Imagining Theology: Encounters with God in Scripture, Interpretation, and Aesthetics

The imagination is where the Creator chooses to meet his creatures, says renowned theologian Garrett Green. The Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit set the imagination free for genuine and creative knowledge of God, the world, others, and the self. Green explains that theology is best understood as human imagination faithfully conformed to the Bible as the paradigmatic key to the Christian gospel. He unpacks the implications of the imagination for a variety of theological issues, such as interpretation, aesthetics, eschatology, and the relationship between church and culture.

Garrett Green (PhD, Yale University) is professor emeritus at Connecticut College, where he taught for four decades. He is the author of several books, including Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination and Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination, and he is the translator of Karl Barth on Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion. He gave the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in 1998 while he was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Green has held research positions in Germany as a Fulbright and Humboldt scholar. He also served two terms as chair of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion and is active in the Society for the Study of Theology (UK), the Duodecim Theological Society, the New Haven Theological Discussion Group, and the Karl Barth Society of North America.