For as long as people have written, sung, and told stories about God, literature has been a means by which the Holy Spirit has moved individuals to draw closer to Christ. However, the role of the imagination in apologetics and theology has received, until lately, little attention from Christian scholars and apologists. Fortunately, this situation is now being remedied by a number of gifted scholars working on what is being called “imaginative apologetics” or “literary apologetics.” Malcolm Guite’s brilliant book Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination is absolutely essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the subject.

Guite is opening a door into quite new territory for most apologists, and thus he begins, rightly, with an extended introduction setting out the issues that he will address, and why they are important. To begin with, he notes that a cultural shift is underway. We now have a “wider debate in modernist and post-modernist times about the relations between imagination and reason as ways of knowing.”[1] At least in the American Evangelical world, this debate has often played out simply as a critique of postmodern influence in the church, but the larger issue of the role of the imagination in apologetics, theology, and Christian experience is much more significant. Guite argues that “if renewed claims are to be made for the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, we need both to understand why it came to be marginalised and also to ask in what ways it is consistent with, and complementary to truths arrived at by other means.”[2] Continue reading →