The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith(Current Issues in Theology)

How can we live truthfully in a world riddled with ambiguity, contradiction, and clashing viewpoints? We make sense of the world imaginatively, resolving ambiguous and incomplete impressions into distinct forms and wholes. But the images, objects, words, and even lives of which we make sense in this way always have more or other possible meanings. Judith Wolfe argues that faith gives us courage both to shape our world creatively, and reverently to let things be more than we can imagine. Drawing on complementary materials from literature, psychology, art, and philosophy, her remarkable book demonstrates that Christian theology offers a potent way of imagining the world even as it brings us to the limits of our capacity to imagine. In revealing the significance of unseen depths – of what does not yet make sense to us, and the incomplete – Wolfe characterizes faith as trust in God that surpasses all imagination.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: imagining a world; 2. Making up a life; 3. Bearing ambiguity; 4. Looking for God; 5. Finding an ending; Conclusion.

About the Author :
Judith Wolfe is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews. She was educated in Vienna, Jerusalem, and Oxford, and has previously taught in Oxford and Berlin. She writes and edits extensively in theology and the arts. Her previous publications include Heidegger's Eschatology (OUP, 2013) Heidegger and Theology (T&T Clark, 2014), and The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought (OUP, 2017, co-edited with Joel D S Rasmussen and Johannes Zachhuber). In 2022 she delivered the historic Hulsean Lectures (upon which this book is based) in the University of Cambridge.

Review :
'Judith Wolfe's wonderfully creative meditation on the human imagination and God inspires, cajoles, disturbs, and invites the reader to a new place of response that few could evoke as she does. As philosophically learned as she is spiritually profound, Wolfe calls in all the power of the arts to support her core thesis that God attends our deepest engagement with the mystery of the world, as it ever challenges our imaginative questioning and response.' Sarah Coakley, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emerita, University of Cambridge 'No doubt it is appropriate that a book about imagination should be so imaginatively rich in form and substance as this one is, but it is astonishing nonetheless. Judith Wolfe's erudition and originality are both fully on display here – she moves with ease through the worlds of the arts, philosophy, theology, and psychology – but so also is the sheer elegance of her mind. And the vision of the theological imagination that emerges in these pages is at once profound and genuinely beautiful.' David Bentley Hart, University of Notre Dame 'This elegant and lushly illustrated book proposes a deflationary account of the imagination and does so in the meeting points of art criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and theology. It is a great deal to take on in one short book, yet Judith Wolfe rises to the challenge with impressive assurance and élan.' Kevin Hart, The Heythrop Journal