The Difference Between Imagination and Fantasy

The news is filled with pictures and videos of human agony and environmental brokenness.  Japan is only the most recent source of such images...and it sadly won't be the last.  Such events will bring to the surface the long-dormant spirit of hopefulness or hopelessness in people.  It is easy to not think about hope as long as life proceeds "normally" according to "plan."  It is also easy to keep hopelessness bound and gagged in the deep recesses of our consciousness as long as life is tolerable and as long as the things of life continue to bring sedation.  Tragedy - whether it is global or personal or both - will bring us face to face with the reality of our own hopefulness or hopelessness.

It is worthwhile therefore to talk about the difference between a hopefilled imagination and pure fantasy.  Christians are sometimes accused of engaging in laughable fantasy when it comes to issues of our hope.  But this is to confuse the definitions of both fantasy and hope.  Hope may be placed in the yet unseen realities of future, but it is grounded in the accepted truths of the past.  I never tire of telling my Hebrews students that Christian hope is about seeing with our ears.  We trust in the message that we have heard.  We trust in the truths which we have recieved.  This then gives us new eyes to see the future - eyes of hope even when all we see is defeat. This type of hope is not mere fantasy - but it is imaginative. 

To illustrate the difference...It requires imagination to hope that the Cubs would win the World Series this year.  Hope against all hope perhaps.  But it is possible because the Cubs are a professional baseball team (despite what our cultured despisers may say) and they have won the Series in the (distant) past.  It would be pure fantasy to hope that the Chicago Bears would win the World Series this year.  Imagination is grounded in the already possible.  The past opens up a world of imagined possibilities.  So the events of Japan create within us a common despair and hurting.  But events like those in Japan or Haiti or Libya also wake within us the eschatological imagination.  Because of the promises of God and the victory of the resurrection, we may anticipate and imagine in hope the new heavens and the new earth.

I will quote Richard Bauckham at length on this point...

           

Hope is an imaginative enterprise.  Especially is this the case when hope’s great gift is its power to negate the negatives of present experience.  Only the capacity of the human imagination to transcend the given enables us to escape the constraints of the present and to suppose that things might be otherwise.  This kind of imaginative or visionary hope is intimately related to transcendence.  It takes us beyond the mere extrapolation of the future from the present and the calculation of the future on the basis of past and present.  It envisage the genuinely new.  Of course, this raises the specter of mere fantasy and the questions of the ground of hope and the sources of hopeful imagining.  The more we envisage the category of the eschatologically new—a future reality that breaks the bounds of the immanent capacities of nature and history—the more important it is to distinguish imagination from fantasy.  Christian hopeful imagining is grounded in the promise of God and resourced by the images of the scriptural revelation.  As Moltmann’s theology of hope has always insisted, it is inspired and directed by the event of eschatological promise: the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.  It is characterized also by its relevance to the way Christian life now is lived in the direction of the coming of God’s kingdom and its impact on present reality.  In these ways, eschatological imagination is Christologically and scripturally disciplined imagination, not free-floating speculation.

            Consequently, human imagination does not function in Christian eschatology as an alternative to God’s revelation.  Rather, the revelatory promise of God in Christ and scripture appeals to the human imagination; seizes, transforms, and expands the imagination; makes the imagination the locus and vehicle of its reception.  It is the imagination transfigured by God’s promise that is able to envisage in hope the promised transfiguration of reality.  It is this Christian imagination that can envision the coming kingdom sufficiently for it to empower Christian living without reducing the kingdom to a reality that can be all too easily perfected already.

            It is vital to insist that, when statements of eschatological expectation are said to be imaginative, this does not mean that they are not truth bearing, as an overly rationalistic view of human understanding might suggest.  Christian hope is imaginative but not imaginary.  In reckoning with the imaginative character of eschatological images and stories, we recognize that they refer to a reality that, because it lies beyond present experience, cannot be literally described.  Christian eschatology must speak of a new creation that is both transcendently new and yet in continuity with this creation, since it is the renewal of this world.  Of something that were wholly discontinuous with present reality we could hardly speak at all, but of the transcendent future of this world, we can speak in images that point beyond the limits of their literal reference.

            Richard Bauckham, “Conclusion: Emerging Issues in Eschatology in the Twenty-First Century,” Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, 681-682.