Mankind was created in the image of God. That’s Theology 101. Inherent in that premise is the embedded prophetic imagination built into God’s masterpiece. And the church has lost it.
I’m not talking about a style of worship service, or the flavor of Sunday morning sermons. I’m talking about the very thing that marks human beings as human beings: the creative spirit itself. If we’re made in the image of God, then we bear the same attributes as our Creator. Since the Creator Himself is first and foremost a creator, that makes us humans, in our natural state, images of the Great Creator Himself.
Marks. Imprints. Carbon copies.
When I speak of prophetic imagination, I’m talking about the created imagination that does naturally what God has done by His supernatural power. This is not decoration bolted onto serious theology. It is a core theological concept. We possess creativity because our creator is Creative Energy.
That isn’t some New Age mumbo-jumbo. God-as-Creative-Energy is not some impersonal force masquerading as spine tingles. It is His Being, the personality of the Person reforming Himself within the personal — you and me. And the church has let it go, preferring a faith that can be itemized, test-certified, and shortlisted to one that requires prophetic vision. The God-given was exchanged for something the Almighty never asked for. We cannot repair that loss by writing better worship songs and including more witty anecdotes in our three-point sermons. It is a loss of identity.
Why Humans Love Stories
Stories sit at the heart of imagination. Whether we’re talking about song lyrics, documentaries, novels, film documentaries, or epic poems, stories reflect the loss of which I speak. All cultures through history have told them. One of the earliest recorded stories in history, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is a product of Sumeria, the same culture from which the biblical Abraham was called out to follow God. Before that, oral storytelling was the norm; telling stories is naturally human.
But where did we get our penchant for telling stories? We got it from our Creator. He Himself is Story.
Today, if you call the story of Jesus a story, many Christians will correct you (I know, I’ve done it). It’s not just a story, they’ll say. As if recognizing that the truth of a tale has nothing to say about whether the story itself classifies as a story is some long-forgotten truth we need not remember. The facts must be the facts, even as we bury the truth beneath them. In an effort to defend accuracy, the facts are footnoted, organized, and systematized to the point that truth is glossed over and the multilayered beauty of it is whitewashed into a single thread of data.
With that level of thinking, stories, if they are told at all, are used as a delivery mechanism for facts. To be sure, facts matter. But stories make them mean something. Strip the story and keep the data and the data carries no weight. Christians today treat the Bible like a textual data center, and that’s what I mean when I say we’ve lost our prophetic imagination.
Inerrancy’s Gravest Error
For many Christians, defending biblical inerrancy is more important than telling God’s story. The Bible is distilled to a set of facts, which inerrantists then claim is the evidence of truth. This misses the point.
The Bible is not a science textbook. It is reliable and authoritative. But saying God does not speak falsehood into reality is not the same as insisting the Bible and science must agree and, where they don’t, insisting that science must be wrong. Humans err; God does not.
Inerrancy is not new. Augustine believed the Bible contained no errors. Other theologians throughout history have also made the claim. But the modern church has idolized it. Christians today use it to guard a specific image of the Bible rather than to communicate the efficacy of God communicating who He is (and, by extension, who we are). The Bible is used as a tidy answer key to a divinely administered test of devotion and faithfulness. If you pass, you’re in; if you don’t, you’re labeled a heretic — or worse.
The problem is, the Bible doesn’t make that claim of itself. Reading it honestly means reading it on its own terms. It is an ancient text with strange, textured and layered meanings embedded in a rich storytelling tradition. It was not meant to answer the questions modern humans keep pressing on it.
Everything Holy is Absurd by Design
Let’s be honest, some of the stories in the Bible are weird. Absurd. Strange.
Yet Christians insist that the facts within those weird tales must be purchased wholesale as written or Christ could not have died on the cross. The conclusion does not follow the premise. A talking serpent, a floating axe head, a man swallowed by a great fish — these are not journalism or sworn testimony entered as court evidence. They are stories, and stories often carry truth in surprising ways.
Like parts of the Bible, Christianity rests on the absurd. To pretend otherwise is to turn reality on its head. Any bozo with a scarecrow’s brain can see that virgins don’t give birth and dead men don’t rise from the dead. But that is the point, and the moral, of the story: with God, all things are possible (++Matthew 19:26++).
Absurdity is not an obstacle to belief. In many ways, it is the substance of it. A faith whose central claims are ordinary needs no God.
Instead of leaning into biblical absurdities and treating them for what they are, the church explains them away as if they’re perfectly natural and miracles happen every day. Sure, if you redefine “miracle.” Reduce the Resurrection to a metaphor and the virgin birth to a warm parable about new beginnings and you have drained the faith of the one thing that made it worth defending.
A religion of the reasonable is no religion worth exploring. One built on absurdity is worth taking a second look at.
Prophetic Imagination Is the Core of Human Wanting
Prophetic imagination is not a decorative add-on to systematic theology. It is a direct consequence of being made in God’s image. The imago dei is prophetic imagination.
The First Creator instilled in the pinnacle of His creation the very same attributes He Himself possesses. That is why creativity is such a natural expression of the human experience. That is why we have artists, musicians, painters, filmmakers, sculptors, and, yes, nude models. The impulse to make, to represent, to render something that wasn’t there before does not arrive from nowhere. It arrives because we were made by a Maker, in the likeness of that Maker, and making new things — and making old things new — is what makers do.
This is theology with the dust wiped off. To bear God’s image is to carry His creative capacity into the world. To abandon that capacity is to abandon the image. And that is where the Church sits today.
It seeks to put artists into two unworthy buckets.
In the first bucket are those who honor God with their gifts — and by “honoring” we mean no nudity, no profanity, and a presentation of the simplest possible version of the Gospel. In the other bucket is everyone else: the heathen, the hell-bound, the pagan or atheist who has no need for a god of any kind, and the “backslidden” or “nominal” Christian.
This is tragic. Do we not realize that even the lilies of the field glorify God just by doing what lilies do (++Luke 12:27++)? So too, artisans of every stripe naturally glorify their Creator when they do the very thing for which they were created — no matter how profane the result.
Artistic Profanity Is Not Evidence of Hell
Profane is not the opposite of holy. It is distortion of the good.
When artists become profane, it is not evidence that they are out of God’s reach. Nor is it evidence that hell is the next room over. The real question is whether the artist is doing what God created humans to do — create, imagine, reflect Him with mind and will. Individually and collectively, humans have glorified God with our capacity to create even as our creations have very often strayed from honoring the Creator who gave us that ability.
Christians do the same in worship. We operate without the Spirit and assume God blesses it because “we’re doing it.” The form is there, the intent is there, the church-y polish is there. The Spirit is optional.
All creativity, all imagination, is a gift from God, no matter how it is used. That’s no excuse to be profane. It is a realization of our creative purpose — and a recognition that the gift does not stop being a gift because it points in the wrong direction.
The Profoundest Trade in History
Rather than lean into prophetic imagination to recapture the spirit of the imago dei, the modern church has abandoned the effort and focused instead on relating facts.
The problem is that facts, all by themselves, do not light lamps. You can stack them, defend them against every objection, and restate them until they are as inviting as the fourteenth hole. But God is illuminated through stories more than lists of facts. We are good at defending the text but bad at telling the story of redemption. We defend the “truth” of the Bible through preferred definitions while ignoring the human need for the story.
Man was made for carrying forward the creative work of God.
That is our job. From the Garden of Eden to Solomon’s temple and from Sinai to the Council of Jerusalem, the story of redemption puts God front and center and man in the midst. The point is not to defend it, systematize it, or reduce it to a laundry list of facts in preparation for a divine quiz. The point is to pick it up — talking asses and all — and show the world that God is still working through His creation. Not in spite of, but inside of, the absurdities.
Christians have no standing to criticize artists who do not honor God with their creations if we ourselves do not seize the prophetic imagination of our Creator.
This post was first published at Substack.
Image by ChatGPT
✍️ Published to the Hive blockchain by Kolony ✍️
