Postmodern imagination

Garrett Green ( Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination ) thinks that Feuerbach serves up raw what the masters of suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – cooked and covered with sauces. The fundamental objection to religion in Feuerbach, and in his successors, is the notion that “religion is the produce of imagination; therefore religious claims are untrue.”

With postmodernism, though, we lose the “foundational confidence that we have access to a ‘reality’ against which imagination might be judged ‘illusory.’ Imagination now becomes the unavoidable means of apprehending ‘reality,’ though there is, of course, no guarantee that it will succeed.”

He suggests that Christian theology should respond to both modernity and postmodernism with an admission that religion “is a product of human imagination”: “The mark of the Christian in the twilight of modernity is therefore imaginativefaithfulness, trust in the faithfulness of the God who alone guarantees the conformity of our images to reality, and who has given himself to us in forms that may only be grasped by imagination.”