Imagination, Beauty, Glory

“Christian church has often been bad at encouraging imagination. People have been worried, Christian teachers have been worried, about letting people imagine things, in case their imagination runs riot and they start imagining the wrong things, and so we’ve squelched it and squashed it and we’ve built buildings that are inherently ugly, lest anyone think that the buildings are somehow divine. And we’ve done all kinds of things, even in our worship, to prevent the glory getting out.”

~N. T. Wright

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do…Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion…To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain…The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

~G. K. Chesterton

“Theology, therefore, must be concerned much less with showing man that Christ offers him what he wants and much more concerned with showing man that he cannot help but worship the splendor of what he sees.”

~Jeffrey Kay