From DOXOLOGY’s Grand Reunion, Dr. John Kleinig teaches on the imagination — how the mystery of worship opens heaven to the eyes of faith, how the unholy imagination disorders the desires of the heart, and how the Holy Spirit sanctifies the imagination for the reading of Scripture, preaching, and the vision of God.
1. Seeing Heaven Now Open: The Mystery of Worship
Kleinig opens the series on imagination and glory by reading Jacob’s ladder and John 1 to show that Jesus, the incarnate Son of Man, is the true stairway where heaven opens on earth, God descending to meet us rather than us climbing to Him. From Colossians and Hebrews he presents the pastor as a mystagogue who, by proclaiming the word, leads people into the mystery that is Christ present among His people, and he expounds Hebrews 10 to show that through Jesus’ flesh and blood we have bold access to the heavenly sanctuary, coming clean in conscience and washed in baptism to the Lord’s Table. Reading Hebrews 12, he names the seven unseen realities present every Sunday, from the heavenly Jerusalem and angels to the sprinkled blood of Jesus that speaks pardon. He closes with Luther’s insistence that in preaching, baptism, absolution, and the Supper it is Christ Himself doing and speaking, and with the picture of angels escorting believers to and from the altar, illustrated by a woman whose only relief from abuse is the cleansing blood received in Communion. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Seeing What We Hear: Insight into the Mystery of God
Kleinig argues that hearing God’s word rightly issues in seeing, and that Scripture’s vivid imagery is meant to address not only the intellect but the sanctified imagination and all five senses, which modern abstraction and flat translations have dulled. He teaches that alongside physical and mental senses God gives spiritual senses that sin has damaged and the Spirit re-tunes, enlightening us so that we receive the mind of Christ; drawing on 1 Corinthians 2, he uses the analogy of becoming an ant and giving ants a human mind to explain how God in the incarnation communicates Himself and gives us His Spirit so we can perceive His hidden gifts. He then models meditation on Luther’s method of picturing a gospel story, entering it, and receiving by faith what Jesus says to the woman as said to oneself, and he presents justification as a courtroom picture in which one pleads guilty yet is pardoned for Christ’s sake, righteousness credited through faith. In the questions he counsels that people are changed toward discerning good and evil not by attacking sins but by preaching law and gospel that enlightens the conscience, and he treats the Supper as a genuine foretaste of the face-to-face joy of the heavenly feast. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. The Desires of the Heart: The Unholy Imagination
Kleinig, following Luther, describes the human being as fundamentally a creature of desire whose thoughts follow what the imagination judges good, and he reads Genesis 3 to show how mistrust of God’s word distorted both imagination and desire, opening our eyes only to shame. He traces “concupiscence” from the Apology as misplaced, disordered desire that idolizes created things as ends in themselves rather than receiving them as means through which God gives His gifts, and he shows how the ninth and tenth commandments diagnose this by exposing coveting the neighbor’s spouse and house. Cataloging the New Testament’s language for fallen desire, he charts how such desire entices, is followed, and is enacted, and how it deceives, defiles, corrupts, enslaves, and finally wars against and kills the soul. He ends on the paradox of indulgence, that the more desire is indulged the less it satisfies and the more it desensitizes, leaving the solution for the following session. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. The Use of the Imagination in Exegesis and Preaching
Kleinig contrasts a sermon with an essay and, drawing on classical rhetoric’s credibility, argument, emotion, and vividness, argues that preaching must appeal to the sanctified imagination so hearers see what the text says. He models imaginative exegesis on Ephesians 2, moving through its montage of pictures and asking who is compared with whom, and how and why: the walking dead, the rich benefactor, the resurrector who enthrones us with Christ, the church as God’s work of art created for good works, the wall-breaker who reconciles Jew and Gentile, and the congregation built into God’s holy temple. He stresses that the deepest wall Jesus broke is the curtain into God’s presence, and that we reign with Christ chiefly by interceding and praising, God enthroning us so the world may prosper spiritually rather than for our own prosperity. Practically he urges preaching one dominant image placed at the beginning and end, delivered credibly in keeping with one’s own personality, and using projected screens sparingly to point to the word rather than to the preacher. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. The Desires of the Heart: The Sanctified Imagination
Turning from the diagnosis of disordered desire to God’s remedy, Kleinig uses the image of a blood disease curable only by regular transfusion, and of a house rebuilt while still standing, to show that God renews us from the inside out through the incarnation of Christ. He argues we do not fix ourselves by managing cravings but receive Christ’s own mind and nature: armed with His mentality (1 Peter, 2 Peter), made over in baptism where the old self is put off and the new self put on, and given not new laws but great promises so that we share the divine nature and escape corruption. He names five marks of godly desire, renouncing and mortifying and abstaining from worldly desire, then walking by the Spirit and living holy lives, insisting that self-control is the Spirit’s fruit prayed for daily and that sanctification is God making and keeping us holy in Christ, not moral self-improvement. In the questions he handles Cain and the demand to rule over sin as law that finds its answer only in Christ, cautions that we cannot change our own character though behavior and thinking can be modified, and counsels that where someone pursues happiness apart from God the pastor speaks God’s word into the conscience while entrusting the outcome to God, since the task is to save souls. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →