Wow. SO many nuggets of wisdom in this book.
The subtitle is "Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind," and that pretty succinctly explains what this book is about. Veith and Ristuccia point out that Christians are often told not to use their imaginations. The imagination is often reviled as being untrustworthy, frivolous, unnecessary, or even an instrument of Satan. But, God gave every person an imagination, just like He gave them reason and taste buds and an appreciation for music or flowers or other beautiful things. That's the starting point for this book: imagination is a gift and can be used for good or evil, like everything else.
Each chapter is broken into three parts. First, Veith (a professor of literature) discusses good and wholesome uses for the imagination, as well as how to deal with temptations to misuse it. Second, Ristuccia (a pastor) delves into one of the amazing visions in the Biblical book Ezekial and unpacks the ways that God spoke to Ezekial and the ancient Israelites (and us) through visions that appeal to the imagination instead of to reason and intellect alone. Third, they include a short colloquy based on the rest of the chapter.
I have always cherished my imagination and sought to use it to God's glory, so this book mostly confirmed things I have thought or felt or believed, but it explains them so much better than I ever could. If you've ever been told to stop being imaginative, or been told that reading (or writing) fiction is a lesser use of time than nonfiction, or been told that imagining things is actually wrong, you might find this book comforting and revelatory.
Particularly Good Bits:
But just because the imagination can be the source of idolatry and other sins is no reason to ignore it. That the imagination can be used for evil means that Christians dare not ignore it. We must discipline, disciple, and sanctify our imaginations. We are to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5), and that must include the thoughts we imagine (p. 16).
But the imagination is a gift of God, and it finds its fullest expression in God. His imagination led to his creation. His imagination was manifested in his image, in us human beings and supremely in Christ. And God reveals himself and restores his image in us through Christ by means of his Word. That Word addresses our understand, our will, and our imagination. When we attend closely to the words of the Bible and imagine what they are saying in a fuller way, we become more intimately and personally involved in Scripture, and the Word of God has a greater impact on us (p. 41).
A Christian imagination comes from internalizing Christian truth, not just from knowing a set of doctrines abstractly. They have to penetrate deeply into the heart and become part of one's identity. The way that happens, again, is through the imagination (p. 111).
Remember that a worldview is something that we see with, a model by which we "view" the "world." So someone with a Christian worldview is able to look at all the world and everything in the world -- including the constructions of non-Christian worldviews -- in the light of Christian truth (p. 116).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for including some discussions of bad ways the imagination can be used, such as to indulge in sexual fantasies. Those are only mentioned very matter-of-factly, not delved into in a salacious way, but this is still not something I would recommend to kids or young teens. It would be great for the upper high school grades, though, and I intend to have my own high school-age son read it.
This is my 21st book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.
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