The Christian Imagination Quotes

“literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the “actual world” a “new dimension of depth” (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their “stained glass” associations and make them appear in their “real potency” (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“As Francis Schaeffer reminded us, “The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to “make Christian.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois error. It cannot be assumed that if a Christian painter becomes “more Christian” he will necessarily become more and more like Rembrandt. This would be like saying that if the preacher really makes it next Sunday morning, he will preach to us in Chaucerian English. Then we’ll really listen!”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“Western culture generally, as well as the Christian subculture specifically, has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“Part of what Milton valued in a good book then was contact with the mind of an author rendered otherwise inaccessible by distance or time. Such contact is precisely what much modern and postmodern criticism insists we cannot have. Perhaps a secular world view inevitably leads to a universe in which a text is merely a playing field for the reader’s own intellectual athleticism. Perhaps only a Christian view (such as Milton’s) of the imago descending from God to author to text can preserve the writing of literature as an act of communication.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“The end of learning, he said, is to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” by acquiring “true virtue” (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney’s point that the end of learning is virtuous action.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“The task is rather to assess whether and to what degree works are Christian in their viewpoint. Christian enthusiasts for literature too often seek to baptize every work of literature that they love.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“To enjoy in tragedy that which one would not willingly suffer in reality is “miserable madness” (miserabilis insania).”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing

“In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers provided a detailed analysis of that creative process in The Mind of the Maker. She developed the relevance of the imago Dei for understanding artistic creation in explicitly trinitarian terms. In every act of creation there is a controlling idea (the Father), the energy which incarnates that idea through craftsmanship in some medium (the Son), and the power to create a response in the reader (the Spirit). These three, while separate in identity, are yet one act of creation. So the ancient credal statements about the Trinity are factual claims about the mind of the maker created in his image. Sayers delves into the numerous literary examples, in what is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written both of the nature of literature and of the imago Dei. While some readers may feel she has a tendency to take a good idea too far, The Mind of the Maker remains an indispensable classic of Christian poetics.”
― Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing