Abstract
This engaging volume comprises the Hulsean lectures that Wolfe delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2022. An exercise in worldly wisdom—informed by theology, yes, but not ultimately in service to it—the book presents difficulties for the reviewer. There is a thesis that is argued cogently from beginning to end. But the argument unfolds in a rich display of insights and illustrations drawn from perception theory, visual art, poetry, the theater, and, of course, from the author’s life experience. This diversity of media, each with its own manner of conveying the author’s judgment, is what is difficult to capture in a review. The reviewer can only commend to the future reader the delight of encountering W.’s remarkable erudition in these pages.
W.’s very first sentence announces that her book will be “about how to imagine the world theologically” (1). But, as noted above, theology is not front and center in her account of the imaginative process. Rather, she argues, by attending to how the activity of imagining unfolds in experience, one might understand how best to appreciate that process in its theological employment and, more capaciously, to understand how the divine presence apprehended in the act of faith informs the imaginative search for meaning. Christian faith, W. avers, “makes sense of the world by enabling us to hold open horizons that we always rush to foreclose, and to sustain uncertainty in the light of a divine promise” (26). Thus, the lion’s share of W.’s exploration of imagination is taken up with grasping just how the imagination holds horizons open and concomitantly stirs the uncertainty that comes from properly resisting the foreclosure of meaning.
This more general account begins by observing that the process of imagining typically is taken for granted in our experience. Hidden from us, imagining, if it ever rises to the level of being imagined at all, has us finding the world rather than making it. But make it we do in circumscribed ways, which W. presents as a balance between a given context in which we find ourselves and our creative efforts to place meaning in it. W. illustrates this compellingly in an early chapter on our broken efforts at self-narration in which the struggle for identity cannot escape the tragedy of role-playing pretense, ever defined by the ambiguities of circumstance and interpretation, and the “inhabited ambiguity” (71) of our lives with others. Art and poetry work to reveal this tension in the imaginative quest for gestalt, ever nudging and at times even jolting the imagination from complacently settling on an expected and reductionistic closure. Authentic meaning-making dwells in this dialectic.
Venturing a hermeneutical style of theological interpretation, in successive chapters W. engages the theological resonances of what could otherwise quite nicely stand as a credible secular account of imagining. W. is not interested in drawing Christian doctrine into dialogue with the tentativeness of the imaginative quest. Instead, Christian experience is the dialogue partner and the dialogue elucidates the theological imagination of her title. Thus, Christian faith “manifests itself. . .as a mode of seeing the ordinary world which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance” (94). Imaginative theory enables the appreciation of the perception of God, which, like imagining, is ever incomplete and enmeshed in “the vagaries and vicissitudes of the ordinary senses” (109). Spiritual vision is typically human in its restlessness (122) as it apprehends a God whose perceived presence cannot transcend the disquiet of divine absence.
The human desire for completeness in the midst of this existential tension prompts a hope for graceful fulfillment, which W. explores in a final chapter on eschatology. Here, what she calls the “eschatological orientation” (128) of Christian theology offers an imaginative vision of future consummation that can only come as a gift entering into the tension from without. W. chooses not to engage the eschata directly. Like most hermeneutical theologians, her eschatology is this-worldly. She nods to traditional and non-traditional images of the Last Judgment which “do not so much project closure as demand that their viewers, readers, or listeners reconsider their own lives in light of realities beyond their grasp” (132). Here might be an occasion to reflect explicitly on grace’s interruptive power with all its possibilities for new ways of imagining (and redeeming) lives and communities. Instead, W. is happier to end her inquiry by exploring moments of ambiguous self-discovery in the characters of Shakespeare and Beckett. Apocalyptic serves as a reminder that the meanings, and indeed the very selves, we seize are fleeting and vulnerable, ever defined by the imaginative dialectic of finding and making.
W.’s brilliant meditation on the imaginative proportions of life’s aspirations is at the same time a cautionary tale on the temptation that even the softest of fundamentalisms presents to that authentic quest. In making the believer’s claim that “God’s behind it all” (26), W. invites her readers to imagine that the imagination cannot but be theological in its ever-shifting pursuit of truth.