
Member Reviews

To read a nicely formatted version of this review, visit https://benmakuh.com/2025/07/a-hermeneutic-of-imagination/
One of the most transformative classes I took in seminary was my Old Testament survey course with Dr. Knut Heim. He began the course by describing the way many of us had learned to read and receive the Bible, namely, as a static, timeless text that has one meaning to be understood in the same way by all people in all places. The Spirit might lead you or I to *apply* Scripture to our lives in creative ways, but the reading of the text itself was no place for the imagination. There are therefore rules—hermeneutics—for how and how not to read the Bible. These rules govern what counts as a legitimate or illegitimate interpretation of the text. This forces us to reckon with the author's original intent rather than just with what the text appears to say to you or me.
In contrast to all of this, Heim proposed that there actually *should be* a place for imaginative readings of the text. My theological hackles immediately rose, because it sounded like he was saying that we should treat Scripture like a Rorschach inkblot where we see whatever we want to see. As I continued to listen to his lectures, though, I came to realize that's not at all what he meant. Instead, his point was rather that we already *do* employ our imaginations in reading the Bible even though we think we don't:
- When we read a Bible story about Jesus being born in a manger, we mentally place him in the hay in a wood slat barn surrounded by snow and twinkly lights
- We picture the Tower of Babel in our brains as a kind of old school Tower of Pisa
- Our brains jump back to our children's Bibles when we picture the walls of Jericho
- We read Paul's writings and subconsciously deduce that he must've been a pretty intense, serious guy who disliked women
In all of this, we are *imaginatively filling in gaps* in ways that may or may not be faithful to reality. Heim insists that we *notice* that we're doing this, and what's more, that we would start to apply our imaginations with intention and responsibility.
## *A Hermeneutic of Imagination*
This summer Heim is now packaging these ideas up into a new book from Baker entitled *A Hermeneutic of Imagination: Unlocking Scripture's Full Potential* written with Jeffrey Oetter. No longer are his ideas available only to Denver Seminary students and readers of academic articles.
So does a hermeneutic of imagination just make some biblical narratives "pop" more vividly, or is there more to it? Heim and Oetter propose that an intentional engagement of the imagination in the text helps us to read the text more faithfully, it reinvigorates the Old Testament as a kind of "new" New Testament, and it enables us to connect the world of the text to the world of the present with fresher force.
### It helps us read the text more faithfully
Over my many years of listening to people read the Bible, either aloud at church, in a Bible Study, or via a recorded narration, one observation has consistently struck me. No matter the emotional content of the text at hand, people almost always read it in what I call a "holy monotone." It's slow, clear, and devoid of any variation in pitch, pace, or tone. Maybe the reader is reading, "I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me" (Amos 5:21, NIV), but it's not *read aloud* in a way that conveys hatred or disgust. Or perhaps the reader is reading about Balaam beating his ass and getting rebuked for it (Num. 22:28-30), the Judge Ehud stabbing the King of Moab in the belly so that his poop comes out (Jdg. 3:12-25), Elijah's sarcastic mockery of Baal's prophets (1 Kgs. 18:27), or Jesus's absurd word picture of having a literal plank of wood in your eye and not noticing (Mt. 7:3). But you'd never know that any of these passages are funny, because there's only ever *gravitas.* The Bible has more puns than a dad trying to make his kids groan, but we flatten most of them out in the translation process.
If the Bible were made into an actually faithful movie adaptation, it would easily be slapped with an NC-17 rating. It's chock full of scenes that are more violent than *300,* other scenes that are steamier than *The Notebook,* and it contains explicit language that Christians would never repeat. This is a surprising fact to many, even to those who have read the Bible cover to cover. Why? Because we think of all of those things as worldly and having no place in the Bible. As a result of such forced piety, our readings of the text are (ironically) unfaithful to what it's actually trying to say.
If the worst that occurred because of this was that we simply missed out on the joke, it would be one thing. But what's far worse is when our inability to catch the humor/sarcasm/etc. leads to horrifying readings that push people away from the faith altogether. The example that Heim and Oetter give of this phenomenon is Micah 6:7, here quoted in the NIV:
> Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
> with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
> Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
> the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
Here it appears that the book of Micah is condoning child sacrifice as a means of appeasing a wrathful God. Consequently, some have (understandably) concluded, "That is simply not a God I could follow," and thus leave their faith behind. What grievous evil we do, and all because of our belief that this must be read with straight, serious literalism!
But if we were to approach that same text with an alive imagination, it would sound *very* differently. For starters, we begin to notice the utter ridiculousness of the question: Having *one* ram to sacrifice to the Lord is costly… having *thousands* of rams to sacrifice means you'd have to be the wealthiest king in all the land! And the olive oil—the fruit of your trees that you then worked hard to harvest, treat, and press—do you really have a *river* of it? Do you have *ten thousand rivers* of olive oil? Once you start to engage your imagination in the text, you bark a laugh at the sheer absurdity of it. That is, in fact, the point, and it leads you to receive the second half of the verse in a very different way.
Rather than advocating for child sacrifice to cleanse oneself of sin, Heim's and Oetter's argument is… something you'll have to buy their book to discover! Instead of spoiling it here in this review, suffice it to say that they show that by approaching the text with an open imagination, it's possible to discover readings that are not only theologically plausible but that also don't require one to make God into a moral monster. Reading with imagination, far from distorting the text like we might fear, actually allows us to see what has been there all along in a brand new light.
### It reinvigorates the Old Testament as a meaningful source for faith for Christians
Christians, for the most part, depend upon the New Testament as the trustworthy guide for life and faith, and the Old Testament is only relevant as a setup or appetizer for the main course. Sure, it may get trotted out when a certain law happens to feel convenient for an argument ("Don't get a tattoo! The Bible forbids it!"), but overall it's the New Testament—and particularly Paul's letters—that matter most. Heim's assertion is that if we come back to the Old Testament *with imagination,* it can actually become a kind of *new* New Testament, in that all of a sudden there is this vast fount of faith, ethics, and wisdom that is relevant to the Christian life.
Part of the reason the Old Testament feels mostly irrelevant to Christians is because, well, it feels *old.* As in *outdated and outmoded.* We feel like the OT was all about haranguing people into following the Law to stay on God's good side, whereas the New Testament is all about forgiveness and love for those who believe in Jesus. Yet as Heim points out, the Old Testament (he calls it the *First* Testament to eliminate the stigma) represents millennia of reflection by God's people on how life could be lived faithfully in the shadow of slavery, in the shadow of terrible rulers, and in the dilemma of being exiled from one's homeland. Since we don't live as slaves in Egypt, or under a literal monarchy, or carried off in exile by a foreign empire, and since Christ has come to fulfill all that stuff anyway, we can't imagine how any of that matters to us.
We can't *imagine* how any of that matters to us.
Or maybe we can, if only we had the permission to imagine.
No, we are not slaves in Egypt, but the memory of that event remained as a core identity marker for the people of God long after they had been set free. We might not be under a literal monarch, but we know what it means to be under a bad authority figure. For those Christians with alive imaginations who are keen to learn about how to live a life of faithfulness in the here and now, the First Testament begins to look like an incredible resource all of a sudden—a new New Testament—not because it shows us how to get right with God on an existential level, but because it contains great wisdom for how to walk in God's ways here and now.
### It helps us connect the text to our modern world more easily
Bridging the gap between the world of the Bible and our modern world has never been easy, but it seems like it keeps getting harder and harder. Over the past decade or two, the church has been increasingly split down the middle over matters of social justice. Central to the debate is, "Should Christians care about social justice at all, or is it a distraction from preaching the gospel?" Put another way, the question is what it means to be faithful to the calling to which we have been called.
Opponents of social justice today look at Paul and see in him someone who was largely ambivalent towards the oppressive Roman empire, the institution of slavery, and the social framework of patriarchy, all because his primary aim in life was to preach a message of spiritual reconciliation between us and God. For them, faithfulness means avoiding the temptation to get sucked into temporal distractions from eternal realities. Proponents of social justice point at the many places in Scripture that urge us to care for "the stranger within the gates" or to leave some fruit on the trees as food for those who have nothing, as well as at the ways in which Jesus transgressed many social lines to welcome in the marginalized and hated of society. For them, faithfulness means avoiding the temptation to an easy, spiritual-only, "I'll fly away after I die" gospel.
Heim and Oetter dedicate chapter 8 to this challenging dilemma, aiming to hold them both together. Yes, there is a need to preach about sin and salvation and reconciliation with God, but we cannot ever let the "not yet"-ness of the gospel obliterate the "now"-ness of the gospel. God *requires* us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God… *now* (Micah 6:8). Much of the New Testament was oriented around Paul's letters and thus his priority of Gentile inclusion, so sometimes we think that's all that matters. But if the First Testament is just as important a source of faith for Christians, then we actually have a deep well to draw on to imagine faithful ways of pursuing a just social order in our world today. It doesn't mean that we as Christians have to approach "social justice" in precisely the same way as non-Christians do, but neither is it something that we can write off as a modern Marxist invention. We as Christians have the responsibility to imagine better ways of incarnating the love and justice of God in our world… and then actually doing it.
## Criticism
The most obvious criticism of instructing people to read the Bible imaginatively is that… *they will*. It's all well and good when fresh insights are unlocked with the power of imagination, but what happens when someone interprets a passage imaginatively in a way that isn't good? And who gets to define "good" here? Heim's proposal takes aim at the ways in which hermeneutics can be a rigid, lifeless discipline of applying a set of rules to text in a relatively mechanical way that leaves little to nothing to the imagination. To take what is most objective about the discipline and make it much more subjective is to create more space for terrible readings.
A case in point is The Department of Homeland Security's [recent promotional video](https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1942362217795510273) that took Isaiah's famous line, "Here am I, send me," and made it about the work of joining ICE to hunt down immigrants. This is an undeniably *imaginative* direction to take the text.
At about the same time, I myself went to a "No Kings" protest with a sign that read, "Woe to those who make unjust laws," which is from Isaiah 10:1. In both of these cases, there's a reading of an Isaiah text as well as the belief that it is somehow relevant to today in some way. There are a few responses folks might have here:
1. The Bible and our current political situation should not be mixed. Let Isaiah's words be about Isaiah's time, and leave the politics to the realm of the secular.
2. It's okay to build imaginative bridges from the text to modern-day life, as long as they are about personal piety/holiness and not about current events.
3. One of the two approaches, either DHS or mine, is acceptable and the other is not on ethical grounds: one is fighting for what is good and the other is fighting *against* what is good.
Is this a defeater for the entire hermeneutic of imagination?
Heim would say a few things in response, I think: first, that these two approaches are examples of imaginatively *using* Scripture for specific ends, but it is not a good example of imaginatively trying to *understand* Scripture. Second, he'd say that a hermeneutic of imagination, like everything else, ultimately must roll up into the command to love God and neighbor, and using Scripture creatively to hate your neighbor is to disobey God. Third, to assess the validity of any given imaginative reading of Scripture, we must evaluate it based not upon whether we *like* or *dislike* it, but upon whether it coheres with the way the church has historically read the text. In chapter 7, he says this: "Earlier [historical] readings, by way of comparison, can help us to evaluate the quality of our own imaginative interpretations and vice versa, as a reception history of the book of Jonah illustrates."
This assumes that the imaginative reader of the Bible is approaching it in a responsible, good faith, historically informed way, and I'm not sure whether that's a very safe assumption to make. The Bible is *always* going to be a prize text that can provide apparent divine backing to a cause with enough creativity. This has been true throughout history. Consider: is leveraging Scripture to back the violence of the Crusades all that different from what DHS is doing? That's why, though I agree that it's good to compare our readings against historical precedents, I don't think it's bulletproof.
Lest you say, "Yeah, but what DHS and Ben are doing with the texts from Isaiah are more in line with application rather than interpretation," let's consider another example. Back in the 1970s, Hal Lindsey wrote his massively popular book, *The Late, Great Planet Earth,* with the stated aim of understanding biblical prophecies and making them accessible to a wide audience. I don't think Lindsey would've said that his readings were imaginative—he most likely viewed what he was doing as just "reading the plain meaning of the text" or something to that effect. Yet it remains that his readings *were* undeniably imaginative. He saw in Ezekiel's "Gog" a picture of the USSR. He saw the 1948 establishment of modern Israel as a direct fulfillment of prophecies about Israelites being gathered back to their homeland. He saw Revelation's "ten horns" and "ten kings" as pointing toward the formation of the European Union. We might see those as *applications* of the text, but Lindsey probably would've disagreed—for him, these things were the direct fulfillment of the prophecies. It's what the text was actually trying to say for those who had eyes to see it.
How do you argue against that? Do you just say, "No"? The reality is that there's not much you *can* say against such interpretations of the text, because it's a fundamentally unfalsifiable approach. It's like the many conspiracy theories out there that are amazingly imaginative and yet similarly unfalsifiable—[the earth is flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_beliefs), [the government controls the weather using airplane contrails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory), [our government is run by a ring of pedophiles in the basement of a pizza shop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory).[^1] It's not possible to argue with a conspiracy theorist, because any evidence you present to the contrary is evidence that you're part of the problem. If we are to give license to exercising imagination in our reading of Scripture, we need to be careful that we're not greenlighting Hal Lindsey 2.0.
## Conclusion
Having already considered Heim's hermeneutic for years before reading this monograph, I have concluded the following about his proposal and its downsides:
1. I doubt that *rejecting* his hermeneutic is going to do much to prevent maliciously imaginative readings of Scripture. Bad actors are always going to do that, no matter what.
2. Would embracing his hermeneutic worsen it, though? Would more people feel free to come to novel, ahistorical, unorthodox conclusions about Scriptural texts? Maybe, especially if it gets popularized and socialized into lay contexts where well-meaning but untrained folks are unlikely to stay within the guardrails.
Even with that said, though, I have ultimately embraced the hermeneutic ever since I sat in Dr. Heim's lectures. It's a powerful way of reading, teaching, and making the text come alive. In my estimation, even hermeneutical approaches like historical-cultural criticism are, at their root, imaginative. We gather archaeological and textual data about the ancient world, and from that we deduce what life was probably like and thus how we probably should read the text in light of it. When we say "probably" there, we are exercising our imagination! We don't *know* what first-century Ephesus was like or the exact contours of what the Cult of Artemis was like or what it did, but we have a few data points here and there, and we can't help but try to connect the dots.
The power of the *Hermeneutic of Imagination* is precisely in that it makes me aware that I am doing it. If I am aware, I am at least slightly more likely to engage in it responsibly. I am less likely to read the text in a woodenly literalistic way and more likely to read it according to the ultimate end of love of God and neighbor. Knowing my proclivity to get the text to say what I want it to say makes me more keen to test my readings against history and against the Spirit-led consciences of trusted friends. Ultimately, it is permission to let the Word of God be fully alive.
*DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.*
[^1]: It might seem like these are easily falsifiable, but just go ahead and try presenting your evidence to someone who believes in one of them and see what happens.

A Hermeneutic of Imagination: Unlocking Scripture's Full Potential
Knut M. Heim, Jeffrey R. Oetter (contributor)
The Bible has a message for everyone there are those than take it at face value and there are those who believe there are deeper messages that can be found when doing a through study. In this book we look at scripture through imagination. I believe we need to look at scriptures through the places, time and culture. But I also agree that there are deep messages that come to light when we dig deeper using our imagination.
Authors Knut M. Heim and Jeffray R. Oetter are experts in biblical poetry. “The meaning of HERMENEUTIC is the study of the methodological principles of interpretation (as of the Bible). It is the study of interpretation”. The authors discuss the many techniques used in scripture among them are figurative language, emotions, and humor. By using our imagination, we can form biblical ideas that draw us toward the messages that show us what the scripture was intended to tell us.
I enjoy bible study. I like digging deep and getting the intended message from the scripture. This book is invaluable to bible study.
Thank you NetGalley