The End of Imagination?
Most of what I know about imagination I have learned from the varied dense writings of Paul Ricoeur. I have concluded that imagination is the capacity to host a world other than the one that is in front of us. Such an act of hosting an alternative world is inherently subversive, as it serves to question and override the world in front of us that we too easily take as given. From this it follows that those who have an inordinate stake in the world immediately in front of us—whether that stake is socioeconomic, political, moral, theological—will do what they can to discourage or prevent imagination in order that we may settle into the present world as an immutable given.
In my book, The Prophetic Imagination, and many times thereafter, I have explored the way in which the prophets (and the prophetic books) of the Old Testament are master examples of the practice of imagination that regularly served to deabsolutize and deconstruct the world of royal priestly ambition in ancient Israel. They did so, moreover, in the face of royal ideology and temple liturgies that sought to establish that world as an immutable, God-given wonder, a gift of God’s goodness. In that ancient world prophetic imagination saw that the royal-priestly world of Jerusalem was a construct that willfully stacked the cards of political, economic power in greedy ways, and so had to be deconstructed for the sake of an alternative future in Israel. This remarkable cluster of prophetic texts that practice such imagination are presented under the rubric of “Thus saith the Lord,” or “The word of the Lord came to me.” Such formulae credit such imaginative utterance to the authority of God, thus issuing in “divine oracles.” That rubric, however, has caused us not to notice, as boldly as we might, that these utterances are fresh, daring human utterances that practice subversion against the status quo that had been made to appear immutable and “safe and secure from all alarms.” This surge of prophetic imagination in that covenantal corpus revolves, in turn, around two reference points. First, speeches of judgment against Israel that yield sanctions of exile and/or destruction that are said to be YHWH’s own work. And second, great anticipations of newness that God will work as an act of fidelity that will override all historical circumstance. In both cases of judgment and promise, the prophets assert that the world in front of Israel cannot fend off the coming work of God. That is, Israel’s prosperity and security cannot fend off divine judgments of exile and destruction. Conversely, Israel’s alienation and despair cannot fend off the resolve of YHWH to make of Israel a “new thing” in the world. Such imagination refuses to accept present historical reality as a “given.” Rather, it sees such present circumstance as a social construction that can be deconstructed, and by the power of God construed alternatively. This prophetic imagination bears witness to the sovereignty of God that is not defined by or contained in present social reality.
In the midst of Israel’s peace and prosperity the prophets can imagine a world of YHWH’s governance wherein Israel stands under acute divine sanction for its violation of Torah. Thus prophetic imagination is counterintuitive, based in a conviction of YHWH’s uncompromising rule, even in the face of Israel’s peace and prosperity.
In the midst of Israel’s prosperity, Amos can readily voice a sad lament, because Israel has a future coming from YHWH that it does not yet anticipate:
Hear this word that I take up over you in lamentation, O house of Israel:
Fallen, no more to rise,
is maiden Israel;
forsaken on her land,
with none to raise her up (Amos 5:2).
By a word-play Amos can imagine the “end” while Israel itself relies on its continuing prosperity:
“The end has come upon my people Israel;
I will never again pass them by.
The songs of the temple shall become wailing in that day,” says the Lord God;
“the dead bodies shall be many,
cast out in every place. Be silent!” (Amos 8:2)
Micah addresses the predatory forces in Israel that covet and seize the property of others who are vulnerable. He can anticipate a time to come when the successful land speculators will say, with bitter lamentation:
We are utterly ruined;
the Lord alters the inheritance of my people;
how he removes it from me!
Among our captors he parcels out our fields (Micah 2:4).
Micah imagines that the land will be redistributed and the aggressive speculators will have no share in the new distribution (Micah 2:5).
Isaiah can mock the wealthy women of Jerusalem who love to strut in public. He foresees a time when their wealth strut will be reduced to the shame-filled status of slaves:
The Lord will afflict with scabs the heads of the daughters of Zion,
and the Lord will lay bear their secret parts (Isaiah 3:17).
In the inventory of finery that follows in Isaiah 3:18-23, we may imagine the prophet having some pernicious delight in fingering the clothes closets of the women, as he probes décor, item by item. This inventory, moreover, is followed in 3:24 with a five-fold “instead” in which the prophet traces out the socioeconomic demise and shame of the rich and successful women who had thought they had no accountability to anyone for anything. The ultimacy of YHWH’s rule evokes radical reversals in the lives of those who mock that rule.
Perhaps the ultimate prophetic articulation of such divine judgment is offered by Jeremiah who can imagine, point by point, the undoing of all creation:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger (Jeremiah 4:23-26).
The sum of these prophetic utterances of judgment is to place before Israel a world other than the one that is in front of them. The world in front of them was all comfort, success, security, and prosperity. The other world of prophetic imagination, to the contrary, is one of loss, shame, and suffering. The intent of such poetry is to deabsolutize the present world that could all too easily be taken as an assured circumstance, guaranteed by an attentive God whose commitment to Israel is taken to be perpetual and unconditional.
The matter is the same in the utterances of prophetic hope that imagines that God will generate for Israel a future that is counter to the present world of loss, displacement, misery, and death. It was easy enough for Israel, in the ruthless hands of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies, to fall into despair and resignation. The miserable facts on the ground could have dictated exactly such a mood of helplessness and hopelessness in Israel. The prophets, however, insist otherwise. They insist otherwise because the future yet to come will not be determined by either imperial power or by Israel’s despair, but by the deep resolve and intent of God who is now said to be utterly faithful. Israel comes to regard its loss, defeat, and displacement as a sign of God’s abandonment. In the anticipation of the prophets, however, such a negative circumstance is penultimate, because the faithful God wills wellbeing for Israel.
Thus in agrarian imagery, Amos can anticipate the renewal of the productivity of agriculture with inexplicable abundance:
The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps,
and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
and all the hills shall flow with it (Amos 9:13).
In a remarkably cunning oracular utterance Hosea can perform the history of Israel according to the imagery of an angry separation and a failed divorce (Hosea 2:2-13). This powerful relational imagery, in turn, makes it possible for the prophet to imagine a re-wooing of Israel by YHWH, and a subsequent remarriage in utter fidelity (vv. 4-20). In the newly recited wedding vows, voiced by husband-YHWH, the prophet can reiterate all of the great covenantal vocabulary of fidelity on God’s part:
I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord (Hosea 2:19-20).
Best known among such promissory oracles is the anticipation of Isaiah 2:2-4 and Micah 4:1-4. According to this expectation, a new day is coming upon God’s people. It will be a day when the generous rule of YHWH is fully established. That generous rule will make Jerusalem and its temple the epicenter of international wellbeing, as other nations are eager to be instructed in Israel’s Torah. The practical result of such international study of Torah is that there will be general disarmament:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4).
Micah adds to the oracle a caveat that the outcome of such disarmament will be the flourishing of a peasant economy that is not extravagant or overly ambitious or indulgent:
But they shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken (Micah 4:4).
And even hard-nosed Ezekiel, in his singularly begrudging way, can anticipate that YHWH will gather the scattered people of Israel and bring them home to Jerusalem (Ezekiel 36:24). The people shall be made “clean,” that is, fit for the worship of YHWH (36:25), and they shall enjoy agricultural abundance with no shortage of food:
I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations (Ezekiel 36:29-30).
All of these prophetic promises (and many more) are grounded in the conviction that God governs the creation, and that YHWH will enact YHWH’s will for Israel and for all creation, even in the face of desperate circumstances to the contrary.
The ultimate prophetic anticipation in the Old Testament is Isaiah 65:17-25 that awaits a new heaven, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem, all of which are unlike the old world already known in Israel:
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating,
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight…
they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord (Isaiah 65:17-18, 25).
Here as elsewhere, the prophet does not explain. This is not prediction. It is poetry. It is the lining out of an alternative scenario that invites Israel to a new prospect of hope that has within it a new undertaking of on-the-ground practical obedience.
Thus in both speeches of judgment and promises of hope, the prophets, taken in sum and taken utterance-by-utterance, invite Israel not to hold too closely the world in front of it. That is, do not hold too closely a world of wellbeing, because it is fragile and will not be sustained. Do not absolutize it. Or alternatively, do not hold too closely a world of despair, as though it were a fate to perpetuity. Do not hold too closely either a world of prosperity or a world of hopelessness. Because this and every such world is penultimate to the will and purpose of YHWH. Thus the prophetic utterances claim to be in sync with the holy God who is beyond our capture or domestication. Israel is summoned to live with the freedom of penultimacy, with new futures yet to emerge from the sovereignty of God.
I had all of this in mind as I read a book, The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy, (2016). Roy is a bold Indian writer, an active advocate for justice, and recipient of the Booker Prize in 1997. Her book has a suggestive appearance, as the term “Imagination,” on both the front cover and on the binding, is crossed out by what looks like purple ink. The book is a collection of her “woke” essays over time. The titular article, “The End of Imagination” (pp. 45-64), concerns the development—in India and Pakistan—of the capacity for an atomic bomb. She writes of that moment in 1998 when the bomb became a possibility in these two juxtaposed countries:
If only, if only, nuclear war was just another kind of war. If only it was about the usual things—nations and territories, gods and histories. If only those of us who dread it are just worthless cowards who are not prepared to die in defense of our beliefs. If only nuclear war was the kind of war in which countries battle countries and men battle men. But it isn’t. If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth itself. The very elements—the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water—will turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.
Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has been burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminate ground water. Most living things, animal and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die. Only rats and cockroaches will breed and multiply and compete for what little food there is (46-47).
Roy understands this moment in her writing as the moment when imagination almost came to an end, when we could no longer think of anything to write or to say, because the bomb had precluded all work of imagination. She is able to imagine the threat and fear so massive and compelling that it brings to an end the enterprise of human freedom and human possibility. In subsequent essays Roy unfolds the emergency her country faces because of Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party that is increasingly framed as an extreme form of Hindu nationalism that amounts to a deep fascist threat to non-Hindus in their natural country.
By way of analogue I suppose that the development of the bomb by these two national communities has as impact not unlike the deportation from Northern Israel in 722 BCE (II Kings 17:5-6) and from Judah in 587 BCE (Jeremiah 52:24-30). Thus history “stopped”; imagination ceased! As did the reportage of these writings. One could not imagine, for a time, a future out beyond such an event of deep dislocation. That is the “end of imagination” of which Roy writes. But of course she herself, to the contrary, has not ceased to imagine. She has continued, not unlike the ancient prophets, to imagine out beyond the deathly limits of the moment to a future that is beyond human expectation.
Like Roy, we in the US live in a society that is prone to eliminate imagination because it is inherently subversive of the status quo. While we may have moved, for now, beyond the numbing imposed by the threat of nuclear war (even while it remains real enough!), other factors militate against imagination. Most especially, it is the force of the ideology of capitalism that makes it difficult to imagine a world out beyond present economic reality. Note well: I have not said “capitalism,” but rather the “ideology of capitalism” that has become the measure and regulator of all social reality among us. The capacity to imagine outside the limits of that ideology is a tall mandate, one that must be faced and embraced.
Thus in the face of any would-be “end of imagination,” it remains the work of those of us in the church to foster and support the arts (as instruments for imagination), and to be engaged in imagination that lines out a world where the rule of the Crucified One is operative. It is important to recognize that the chief work of the church is artistic, namely, to offer, trust in, and act toward a world other than the one that is in front of us. The world in front of us has largely succumbed to false ideology. But grounding in the reality of the cross (where truth meets pain) offers an opening for an alternative world.
It is important for congregations and pastors to remember that we are primarily in the imagination business. It is our work to line out what the world is like as Christ presides over it. The best and most readily available material we have for such imagination is the collage of the parables of Jesus that tell of a world other than the one that is in front of us. This is the world of a man who had two sons, a world occupied by the Good Samaritan, a world of final judgment for sheep and goats, and a final banquet for all. This is a world in which matters unfold amid surprise, gift, and abundance. It is the work of Christian liturgy to line out that world with freedom and playfulness. It follows that the church defaults on its mandate to imagine when it settles for didacticism, or to put it colloquially, “man-splaining.” The imaginative work of the church intends to break open the world of fear, to witness to “a more excellent way” beyond scorekeeping and vengeance, and to show that we may alternatively practice a world of hospitality, generosity, forgiveness, and abundance. It was of course this practice of Jesus toward the socially rejected that finally made him a threat against the status quo that required his elimination. That, nevertheless, is the work entrusted to us. And when we become didactic and explanatory, we fail.
The practice of imagination, in our lifetime, has come to a wondrously dramatic moment in the “Dream Speech” of Martin Luther King. In that utterance King took on the role of prophetic imagination and invited us to a world other than the world of bigotry and exclusion all around us. And he was assassinated because such dream constitutes an undoing of the status quo. Thus for every dreamer of such a dangerous dream, there are The Killers of the Dream, as Lillian Smith has poignantly shown (1949). It is no wonder that the established powers in ancient Israel had to kill the prophets:
Now Obadiah revered the Lord greatly; when Jezebel was killing off the prophets of the Lord, Obadiah took a hundred prophets, hid them fifty to a cave, and provided them with bread and water (I Kings 18:3-4, see 18:13, Lamentations 2:20).
And it is no wonder that Jesus grieved over Jerusalem that kills the prophets, even as he understood about his own risk in the city:
Woe to you! For you build tombs for the prophets whom your ancestors killed (Luke 11:47).
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! (Luke 13:33; see Matthew 23:29-31).
This imagination for which the prophets were killed is our proper work. Our future depends upon it. In the face of the “end of imagination” in her society, Roy can write:
We’re radioactive already, and the war hasn’t even begun. So stand up and say something. Never mind that it’s been said before. Speak up on your own behalf. Take it very personally (p. 50).
So say we all. The fight is conducted by imagery, poetry, arts of all kinds including the playful utterance of the gospel that refuses the domestication of the Israelite kings, the Roman governors, or the pressures of capitalism. The truth comes as artful subversion. Our lives and our world depend upon it. It is only such a sub-version of reality that will save us from the lethal force of the dominant version.
Walter Brueggemann
April 24, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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