Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven. Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment in God’s future. What role will imagination play in this fulfillment?

Have you heard of the “Imagination Age”? I hadn’t myself until recently, but I have a feeling we will all be hearing a lot more about it. The term “Imagination Age” is being used by some particularly in the field of technology to denote a hypothetical era after the Industrial Age and the Information (or Digital) Age. According to the theorists, each of these epochs of modern history brought forth a new kind of production and a new knowledge base. The Industrial Revolution emphasized factory and machine production, while the digital revolution prioritized the collection of data or information. With the prospect of automation handling much of the data collection and more routine tasks of life, we are now (according to the theory) entering in a new age in which Imagination is to the fore. The mere manipulation of data is no longer the determining factor of life; rather, the important thing is what we do to creatively shape that information and knowledge. Hence the importance of things like storytelling, art, and the force of imagination generally, including with the aid of the same technology.

Second, it is claimed that by relegating digital technology to the background (though how this would occur is beyond my knowledge), we can reestablish human connection and the kind of life we had before technology came to dominance. As one tech writer puts it, “Technology will be invisible and always present, allowing us to go back to a simpler world where we can be people again.”

What is being expressed here, it seems to me, is the paradoxical idea that technology itself can be used to make technology scarce and less prominent in our lives. Technology can perhaps mitigate itself and thus become a humble servant of humanity instead of dominating over it. Technology can be an instrument for true creativity instead of a source of distraction and busyness. A tool, not an idol.

Here is the paradox: we are used to the idea that an overbearing technology tends to destroy imagination, but here we are being invited to ponder whether technology, properly used, can facilitate imagination. I suppose it all depends whether technology can be subordinated to the human will and imagination.

The concept of the Imagination Age has, as far as I know, mainly been used in the spheres of technology and economics; I would like now to extend it into the realms of theology (especially eschatology) and culture. Here is my reaction: I think that an Age of Imagination could be taking shape, but I see it in a more eschatological and spiritual light than perhaps the tech people do. Following current trends in society has never been my thing, and I have always been detached from contemporary life. The model of the Imagination Age appeals to me because it harmonizes with my faith, my strong belief in eschatology, my emphasis on solitude, and my conservative cultural path—particularly where it concerns building an appreciation for the past.

Another reason I am endeavoring to connect the Imagination Age with theology is that the idea overlaps significantly with the idea of the “Fourth Industrial Age” evoked by the new pope, Leo XIV, in his speeches about artificial intelligence. Specifically, the pope has warned of potential harm to human well-being in the new revolution of automation—an environment in which the very definition of what it means to be human is put in question.

Perhaps the cure lies in reactivating the power of the imagination, the unique part of us that machines can never imitate. This is in part because, in the midst of what Gleaves Whitney has called “the breakdown of any shared cultural vision,” we are being forced to define our beliefs and identity ever more sharply, thrown back on our own resources and our faith in God to seek and express truth. In such an environment, culture and creative thinking become all-important. It is no longer possible to ground our beliefs in purely tribal or formal criteria (e.g., I am a Catholic because I am Italian, because my parents and grandparents were Catholics, etc.).

And this new emphasis on creativity and imagination relates to another theme, namely the central place of narrative. Because we no longer have the same cultural supports, we need to articulate basic truths in a compelling form. And that involves calling forth the imaginative force of narrative, of storytelling. That can express itself in art, surely, but also in personal witness to the faith and in daily spiritual practice. As it happens, our faith is itself a narrative, a true story of fall and redemption, which needs to be articulated and expressed ceaselessly in new forms.

Keeping an authentic Christian eschatological angle on these developments will save us from a mindless techno-utopianism while allowing us to welcome any positive developments that do happen in the world of technology as genuine gifts of God and possibly advance notices of the advent of his kingdom.

In this respect, it seems to me that an Imagination Age has the potential to reestablish a proper relationship between humanity and the digital, using the latter creatively to explore and propound truth in all its forms. One can imagine, for example, the Gospel being propounded in creative and artistic ways. This corresponds in a significant way with reality as we experience it; all around the world people are using digital platforms to produce all sorts of creative “content.” Besides the Gospel, there are countless opportunities to interpret and recollect the past creatively, to bring it alive in the present. I find this exciting, the prospect of exercising the imagination artistically and intellectually upon the recollection of the riches of the past.

In this respect, the Imagination Age as I envision it will not be characterized, as in progressive ideology, by a spirit of triumphalist victory over the past, but by a spirit that gathers up and includes all of the best of the past as a prelude to eternity. All imaginative thinkers of the past will be enlisted in a new intellectual and creative synthesis. Our job, whether we be creative artists or laborers in other fields, is to act as heralds of God’s future making a synthesis of the past and the present.

Perhaps it would be of use to pause and review what we believe as Christians about eschatology. The whole field is full of difficulties, quite mysterious, and little understood by the average believer on the street. Here are the bare outlines, to the best of my understanding. As the Kingdom of God grows on earth there is a concomitant growth of the spirit of antichrist; the biblical parable of the wheat and the tares applies here. The two opposing forces reach an ultimate clash (which may have already happened, is happening now, or may happen in the future), after which Christ will return and impose a purifying judgment on the world and bring his kingdom to full realization. Now endowed with glorified resurrected bodies and no longer subject to the tendency to sin, the faithful will live with God and Christ in a renewed creation in which heaven and earth have become as one.

What we should get out of our heads at once is the idea, widely assumed, that God is going to annihilate the space-time-matter universe. God does not destroy; he transforms, elevates, and brings to fulfillment. The final state of our universe will consist of a spiritualized materiality as suggested by Christ’s glorified resurrected body. In fact, one of the concomitants of traditional resurrection faith has been the belief that God is gradually healing both the material and moral universe (a process decisively launched by Christ’s healings while on earth).

Accordingly, I believe that we will begin to see definite anticipations or foreshadowings of life in the future age, in which through the power of Christ sickness and death will be destroyed, as per the revelations of St. John.

Jesus did not preach an escape from earth to an immaterial Heaven (the Platonic idea). Rather, he preached the coming of God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven,” a redemption of God’s good creation. What we hope for as Christians is not an “afterlife,” in the sense of something tacked on to the present life which is tacitly conceived of as the “real thing.” We hope in the completion of God’s grand rescue project, which is taking shape as we speak and which will reach fulfillment in God’s future. There is continuity between heaven and earth and between the present world and the future world. What role will imagination play in this fulfillment?

In the future world, we will experience time in a new way: no longer a seasonal cycle leading at last to the grave, but a continuous being-present, being-alive, to God.

What all these musings are leading to is this. I suggest that we are indeed entering an Imagination Age, but that this is not simply another item on the historical timeline, but an anticipation of eternity itself and the prelude to the final clash between good and evil that will usher in the completion of God’s kingdom.

This is the basic scenario, though I’m sure my language is poor and that it could be stated differently or better.

Utopia or dystopia, then? The best way I can answer this is “both and neither.” It seems that there are in our world signs pointing in two different directions: toward catastrophe and toward salvation. We must choose which path to follow. Artificial intelligence, though I understand it only dimly, seems to have both good and evil potentialities. Like any human instrument it can be directed to a particular end that we choose: either toward demonic manipulation or toward the flourishing of truth and imagination.

Either way, the new age will surely be an age of imagination to the max: we will be called upon to exercise our imagination upon a future-related scenario with both hopeful and dystopian aspects. Since this is an apocalyptic age, it will perforce be an imaginative age in which we reflect on it with the eyes of faith and hope. We can fit ourselves for eternity by activating our imaginative faculties.

Our modern scientific worldview has bred in all of us, whether believers or not, an insensitivity to mystery and paradox. We want everything clear-cut, rational, and compartmentalized. What happens when we adopt a more imaginative view of reality?

I suggest that this will be, not just an interesting option, but a necessity as we go forward. In the coming age we will need to search our hearts, search history and tradition, and define clearly where we stand on the great questions of life. We will need to define our beliefs sharply. At a time when the credibility and competence of institutions is at such a low ebb, we need to join ourselves to something less external, more essential. We will need to fill our lives with substantive meaning, and that will require imagination.

In the old days we expressed ourselves with a moral and spiritual language; nowadays our language tends to be technocratic, scientific, and business-minded. But who is to say that technology cannot itself be imbued with moral imagination, and that it cannot be used to promote goodness, truth, and beauty?

Here as always, the solution to the problems of time and culture can only come from above. The future is ultimately God’s and therefore requires a divine intervention. It is not simply a matter of us running on our own resources without God’s aid—the mistake made by secular utopians in every age.

Yet we must be opposed not only to an unimaginative, technocratic secularism but also to an etiolated, unimaginative Christianity that has lost sight of the resurrection faith of the apostles. What will give us hope is to recover the sense of what the theologians call “inaugurated eschatology”—the idea that God’s kingdom is gradually breaking into the present world and that God’s future is coming to meet us in the here and now. Grasping this requires nothing less than a renewed imagination, at the service of faith and hope.

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The featured image is ‘And I saw an angel standing in the sun’ (Rev. 19-17) [1910], by Henry John Stock, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.