What is the Sacramental Imagination?
What is sacramental imagination?
From Andrew Greeley:
“Religion… is imagination before it’s anything else. The Catholic imagination is different from the Protestant imagination. You know that: Flannery O’Connor is not John Updike.”
“The central symbol (of religion) is God. One’s “picture” of God is in fact a metaphorical narrative of God’s relationship with the world and the self as part of the world… The Catholic “classics” assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world, and who discloses (Himself) only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him crucified). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God.”
More at: http://www.alyosha.com/si/index.html
And here’s from another article at:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/august-5-2009/the-things-of-this-world/3846/
“Theologically, Christianity provides a language—and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks—for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.”
“Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: “The dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation…and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination…emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God…the mystery of the incarnation.”
