Book #4 - Imagining Religion

Thanks to a combination of busyness and my new-found obsession with politics I'm lagging behind on my 50 books in 08 resolution.  But I did recently finish number 4.

I just finished David H. Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (WJK, 2005).  This is a very nice theological reflection that was recommended to me by a professor friend.  The key idea is that when we talk about "redemption" as Christians we have to wrestle with the question, "What difference (in this world) does redemption make?"  Kelsey does a masterful job taking a tragic real-life situation and using it as the context to wrestle with what we can truly hope for and imagine to be made new through Christ's redemptive power.

My favorite quote is: "Jesus does not come promising that God will turn back history, restoring our innocence in the garden of Eden as though nothing bad had happened in the interim.  Rather, as the Gospels present what Jesus proclaims by word and deed and what Jesus undergoes, he simply is the promise that something radically new is about to break in.  Jesus' ministry... is the concrete presence of God's wild and unpredictable power to create new life-worlds in the mist of living death...  The challenge for us is to conceive of Jesus' 'wild and unpredictable power' and to imagine what counts as its creating a 'new lived-world'" (p. 33).

I often like to site my favorite episode from the first season of Joan of Arcadia.  With no explanation or further instruction, God comes to Joan and asks her to remove the sculpture her friend Adam had created for the school art show.  After a couple of failed attempts at talking Adam into removing it, in frustration she takes a crow-bar and utterly destroys the work of art.  This act gets her into trouble at school and severely fractures her relationship with Adam.  When God shows back up, she expresses her frustration that following God's command only created more trouble for her.  God responds by saying, "Joan, what you have had is a failure of imagination.  Destruction is never an option."

Kelsey's book reminded me of our need for a sanctified imagination that can envision the new life God wants us to have in the today, even when we are coming through great suffering.  Although language of heaven is appropriate, part of what I took from Kelsey is that we tend to jump to hopes for the life to come because we don't have the faith or faith-full imagination to hope for redemption.

Good stuff...

Comments

[marty]

R u taking book suggestions. I just finished THE WORLD WITHOUT US by Alan Weisman. Actually, listened to the audiobook. Highly recommend it. His "plain" and "austere" account of a kind of post-apocalyptic sense of the world without us is downright frightening, without being scary.