Imaginative faculty

Listening to God’s words does not seem to relate to sight or image, but hearing or the ear. Normally, preachers think sight and image have a negative impact on the words of God. On the problem of the impressive sight before the viewer, Ellul (1985:6) remarks as follows:

Sight gives me information concerning the world around me … Sight has made me the centre of the world because it situates me at the point from which I see everything, and

a specialized world, not the typical world of most people. Writers were saturated with oral ways of thought. … We assumed incorrectly that the biblical writers thought of writing the way we do. Writing was a skilled technology, and markings on the page were notes that needed to be sounded in order to be understood. Thus we miss the significance of much of what we read.”

169 _{The original state could be characterized as being “formulaic (using various largely unit-initial formulas);}

recursive (featuring various kinds of exact or synonymous repetition); agonistic (polemical – strongly defensive

of an already held set of beliefs and values); contrastive (featuring black-and-white distinctions); traditional (faithful to the ‘teaching of the fathers’); experiential (based on perceived ‘real’ events and concrete social situations); colourful (image-laden and richly evocative), hyperbolic (to make a more vivid mental impression);

emotively-charged in nature (i.e., expressing the ethos of the author and appealing to pathos in the audience);

and acoustically-oriented (appealing to and evoking the sense of sound and phonological combinations, within both the text itself and also the listening audience)” (Wendland 2008:10-11).

causes me to see things relative to this point. My vision makes a circular sweep of space, working from this point: my point of view.

The above comment proves that the impressive sight makes me the centre of the world. When readers read a text by sight, they tend to subject the text to their views. Ellul (1985:13) comments accordingly: “I direct my gaze, turning it spontaneously toward a certain face, toward a landscape which awaits me. I am the subject. I act and decide what I want to see.” However, listening to the words of God means the Word is the subject and I am the object (cf. Peterson 2002:9). There are many problems, negative factors in sight related to the print culture as sight and image; nevertheless, sight and image have a great influence on the way we think:

The sort of knowledge produced by an image is by nature unconscious. Only rarely do I remember all the elements of an image or a spectacle, but it has made a strong impression on my entire personality and has produced a change in me that is based in the subconscious … Intellectual laziness causes the image to win out over the word automatically and we observe its victory on every hand. Finally, the way of thinking changes: images link themselves up to each other in a manner that is neither logical nor reasonable (Ellul 1985:36-37).

Sight and image are self-centred and illogical, but strong enough to change even our way of thinking. If so, why do we not use this strong power to communicate words? According to Ford (2003:74), Reformers, such as Zwingli and Calvin, used to create images to enliven sermons:

Zwingli and Calvin used many images from everyday life to enliven their sermons and make biblical principles more palatable to the lay listener. For instance, while Zwingli often referred to Christ as a captain, Calvin likened God to a schoolteacher and the Church as l’escole de Dieu. Calvin was particularly gifted in the use of fictional speeches or dialogues to illustrate a point.

In connection with the imaginative faculty of the listeners’ inward, Calvin (1983:567) emphasizes the importance of figurative expression as follows:

Although a figurative expression is not so distinct, it gives a more elegant and significant expression than if the thing were said simply, and without figure. Hence figures are called the eyes of speech, not that they explain the matter more easily than simply ordinary language, but because they attract attention by their elegance and arouse the mind by their lustre, and by their lively similitude better penetrate the soul.

As Calvin indicates, preachers need “the eyes of speech” to attract and get through to lay listeners. However, contemporary preachers lack imagination because of the print culture, as explained in 5.1.2.2. Regarding this problem, Lloyd-Jones (1981:235) remarks as follows: “We have all become so

scientific that there is but little room left for imagination. This, to me is most regrettable, because imagination in preaching is most important and most helpful.”

The use of sight and image with imaginative faculty is most helpful for communicating with listeners. However, Lloyd-Jones (1981:236) draws attention to the dangers of imagination in preaching:

The danger is that imagination tends to run away with us and one can easily cross the line from which it has been helpful, to that point, once more, where it draws attention to itself and you have lost contact with the Truth which gave origin to it. In the end it is the imagination, and your statement of what you have seen with your imagination, that influence the people rather than the Truth.

If preachers’ imagination, rather than the Truth, influences the listeners, preachers must stop using it. Lloyd-Jones (1981:239) comments:

Where do you draw the line? I suggest that the preacher always knows himself when he is taking delight in the story or imagination itself rather than in what it is meant to illustrate. The moment that point is reached you must stop; because we are not concerned just to influence people or to move them; our desire must be that the Truth should influence them and move them.

If preachers can use imaginative power for the Truth to influence listeners and move them, there is no reason not to use sight and image with imagination. Actually, the Bible is also ambivalent about images:

Whether we are dealing with the ancient church or the modern era, the community of faith goes back and forth between affirming and denying the place of visual images in the life of faith. The oscillation arises in large part from the Bible’s ambivalence about images. We are commanded not to make images of God, yet scripture presents us with a plethora of imaginative visions of the deity, describes the temple as a richly decorated interior space (1Kings 6:14-37), and names Christ to be ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15) (Troeger 2003:30).

Troeger’s comment indicates that preachers need to use images within the biblical limits. According to Lloyd-Jones’s comment (1981:235), imagination as a gift of God is most helpful for our preaching: “Imagination has a real place in preaching the Truth, because what it does is to make the Truth lively and living”. Preachers can rehydrate their sermons for contemporary listeners through the use of imaginative faculty in preaching.170

170 _{Refer to Preaching and teaching with imagination (Wiersbe 1994) for the details of the use of sight and}