The Conclusion draws together the themes of the book, and expands on how the foregoing discussions of art relate to ordinary life and love. Expanding the categories of ‘finding’ and ‘making’ by that of ‘receiving’, it sketches a constructive vision of the theological imagination.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.

The introduction introduces the concept of imagination used in the book, explains the relation of art and of faith to this concept, and discusses the approach and method of the book, highlighting its understanding of theology and theology’s relationship to phenomenology and to other disciplines. The introduction concludes with an overview of the plan of the book.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

Introduction

A guiding hypothesis of this series is that theology has opened up new ways of thinking about history which enable, indeed demand, a fresh consideration both of the development of theological thought and of its shaping role in the intellectual and public sphere at large. No subject within Christian theology is more explicitly concerned with the question of how to think about history than eschatology: that is, the Christian hope for ‘the last things’. For most of Christian history, the biblical promise of Christ's Second Coming, followed by the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgement and the advent of the heavenly Jerusalem, guided people's understanding both of their own actions and of the times they lived in. That promise had both a moral and a historical dimension. Morally, it set all actions within the purview of an omniscient judgement to come: regardless of current inequalities and deceptions, at the last the all-seeing God would weigh all deeds and judge all people equitably. Historically, the promise ordered all events within a divine drama leading through anguish to triumph: suffering, humiliation and persecution were no more than the biblically foretold birth pangs of the messianic kingdom. Throughout Christian history, religious conflicts arose from disagreements about how rightly to map biblical prophecy on to the present time: whether, for example, the pope should be understood as the vicar of Christ presiding over the thousand-year messianic reign preceding the Second Coming, or as the Antichrist beguiling the faithful. But these disputes did not touch the explanatory framework itself. The pressing religious question, in other words, was not whether the drama of life and history was plotted, but only what role each was playing in it.

The Enlightenment, challenging the reliability of revelation as a source of historical and metaphysical knowledge, inevitably changed this. After all, the last things were paradigmatically revealed knowledge. It was from the dominical sayings and actions, and from biblical (and sometimes extra-biblical) prophecy, that the divine plan of salvation and judgement was known. The Enlightenment crisis of revelation was therefore, as much as anything, a crisis of eschatology. From Kant and Schleiermacher onwards, theologians no longer felt able to rely solely on biblical testimony for their assessment of moral action or their expectation of the direction and end of history.

In recent years, C.S. Lewis has been publicly criticized for using his children's fiction to propagate a particular kind of Christianity, one built on a 'rigid hierarchy of power' that negates personal responsibility. For journalist Polly Toynbee, this rigidity is embodied in the Narnian world 'of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons - even children'. For author Philip Pullman, this hierarchical structure is inimical to story as such, which for him is inherently concerned with growth towards maturity and responsibility. The test case, for Pullman, is Lewis's (supposed) final mention of Susan Pevensie: “[I]n The Last Battle, notoriously, there's the turning away of Susan from the Stable (which stands for salvation) because 'She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up'. In other words, Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that.”