A Hermeneutic of Imagination

To read the Bible well, we need to employ our imagination. This volume is the first book-length study that takes the Bible's imaginative nature seriously. It integrates insights from disciplines like neuroscience, metaphor theory and cognition, translation theory, the affective sciences, humor studies, and the interdisciplinary study of imagination itself into the academic and theological study of the Bible.

Knut Heim and Jeffrey Oetter show that reading with imagination is a critical hermeneutic of engagement that fosters close, deep, lusciously savored, and pleasurable readings of the biblical texts. Bringing current scholarship from a variety of disciplines to bear on biblical interpretation, this book explains that Scripture employs often subtle literary techniques--including figurative language, emotions, and humor--that require imagination to recognize and interpret. Imagination helps us develop genuinely biblical ideas that get us closer to the meaning intended by the Holy Spirit and the original authors, resulting in more accurate interpretations when paired with traditional approaches. Even textual aspects that have until now remained odd, foreign, and confusing can become occasions for imaginative engagement that reveal new meaning and significance.

A Hermeneutic of Imagination makes the case that reading with imagination is crucial for unlocking the Bible's full potential because it transforms academic study of the Bible into aesthetically inspiring, intellectually stimulating, emotionally rewarding, theologically rich, and spiritually transformative adventures of the mind that contribute to problem-solving and human flourishing today.