The Imagination You Scorn Is The Same Imagination You Deny Using To Do It

In the second chapter of The Bible Makes Sense, Walter Brueggemann gives a list of things that have to be considered to come to even a pedestrian knowledge of the events, people and places contained in the Bible, names of peoples, countries, rulers, geography, etc.  And he gives a short bibliography of resources that would be helpful in gaining such knowledge and to use as references when knowledge or memory fails.

Then he does something really interesting, especially considering what he said in the first chapter about how a biblical understanding of reality is at odds with the "modern-industrial-scientific" view of reality, he says that even with all of that, you can't get the point of the Bible and what its purposes are without reliance on the use of creative imagination and, especially, recreative imagination*.  Being raised a Catholic, I would think what he advocates as a means of comprehending what the Bible is saying is close to the practice of  lectio divina, but I'm not going to go into that just now.  Here is the beginning of Brueggemann's section about the need of imagination to understand the Bible.

Such understanding is indispensable for serious study of the Bible.  But it will not make one an insider.  I suggest that the key to becoming an insider (which presumes the above dimensions of knowledge) and therefore a participant in this covenantal/historical understanding of reality is the nurturing of an historical imagination.  By imagination I mean an openness and sensitivity to the pulses of meaning that can be discerned in reflection upon historical experience preserved in an historical community.  The imagination of the biblical community plays primarily with images which have come from this particular history.  thus “Pharaoh” comes to be a symbolic reference to every form of oppression.  “Bread” comes to refer to the strange gift of nourishment which happens in the desert.  And the stories cluster around these images, so that every oppression-liberation event is a new dealing with Pharaoh.  Every surpassing gift of nourishment is another miracle in the wilderness where starvation is wondrously avoided.   This community, like every vital community, has its own energizing repertoire of images which give life and direction.

Such imagination of course opposes that kind of preoccupation with “facts” and “history” which believes only what can be proven and which limits belief to what is empirically demonstrable.  Imagination is the gift of vitality which enables the believing community to discern possibility and promise, to receive newness and healing where others only measure and count and analyze.  (The Pastoral letter of Roman Catholic Bishops on Powerlessness in Appalachia” is an example of such imaginative activity.  That those Bishops departed from tightly reasoned prose and utilized free verse which opens itself to impressionistic reception, was an exceedingly important event.  Perhaps the greatest impact of the letter was its use of a bold medium of expression.)  From generation to generation the transmission of the Bible in all its power and vitality has been possible because people with imagination have been sensitive to fresh dimensions of meaning, to new interconnections perceived for the first time, to new glimpses of holiness that lie within the text.  Conventionally this openness to new interconnections perceived for the first time, to new glimpses of holiness that lie within the text.  Conventionally this openness to fresh nuances in the text has been located in the discussion of “inspiration and revelation” and I do not wish to deny those dimensions.  But the need for imagination may also suggest that the handling of the text as an insider requires of us energy and boldness if its new pertinence is to be perceived and received among us.

As luck would have it, the pastoral letter he refers to is available online, This Land Is Home To Me, and while it addressed the poverty in the Appalachian region, it is certainly something that could have been written about just about anywhere, even in the neighborhoods of poverty close by the homes of the millionaires and billionaires, or, rather, their second or third or ninth homes.  While I read it last night I couldn't help but contrast the conceptions of the people, the region and the reasons for The Peoples' oppressive poverty contained in it, its ideas of how to remedy that, with the various programs of Marxists, the songs, the slogans, etc. over the last century and that the Bishops' approach was far more likely to have done something about it.  Considering that most of the Marxists who were involved in, or, rather, in most cases, romantically balladeered about poverty in that land were likely to be Stalinists and considering the living conditions of miners and the poor under Communism, there was never any reason to believe their approach would produce here what it didn't in the Soviet Union or other Marxist countries.

I added that because I read some idiot would-be lefty yearning for a revival of Marxism.  Considering what they produced by way of mass murder, genocide and mountains of corpses, and, I will add, the Putinesque model in Russia and Chinese Victorian capitalism on steroids, any would-be lefty who wants to revive it is as dementedly appalling as anyone who would want to revive the Nazi government.   To hell with the Hollywood 10 and the movies made about them.


* Anticipating the snark of the atheists, caught up in exactly the "modern-industrial-scientific" model to the extent they haven't thought much about what it is they do, every single act of intellect relies on imagination, even the most exacting of the sciences, physics and chemistry, rely, constantly on the imaginations of scientists about the simplest of objects and as those join to become more complex objects.  As I've pointed out before, René Thom, noted how a rigorous mathematical description rapidly becomes ineffective even in the relatively exact science of chemistry.

The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry.   The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.)  of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.

If scientists must rely on their imaginations to do even the hard sciences, the belief you can avoid using imagination to address the entirely more complex reality of human life and societies is rank superstition.  It is exactly the kind of superstition that the "modern-industrial-scientific" model of reality is based in, it can't withstand even that level of investigation, even as it destroys us all.