an effect to support the program of the triad of control.

The use of the term "imagination" in the excellent way Walter Brueggemann does here is imperfect because every single thing we do with our minds is totally, entirely, always dependent on our imagining the things we think about, the images we have in even rigorous scientific imagination, those we depend on to produce the most accurate information we can have  is entirely dependent on our acts of imagination.  That is another thing I have learned, especially from my brawls with "skeptics" and materialists and atheists who, their explanatory educations being so total,  can't imagine that what they do is a product of their imaginations.

In our idiotically psychology and positivist imaginings, the act of imagination is generally relegated to the willful delusion of whoever we want to designate as deluded and so to dismiss. That is probably what any scientistic atheist materialist who heard this passage from Brueggemann's talk would have as their first resort to make the God talk go away.  But the idea that they have access to information of complete reliability about anything, that their planning and modeling is totally objective and an act of rigorous objective science and mathematics is only their denial of what they are doing.  It is one of the most common acts of imagination by those with university and college granted credentialed that they have achieved some kind of independence from the basic methods of babies and toddlers and children understanding their raw experience and their remembered experience of the days or months or few years they have to build on and explain their experience.   

They may as well imagine that their most sophisticated acts of science, technology, engineering and mathematics is free of the first five numbers they learned to count on their fingers because those had to be imagined to be relevant to anything, the abstraction of counting and set making as much an act of imagination as the imagined jillions of universes that some of the most arrogant and ideological of scientists do along with the merely imagined mechanisms of natural selection in the life sciences in their colleagues in another department of their school, as well.  

Especially timely to right now, it is true of those economists and MDs who imagine that masks are not necessary and horse wormer is a miracle cure and even As Seen On TV MDs asserting it would be acceptable for 2 or 3 percent of children in our public schools are a reasonable price to pay for pretending that Covid-19 isn't a world changing event on the basis of their imaginary "herd immunity" which doesn't seem to be in evidence as omicron takes hold. 

My imagination tells me this is a permanent thing and experience of it tells me worse than even this is possible unless we change human culture, politics, the law, drastically and fast.   Freedom that doesn't face that reality isn't freeing, it's homicidal fantasy with college credentials.