Did I just break some Barthian rule in suggesting as much?

So by “constitution” I mean the phenomenological sense of Sinngebung, which ultimately amounts to a hermeneutic point. (I still think Caputo’s classic, _Radical Hermeneutics_, is a very helpful exploration of these issues.)

For an old (but Vandy!) importation of this framework into theology, look at Edward Farley’s _Ecclesial Reflection_.

Just to be clear: My inquiry here really is a genuine one. I really am concerned with what it means to think imagination theologically. I suppose what I am inquiring into is whether imagination has ever been philosophically conceived in a manner that is not, if not Romantic, at least proto-Idealist. What I’d like to do is to think imagination von Gott aus in a manner that is not idealist. Augustine’s notion of “illumination” seems as if it might point a way forward here, but it would also seem to be working against other elements in his thought here, too.

(Of course, we’re somewhat afield of the original post. But if Halden’s okay with it, I’m really up for learning something here.)

Thanks. And fair enough. However, I’m not sure that how I am understanding imagination here has to do with “projection,” so much as that of “production,” which is the result of an appropriation. I mean, what’s great about Augustine here is there is nothing “in ourselves” as such to “project.”

Perhaps my concern is with what you mean by the imagination as “constituting the world.” Perhaps you could say more about the nature of this act of constituting?

The church/world thing wasn’t necessarily directed at you. It was kind of an extension of my reflections into the way I see this getting worked out when “the church” as such is conceived as constituting a liturgical imaginary.

The imagination point is then a separate issue, where I think people appropriate “imagination” as if it were about subjective projection, invention, and Romantic fantasy (I think your use of the term above still has this sense of “projection” about it).

As you know, I don’t agree with you in your reading here–the distinction between “church” and “world” is one that you’ve invoked here, not me. I also don’t think interiority is the worst thing in the world. But for the most part, my thinking about “imagination” here has been largely shaped by contemporary cognitive science and social psychology’s discussion of the “new unconscious.” No doubt that sounds like bad interiority or something to you all. Alas. But I’m not doing apologetics.

I think Schmemann is extremely helpful here, for a number of reasons. But I’ll state two. First, the point that he makes about liturgy in the chapter that you are referring to and the whole of the book (I think that quote is from For the Life of the World, right?) is that the liturgy, the work, here spoken of by which this people becomes something corporately that they are not in-themselves is specifically the work of Christ. The true liturgy is that which we are sacramentally transformed into and made to participate in, as something which we “are not” in ourselves: the singular work of Jesus Christ. Secondly, the work of Christ that of the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God. And so Schmemann’s understanding of liturgy is irreducibly bound up with mission (as is indicated by the key placement of the chapter on mission between the chapters on eucharist and baptism). The liturgy that is Christ makes of the church’s leitourgia a sacrament of Christ only as a sacrament of the world’s transformation and movement into the Kingdom. And so the church only happens as doubly a sign of that which it “is not” in-itself, as such: the world as being confronted and transformed by Christ and the Kingdom that comes by way of that transformation.

I am, of course, reading Schmemann in a very particular way. But reading Schmemann has continually reinforced for me why it is so important that we understand liturgy to be an event of and within the concrete historicity of Jesus of Nazareth — the apocalyptic historicity of his cross and resurrection. If it is not this, that is, if liturgy is not about the concrete “ordering” of the Christian community to the living Christ, and rather becomes about the ordering — or “production” — instead of a discrete earthly-historical and ecclesiastical polity, then liturgy cannot but in the end, it seems to me, turn out to be a matter of sacramental instrumentality and functionality, of historical perdurance and survival. But this would be falsely to historicize Jesus in diachronic relation to the church (as, say, its “founder”), rather than to speak of church and liturgy as the historical event of our participation in the kenotic historicity of Jesus himself. Barth makes something like this point about liturgy in IV/2, and then — surprisingly, to some — draws the conclusion that this is the only way by which properly to conceive of the church as “an order of fellowship derived from the Lord’s Supper” [708].

I’m also curious, Nate, about the conceptualization of liturgy you allude to. Is what you’re summoning up opposed to the ‘leitourgia’ that Alexander Schmemann describes as “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals…”? Is the notion that it gives identity, but only because it does so via an encounter with “the world”? Am interested in the unpacking of this…

As for those who wallow in a narcissistic liturgical “high church” sort of thing in order to differentiate themselves and retreat from a conservative upbringing, it’s not really been my experience either. I’m not surprised to hear about it, though it is disappointing. I can certainly identify with moving from one experience to another–one more focused on liturgical disciplines, but I seldom see it attempted so recklessly as described above. I’ve certainly not experienced anyone hitting up some Eucharist because it’s supposed to solve everything. I do, however, value Cavanaugh’s take in Torture & Eucharist and Theopolitical. Or at least it’s convincing to know that it’s taken concrete political forms in such places as El Salvador. At least gives me hope that it may be practiced so well.

I would also put forth one thing that maybe hasn’t been said in the way I want to say it. I agree entirely that the liturgical formation of the imagination ought to result in a true liturgy, a concrete communal ‘work’. However, I don’t think this means we ought not engage in those activities from which a straight line cannot be drawn to “work” that is “liturgical” or Kingdom-oriented. Specifically, I’m thinking of such things as the nurturing of a poetic imagination (I’m all for–and am–exploring the poetic/metaphorical character of the Eucharist, holy mysteries, what have you, etc.). To that end, I am a reader of poetry. I would not argue that a direct line can be drawn from the poetry I read to the work I may do that affects the life of the Kingdom…but it occurs in at least a tangential way, which is still noteworthy, and worth my time. And heck, I just love it and can’t get enough of it. And though it’s my personal bias, I think poetry in particular has potential to be of great service in cultivating an imagination that does not wallow in its own romantic escapes, but which fosters concrete compassion, and a mind capable of imagining, and calling forth, a “language adequate to our experience” as Jay Parini says. Or, I might add, a language and an imagination adequate to make manifest right action and politics.

Many of them quickly ditch anything smacking of organized church, or they go on the Canterbury trail, leaving various strands of evangelical/non-denom/charistmatic churches. They like that the worship style is more highbrow, but that its more formal nature demands little of them in terms of discipleship: it’s just a nice aesthetic experience. There are two particularly “hip” Anglican churches in my city littered with people who used to worship with me at the Vineyard.

And I should have left out the N.America line above, because my observations are Winnipeg generally and Winnipeg Centre Vineyard particularly. Maybe these observations extend out more generally, but I’m losing my way if I make that my goal.

Can you say more about what you understand to be the relationship between “imagination” and “contemplation”? It is my understanding that “imagination” for the medievals played a kind of mediatory role between interior reasoning and contemplation of the divine. This had to do with the association of imagination with memory. So, imagination had to do with the transition from our interior thought world to the external operation of the will. Thus, as I understand it, imagination has to do with the construction of an imaginary from out of the storehouses of memory, which we then place ourselves into via the active movement of the will. In this way, the imagination is indeed productive of a world which we then inhabit.

Now, of course, this understanding of imagination is entirely dependent upon the scaffolding of Platonic recollection and of an analogical account of being. My problem with this is that it seems as if imagination as such only functions within a context in which it is already given in advance what we shall come to “contemplate” or to “see.” Of course, all of this needs unpacking, but I do find it curious that those who emphasize the notion of something like a liturgical imagination often speak of liturgy in terms of a kind of “production” of Christian “identity,” etc. And the big worry of mine here is that this liturgical imaginary makes of the church a kind of interior “space” wherein our identity is formed prior to our encounter with, say, “the world.” Along these lines, I have found Rom Coles’ critique of the “liturgical imaginary” as he finds it displayed throughout the pages of The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics in his essay “Gentled into Being” in The Radical Ordinary very helpful. For me, all of this turns on Coles’ almost laconic remark that the liturgical imaginary as such “risks getting Jesus wrong.” But how that is so must remain, of course, for another day.