By Andrew D. Thrasher

When I was in undergraduate at George Mason University in 2011, I took a brand-new course in a discipline I came to pursue for more than another decade. The course was called “Religion, Fantasy, and the Imagination” and I remember by the end of that semester, I dreamed I would teach a course like it down the line. This came true in 2022, when I taught the course twice at my alma mater, and I treasure the memories of it. Alongside that dream, I also thought of writing a book on the intersection of fantasy and religion as early as 2011, considering that in my prime years as a teenager, I devoted myself to reading the fantasy of David and Leigh Eddings, Terry Brooks, Tad Williams, and most importantly, Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. I am pleased to announce that both dreams have come to fruition after twelve years of dreaming.

Co-edited with Austin Freeman (with Fotini Toso), we are pleased to announce the publication of our collected essays on the intersection of fantasy literature and games with theology, philosophy, and religious studies: Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination! This volume not only features essays by leading theologians such as Oliver Crisp, Nicholas Adams, and Alison Milbank, but also features several younger scholars who are just as passionate as I am about theological, philosophical, and religious readings of fantasy and playing table-top games.

The volume is split up into three main sections after an evocation to set the mood of the volume, and each section starts with a more methodological or theological reflection on the imagination. After an apophatic invocation of the “Old Magic,” the three main sections cover the primary figures of classical Christian fantasy—addressing Lewis’ “Imaginative Apologetics” and Tolkien’s indebtedness to classical and medieval philosophy after an rich and robust analysis of how the imagination can be sinful, as well as the Post-Christian turn in fantasy after about 1960 through today—featuring theological and philosophical essays that reflect a movement beyond Christianity and a focus on non-Nicene Christian fantasy in the literature of Rabbi Shagar, Ursula le Guin, Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan and David Eddings, and Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card; and the book closes with two essays that reflect a philosophical and religious set of reflections on fantasy at play in Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering. Each essay is packed with astute theological, philosophical, and religious reflection and analyses of what it means to “subcreate” (to use Tolkien’s word) fantastic worlds imbued with religious, philosophical, and theological reflection.

These reflections in turn offer insightful analysis of how the imagination can theologically rescript and resource religion and theology in the creation of alternate worlds that can (re-)enchant not only the imagination, but lend credibility to religion in a world that is increasingly skeptical or disillusioned with religion. But where does this volume fit within broader literature and how does it compare? Moreover, how does it fit within my own concerns for how popular culture, particularly fantasy, rescripts, resources, and reenchants the imagination? There are three sets of discourses that come to mind that our volume demonstrates analogies with—the “baptized imagination,” “invented” or “hyperreal religion”, and the three “posts” of: post-Christian, postsecular, and postmodern. I will define each of these and how our volume comes into dialogue with each over the course of my next three blog posts.

Philosophy, Theology, and the Baptized Imagination

C.S. Lewis was famous for stating that the fantasy writings of George MacDonald (and to a lesser extent G.K. Chesterton) baptized his imagination. But what does that mean? Working with a three-layered medieval view of the human person where at the center of the human person is the will, then surrounded by the intellect, and that surrounded by the imagination, this implies that for conversion to happen the first stage of conversion is that the imagination is converted before one is intellectually convinced and then finally willfully surrenders to God. This process of conversion encompasses the whole human person as the medieval theologians imagined it. While Lewis did not willfully surrender until about 1933, his intellect was largely convinced as early as 1931—whereas his imagination was baptized when he was quite young.

So, what does it mean for the imagination to be baptized? It means that the imagination becomes enchanted, taken ahold of, as fascinated by a certain way in which we can theologically imagine the world. A baptized imagination is a particular way of imagining the world through a particular myth (a symbolic story of sacred significance) and mythos (an assumed, unquestioned, or preconceived way in which we live in the world). This enchanted imagination is one wherein religious myths and mythos come to implicitly shape how we imagine the world. This can be described in terms of an “imaginary” which can be social, cultural, religious, political, mythological, or even theological. To have an enchanted imagination means in some sense that how we imagine the world is shaped by certain theological, religious, and/or mythological ways of imagining the world.

For Lewis, this baptized imagination did not necessarily entail concrete theological ideas of doctrines. Rather when the imagination is baptized, there are implicit messages found within the myths (or fantasy) consumed and its mythos is implicitly assumed by what is consumed. The implicit theological and religious sensibilities of what we consume have a certain power to shape how we imagine the world—but this could be in ways that may not actually lead to traditional Christian ideas (and this is apparent in MacDonald’s theologically unorthodox advocation for universalism that Lewis seemingly adopts in The Great Divorce).

What our volume demonstrates, most notably, is that fantasy literature and games have the ability to baptize our imaginations—to enchant our theological imagination in ways that are not limited to the Christian imagination. The volume begins with two chapters that articulate the power of the Christian theological tradition and its power to shape the theological imagination. Nicholas Adams’ short chapter evokes the mystery of God as a powerful apophatic reality that is ultimately beyond our grasp—and yet has the power to enchant the imagination in ways that can be seen throughout the fantastic imagination. Austin Freeman’s dogmatic approach to the theological imagination presents a compelling account of how to theologically think about the fantastic imagination in ways that are distinctly Christian. Freeman’s clarity over a theological imagination marked by shalom or sin is helpful for those who want to pursue how to write fantasy in ways that evoke peace, wholeness, and flourishing over dynamics that lead to destruction, brokenness, and sin. Freeman offers an important theological framework to shape what it means to write Christian fantasy—and this is not limited to mere theological doctrines.

But we also find the explosion of possible ways in which the imagination may be baptized. Josh Herring, U-Wen Low, and myself each illustrate different ways in which the imagination may be baptized into different religious traditions or sensibilities. U-Wen Low’s chapter on Terry Pratchett may baptize us into an agnostic imagination. Josh Herring’s chapter illustrates how the fantasy of Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card may baptize how we imagine what it means to be human and God along the lines of the Mormon tradition. My own chapter articulates how the fantasy of David Eddings and Robert Jordan may baptize the theological imagination along pluralistic, Asian, and Zoroastrian lines.

Furthermore, Oliver Crisp’s chapter on Ursula le Guin articulates the resources that baptized her own imagination in the creation of Earthsea. Moreover, Jacob Torbeck’s analysis of Magic: the Gathering’s critique of traditional Christianity and it’s imaginative rescriptions of religion displays an attunement that fantasy table-top games do not adhere to orthodoxy, but rather shed light on the problems and promises of religion in ways that may both enchant and disenchant the imagination. Clearly the baptized imagination is not strictly Christian, much less unanimous on what type of Christian or even whether it is bound to the lines of theological orthodoxy advocated by Nicene Christianity.

But the power of fantasy is its ability to shape the imagination in ways that reflect theological, religious, and philosophical frameworks for doing fantasy. Throughout the volume, several chapters demonstrate this, especially those by Austin M. Freeman, Giovanni Carmine Costabile, Levi Morrow, and to a lesser extent Scott Donahue-Martens. While Freeman presents a Christian theological framework for understanding the imagination, Morrow articulates how a Jewish postmodern Rabbi’s theology is always fantasy—that is, theology is always imagined.

On the other side, Costabile and Donahue-Martens address two different philosophical traditions and approaches to fantasy literature and games. Costabile offers an analysis of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of “fantasy” is intimately linked to the philosophical and scholastic theological tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. Costabile asks the question, “What Hath Tolkien to do with the philosophers?” and argues how Tolkien’s views of “fantasy” are resourced within Western philosophical and theological tradition.

In another instance of the intersection between fantasy and philosophy, Scott Donahue-Martens utilizes Paul Riceour’s critical hermeneutics to help us understand how the practice of imagining narratives in Dungeons and Dragons may potentially reflect religious sensibilities and allow us to explore what we believe through imaginative role-playing. The question that this instigates is whether fantasy literature and fantasy at play have the ability to create religions. It is to this that we turn in my next post with an analysis of Invented or hyperreal religion.

Part 2 Forthcoming…

Andrew D. Thrasher teaches religious studies at George Mason University and in the Virginia Community College System.