Religious Experience, Imagination and Interpretation: A Case Study
Journal of Scottish Thought 2018 DOI: 10.57132/jst.28 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Case report Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 20 |
| Key points | Argues that imagination is a necessary power for religious life and experience, without which religious claims could not be communicated, while also contending that this same imaginative strength makes it a liability, since it is 'too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation.' The position is developed through a Kantian understanding of imagination and Coleridge's distinctions. |
Abstract
What is beyond all question is that in the field of religion, imagination must be accorded an enormous role, seen as an indispensable agency without which the claims and teachings of religion could never be communicated at all -far less arrestingly or memorably expressed.'Ronald Hepburn, 'Religious Imagination ' (1992) 'You Scottish theologians are always talking in parables.'R. D. Laing Hepburn on Religious Imagination and InterpretationWithout imagination, Ronald Hepburn argued, we cannot move from our ordinary concerns in their familiar, transient setting, to thoughts 'on a cosmic scale and with a cosmos-transcending being'. 1 Whether through icons, metaphors, or symbols, imagination is in this view a necessary power for the life -and not merely for the discourse -of religion and religious experience.Yet this very strength as a mode of relating to the transcendent, a mode that sees in and through surroundings -thereby gaining an elevated, symbolic significance -is also the root of what makes imagination a liability, being 'too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation'.2 Hepburn adhered to an essentially Kantian understanding of imagination, furthered by an appreciation of S. T. Coleridge's famous distinctions concerning the concept.In Immanuel Kant's philosophy, the 'necessary' imagination 3 1