The Case for Spiritual Imagination
Let reason anchor us and imagination buoy us.
Artwork by Scott Erickson used with permission
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
One of the greatest “know-ers” of the last century, Albert Einstein, said that. Society ate it up wholesale. We now plaster it on bumper stickers and t-shirts and social media and vigorously nod in agreement that yes, we believe this maxim to be both an inspiring bit of wisdom and well as Truth.
This is a truncation of Einstein’s idea, which can only be appreciated fully when consumed in whole:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
I think of this quote every time someone asks me how I can “stay” a believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To be honest, I don't know how my faith development works without a hefty dose of imagination. I guess it doesn’t.
“I never stop asking questions,” says environmentalist and theological George Handley. “I don’t believe my loyalty to the body of the church requires me to give up my search for truth. Quite the opposite….The greater the confidence I feel about the truthfulness of the restored gospel and my role in it the freer my intellect feels to explore, ask questions, and turn over new soils.”
Truth is ultimately always what I’m seeking, and it overrides all, including an imagination in overdrive since my birth.
But when authoritative answers aren’t available, spiritual imagination becomes indispensable.
Imagination gets a bad rap in theology.
Imagination is mostly referenced in the Old Testament almost as a detriment to righteousness. (The Topical Guide confirms a pretty dismal view of the term, that the “imagination of man’s heart is evil,” that “vain” and “foolish” imaginations “plague” God’s children, etc.) Irritatingly, scriptural canon doesn’t have much good to say about mortal imagination. But its necessity is undisputable.
Christianity is a faith tradition that demands buy-in to an imaginative standard (An omnipotent God! A Virgin Birth! A Resurrection!), and the Latter-day Saint tradition arguably requires it, and then some (A Vision! Angels! Gold plates!), but when we switch to various modes of criticism it’s a standard I fear we too quickly abandon. Often, in our tremendous zeal to excavate the full truth of a matter, we leave our imaginative selves behind. We’re creative beings who tend to neglect our spiritual creativity.
We seek totality and certainty, but we don’t have vision.
Consider the changes happening within and without the institutional Church in the past few decades. We’ve been given declarations on gender and marriage, clarification on the divine feminine, and greater transparency on the history of our faith and faith leaders. We’ve got worshipers hungering for further light and knowledge, along with clarification and explanation of current light and knowledge (I’m among both these cohorts). So many of us have all sorts of growing pains as we really dig into our search for Truth, and while some seekers are thriving others are undeniably hurting. It’s a confusing and exciting time for believers and semi-believers alike. In some senses, many of us are experiencing what feels like a spiritual adolescence.
Like any adolescence, it’s a wild place to be. We’re filled with new passions and fervors and are routinely held captive by our emotions (indignation, confusion, betrayal), when all we really want is to think and respond logically, as we point to satisfying explanations of seemingly impossible questions and contradictions.
We think we know everything. We’re also, suddenly, worried we know nothing.
In the last few decades a whole crew of us stepped bravely, awkwardly into this developmental phase. As we did, we stopped believing everything in the manner it was taught to us as children, or at least stopped taking it at face value. Instead, we began to see incongruities and what appeared to be anachronisms. We researched. We found things that troubled us. We found things that shocked us. We started to question authority, authority figures, and even the very nature of deity. We left childish things behind, and we really started examining our faith critically.
I think God, in His heaven, is delighted at this turn of events. It denotes major and necessary spiritual development.
Infinitely further along in His spiritual development, He is not afraid of our most difficult challenges or questions. He can handle our fists and our faithlessness. I’d go as far as to bet He’s excited at spiritual teenagerhood. He loves the grit of it. The angst. He loves our late night talks, even the ones that end in tears and swearing. He’s excited we’re questioning, because that means we’re learning.
Not to mention that teenagerhood is an essential step in becoming an adult. We can’t become fully developed until we’ve gone through the phases of ears too big and legs too long and voices shaky and uneven. This phase is vital and we shouldn’t be ashamed of our unease, anger, self-centeredness, and questioning.
But wait, do we even need to become teenagers? And adults? Didn’t Christ ask us to be like little children? What did He mean by that?
I believe He meant to embody the humility and faith of a child, a willingness to ask questions meekly, and receive answers in patience and good faith. There are many adult believers who still embody this childlike manner of faith. Perhaps it’s because they were given the spiritual gift of faith, or the gift of believing the words of the prophets. Whatever the case may be, these are they who maintain a childlike faith to just believe. These are believers I admire, and even envy, and when I suggest we need to move beyond a childlike view of doctrine, I do not mean at the expense of leaving this sort of childlike faith behind. On the contrary. We need to bring it with us into adulthood, along with an imagination that will push us further along developmentally.
Childlike imagination is essential in our spiritual growth, and so is teenage and adult criticism. Our Church will not be solvent without healthy critical thinking, as it’s often the catalyst to get us to examine cultural and pharisaical traditions that we might need to be pushed out of.
We need critical thinkers. But we are in desperate need of creative thinkers, too. People who can sit with paradox, who will allow themselves to put in the work of imagining possibilities beyond ones they are comfortable with. People who will try to read between the lines. Who will give ideas the benefit of the doubt before abandoning them wholesale. People who sit in dark theaters while credits scroll and ask themselves “What did that mean? What is the filmmaker trying to say?” We need people who read poetry. We need artists. Paradoxially, to get to this adulthood, we need the wonder of a child.
Thinking critically has always been vital for spiritual growth. Thinking imaginatively is where we need to go next.
Our culture has a hard time with spiritual imagination. We’re a bit afraid of exploration. There’s a generous, well-intentioned desire to protect and to keep all worshippers “safely gathered in.” We have been commissioned to bring souls to Christ, and it’s a covenant we take seriously. We sadly refer to loved ones who have left church activity as “wandering” or “lost.” (Puzzlingly, we neglect to remember the many spiritual wanderers who have had story-changing divine encounters in their own wilderness.) For all this well-meaning protecting, it seems we don’t want to leave much room for spiritual interpretation, even though our core theology demands personal revelation. For me, it’s sometimes meant I’ve feel smothered by correlation.
Obviously, a degree of correlation is necessary in God’s restored gospel. We need a set doctrine that is taught consistently and universally so we don’t have regional splinter groups or people simply creating doctrine or making God in their own image. General Conference also has a tough job to do, which is to provide general, broad counsel to a very diverse group of believers at various stages of faith development. I think we often fault the messages for not providing the revelation we hope to hear, but fail to remember this is a incredibly wide audience with varied concerns. These messages have to be general. They need to be simple. This is not the venue for speculation. And prophets are not in the business of speculating. As Dale Relund noted, prophets “do not pronounce doctrines ‘fabricated of their own mind.’” Nor should they. They teach the gospel, plain and simple.
And so, as children, many of us were taught gospel principles according to this simplistic manner. Unfortunately, sometimes in the name of simplifying, what we learned was how to see the gospel in stark contrasts. Nuance is hard for children (and some adults). We photoshop the wings off of angels in our artwork, because symbols are prone to misinterpretation. We don’t openly speak of things that feel complex, or often we’re afraid to discuss what feels like uncomfortable history. Our Primary dichotomies are helpful with young brains but as we grow into adulthood this kind of black-and-white thinking often doesn't serve all of us anymore. We need correlation to serve us, instead of constrain us. We need it to give us the foundation to build on, but we need to then do the work of building something custom, a faith space that gives us room explore our individual questions and destinies.
Instead of franchised faith, we need highly creative and highly personal faith.
There are many intelligent adults (who I highly respect), who, through little fault of their own, operate according to Primary-level understanding of God, and of themselves. They live in this literalism and moralistic simplicity. Black and white. Good and evil. They encounter challenges to their testimony when they learn something seemingly unsavory about a prophet or practice (or hey, the entire Old Testament!), and naturally and very logically, question if anything they were taught can be true. Trust lost is very hard to re-earn.
The contradiction here is that our doctrine is incredibly paradoxical. Incredibly symbolic. In our now spiritual adolescence our faith can no longer be handed to us, a kind of neatly packaged literalism. Our theologies are also very often illogical, or more accurately, logical beyond our mortal understanding. We’ve all got at least one thing we can’t square. The tiniest rock in our spiritual shoe.
Start where you want. Start with the Virgin Birth. Start with the Flood. Start with God Himself. God Herself. Start with the Thing that just doesn’t compute. Read everything you can about it, from reputable and various sources. Then turn on your imaginative filter, and re-examine it through that “what-if” lens. The sky’s the limit this time around. Go wild.
My husband and I are watching a very complicated post-apocalyptic television series right now, created by some mega-talented writers. We are enchanted by the story of this new world we are watching develop in front of our eyes. We have no idea what’s going to happen. I love it.
Sometimes I pause the show mid-episode. “I can write out 100 storylines for what happens next,” I tell my husband.
I wonder which one the author has written.
It’s a fun, imaginative exercise for us.
It’s a soul-wrenching, expansive exercise when applied to my spiritual and theological questions.
I wonder which story the Author has written.
Take your hot topic. Your dealbreaker.
Mine, for a while, was polygamy.
Why, Lord, did you ask your Old Testament and modern-day prophets to practice polygamy? Why did you allow it? Did you allow it? Did you sanction it?
Then I commence with this creative exercise: I write (quickly, in my head), a half-dozen reasons why polygamy was wrong, abhorent, why it wasn’t sanctioned of God. Then, I compose a half dozen reasons why polygamy was right at one particular time, why it would make sense. (I was on the debate team in high school, so it’s possible I benefit from the skill of arguing both positions).
If I let myself wander, I can imagine explanations for both. I can “make it work”, even if I’m not sure which answer is the true one. At this point, truth still matters, but until I know the truth I can operate in a nuanced space with the assumption that there exists a reason that is logical (even if it’s one my internal debating didn’t surmise).
If I, someone who has barely cracked open the door to my spiritual adulthood, could posit, could create—could “make it work,” how many more story lines could Heavenly Beings with unparalleled wisdom compose?
Artwork by Scott Erickson used with permission
My faithful speculation could see dozens of possibilities—enough to save and satiate my faith—but I also knew I could also only see a fraction of all possibilities. I see through a glass, darkly.
“Faith gives us access to a broader reality,” Terryl Givens said, when speaking about similar themes in a February 2022 Faith Matters podcast. (He could have said the same thing about imagination.)
Faith has never been limiting to me, it’s always been capacious. My own reality has been enlarged, my spiritual universe expanded and expanding, because of this exercise of faith. Because of its attendant curiosity.
Curiosity and humility are overlapping practices. You can't be curious about things if you insist there’s nothing more to learn and understand. You have to be open to learning. But pick your sources carefully. Those who may have illuminating or faith-shattering “answers” might themselves be engaged in earnest spiritual speculation (or something more sinister at times). Where it gets dangerous is when they name their speculation Truth. So go head, imagine possibilities, but realize that’s what others, including detractors, are also doing. Recognize that. Criticize, but not at the expense of creating.
This practice of course comes with caveats. Our ability to make sense of the world through our imaginative capabilities means maybe how we justify things to ourselves is just that—justification. (Is a fictional explanation better or worse than no explanation at all?) Our imaginations will create scenarios that many times aren’t true. We’ll talk ourselves into an answer that feels good to us, but maybe is false. At times we risk making God in our image. So as we work on fostering a more creative faith, we need to name our imaginations as just that.
I remember picking up Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion when I was in college. I read it in one sitting, in a pleather easy chair at Borders Books. I found it highly interesting. I wasn’t offended by it. But I did recognize Dawkins' assertions for a universe without a God just as speculative as faithful arguments that there is one. His logic (if A = B, then B = C, C = D, and therefore there is no God.). His arguments were far from waterproof. They were highly speculative, incredibly assumptive. He had many loopholes, this man of reason.
In recent years I've also seen imaginative machinations on the nature of God, the truthfulness of scripture. Often they are incredibly interesting theories. But while hiding under the sheen of logic, they are actually also cloaked in a different flavor of speculation. What seems improbable and impossible to refute are just different guesses. They’re smart guesses, they seem possible and some even likely, but they’re also guesses.
Dawkins, fascinatingly and tellingly, later acknowledged he could in fact believe in a God, if God were some sort of super-evolved being, “a deistic god, a sort of god of the physicist, a god of somebody like Paul Davies, who devised the laws of physics, god the mathematician, god who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen."Dawkins (unaware he was describing a Mormon understanding of God) later rescinded this imaginative twist in his philosophies and went back to his hard line of God as fantasy.
You can’t talk about Latter-day Saint gospel-related imagination without talking about Joseph Smith. I can hear the arguments forming. “Of course Joseph Smith was an imaginative thinker—he imagined the entire Book of Mormon!”
That is logically one way to write it, and it’s one I can debate. That this farmboy simply created the entire book of scripture. There are plenty of storylines you can choose from to argue that position. There are publications that seem like irrefutable proof. But, there are also plenty of storylines in support of the book being divinely given to him.
From his youth, Smith was very comfortable in the realm of imagination. He dabbled in folk magic and divining rods. (These facts from his childhood are in fact so ludicrous to some that they can no longer hold them and their faith at the same time. See ya, make-believe rituals! I’m off to a tarot reading!)
Did God need an imaginative, creative, storytelling man to fulfill his purposes? Or did God simply work with one? One speculation of mine is that God needs his children to be imaginative, and that imagination co-exists naturally with rational thinking. There are so many possibilities from a God of endless possibility.
Faith expands possibility, fear narrows it.
God needs our creative faith. Abraham was an imaginative and bold negotiator, trying to save a fallen city. Lehi was a “visionary man,” and was ultimately attacked in similar ways as Joseph Smith for that very reason. The Brother of Jared imaginatively solved the problem of dark boats by bringing rocks for the Lord to touch and make light. We’re creative beings, designed after the image of male and female Creators.
We’d do well to pair our reasoning with creative and faithful speculation, asking “how could this be true?” as much as we ask “how could this be false?” We need to lean into our God-given imagination. And then remember the bottomless imagination of the Ones who created us.
Is the entire idea of God fiction? That's a possibility, sure. Is God real? Also possible. I can't "prove" to you that God is real any more than Dawkins can "prove" that He isn't. I can't "prove" to you through any kind of persuasion, or sophistry, that my faith tradition contains unique, additive truths to mainline Christinaity. How then, if after all we’re all just imaginers, can we move to become unmovable believers?
“Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Jesus asked the Pharisees, when accused of performing miracles by the power of the devil.
“Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruits; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”
I know the fruit is good, because I have tasted it. I know God is good, because I have seen Creation.
Nevertheless, there are many for whom the taste is not good. They claim the proof is in the pudding, and the fruit injures, and is rotten. My sympathies are with them and I validate their experiences. My heart aches for them. It’s maddening to be so patient sometimes, but I truly believe the Truth will be manifest, and in a way that includes all God’s children.
I don't think the fruit is all rotten. I think some of it just isn't ripe.
“Are we a church of continuing revelation or not? Are the heavens open or not?” asks Heavenly Mother scholar Rachel Hunt Steenblik. “I believe we are. I believe they are.”
Maybe certain things in the gospel don’t taste good to everyone because they have been picked prematurely. A peach isn’t a bad peach just because it isn’t ripe, it’s just a peach that requires patience.
There’s been a lot of divine discontent going around about the place of marginalized groups in the plan of salvation. And though imagination and speculation are necessary, alone they don’t always equal sweeping institutional change that’s hoped for. Imagining a theology that embraces all of God’s children regardless of sexual orientation or gender or race is simple enough. Imagining an institution where all members routinely do the same requires some real brainwork.
This practice is not always an easy endeavor. It feels like trying to jam a square into a circle. But it’s worth the ask.
This same pain point exists for the existence and role of a female deity. Some of us lack the authoritative, institutional revelation we are hungry for, so we are left to imagine the natural possibilities of what a Heavenly Mother is. In doing so, our reason is tested but our faith is expanded. There are numerous storylines, many possibilities, many righteous imaginations about Her that bring peace. “Reason cannot replace revelation,” Renlund says, but knowing there are many happy possibilities that exist can bring us peace in the interim. Possibility can help us “stay.”
It becomes clear there do exist ways to make these difficult topics “work” (at least individually if not institutionally). For us to retain our faith even when nothing is has been explicitly revealed.
In this way our imagination can save our faith, even add to it, if we remember to label it appropriately—as glorious, divine Possibility.
For years we’ve turned our minds away from the uncomfortable bits of scripture and history and relented that they’d just have to be “put on our spiritual shelf.” I’d like to propose that might be the solution. Imagination, wonder, and pondering might be the way forward. Instead of filling our spiritual shelves to the ceiling, it might be the right time to declutter the shelf. To Kondo the crap out of that thing. It’s time we dig deep, especially when it comes to the things that really unsettle us. Now is the time to start asking about the shelved items. It’s time to bring them down to daylight, dust them off, and seek further understanding.
“Religion is a call for changing the world,” says Handley, “and so it must lead its adherents to some kind of urgency about effectuating that change.”
And it’s time to do it under the faithful lens of creative possibility.
Logic on its own isn’t going to save us. Faith is. For however much we are desperate to be, none of us are purely logical beings. We’re ruled by our emotions, even the most practiced scholars. We tell stories of heroism and stories of brotherhood and stories of love because that’s who we are. We’re human beings with bodies and foibles and emotions. Our logic isn’t going to get us into heaven. Logic will never on its own help us understand something so mind-blowing illogical as infinite atonement. Or infinite, eternal lives. Our imaginative, playful faith will.
Jesus Christ knew this more than anyone. In the synoptic gospels he communicated a truth that bouyed me up when I felt disheartened with a seeming lack of institutional progression or clarity: “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” I, like the poets before me, dwell in possibility.
Artwork by Scott Erickson used with permission
The next time someone asks me, in light of seeming anachronisms and logical fallacies, how I can still stay, I think this time I’ll answer “Because of my imagination. And because of God’s.”