A Hermeneutic of Imagination: Unlocking Scripture’s Full Potential by Knut M. Hein, with Jeffrey R. Oetter. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2025. Paperback, 224 pp. $28.99

I have always been a fan of Leland Ryken, the foremost evangelical scholar of and advocate for reading the Bible as literature. For half a century, he has encouraged and equipped Christians with a high view of scriptural inerrancy to enhance their understanding and application of God’s Word by taking careful account of the many genres, metaphors, and devices employed by the biblical authors. The parables of Jesus, for example, are fictional short stories meant to illustrate a point; the details should not be taken “literally.” Prophecy written in poetry allows for multiple meanings and multiple fulfillments. When Jesus speaks hyperbolically, we should take it as such; otherwise, we might start cutting off our hands and plucking out our eyes!

Although the authors of A Hermeneutic of Imagination: Unlocking Scripture’s Full Potential oddly, and somewhat troublingly, make no mention of Ryken, they do an excellent job training their readers to pay careful attention to the literary qualities of the Bible, including its heavy use of figurative language and its emotional and even humorous dimensions. Knut Heim, professor of Old Testament at Denver Seminary, and Jeffrey Oetter, whose PhD dissertation he supervised, are pioneers who draw together new findings from such diverse fields “as neuroscience, metaphor theory and cognition, translation theory, the affective sciences, humor studies, and the interdisciplinary study of imagination itself.” In fact, they boldly proclaim that “A Hermeneutic of Imagination is the first book-length study that takes the Bible’s imaginative nature seriously and integrates insights from these disciplines into the academic study of the Bible” (2).

Far from leading us into idolatry, they argue, imagination properly used “helps us to identify beings and events as true and real even when we cannot see with our own eyes.” As such, it “prevents us from creating artifacts that would allow a sensory engagement with physical material designed to represent God” (5-6). Imagination empowers us to fill in the gaps, to construct a fuller picture of something that the Bible only hints at. A hermeneutic of imagination can thus help believers find the middle-ground between taking everything in the Bible literally and taking nothing in it literally.

Without denying the Reformation’s focus on the clarity of scripture, Heim and Oetter expose the danger of interpretive strategies that resist ambiguity, preferring to edit out anything that appears abnormal or contradictory. Traditional hermeneutics, they argue, 

often fail to detect nuance or humor because of the impulse to explain away unexpected details to make the text fit with preconceived ideas, and so what is truly interesting, intriguing, and rewarding tends to be missed because it appears to be an obstacle for understanding. By contrast, reading with imagination intentionally focuses on problematic content as opportunities for deeper understanding and new insights—as opportunities for discovery, growth, and transformation (19).

Heim and Oetter claim more for their hermeneutic than mere correction. Imaginative reading is not “an optional extra; rather, it is essential for reading the biblical texts if we want to understand them as they were intended to be understood by their authors, human and divine” (24). Our response to passages that include unexpected omissions, vague language, conflicting advice, or morally questionable content inconsistent with God’s holy nature should not be to evade but to engage, not to go around but to go through, not to impose a solution but to achieve a resolution.

As a case study, the authors take a close, imaginative look at God’s command to Ezekiel not to mourn his wife’s death (Ezekiel 24:15-24). Rather than skip over the passage or accept the seeming callousness of God as a mystery we fallen humans cannot grasp, Heim and Oetter pay careful attention to nuances in the passage. As it turns out, God does not tell Ezekiel he cannot mourn, but that he cannot do so publicly. He must groan in quiet, as God himself will groan in quiet over the pain he will feel when Jerusalem is destroyed. “When God took away the delight of Ezekiel, this represented the terrible truth that God allowed his own wife—the people of Israel—to be taken from him” (37). “The difficult nature of the text,” the authors conclude, “demands that our imagination help us cope with its challenging content. We cannot understand or process texts like this without it” (38). 

Reading the Bible imaginatively allows us to pick up on clues we might otherwise miss, but it also enables us to experience the Bible in a more visceral way. The scriptures abound with figurative language, the kind of language that “provides us with the means to verbalize mentally how our bodies through our brains process what our senses perceive in the world around and within us” (50). When we read David’s prayer of confession, our imaginative engagement with the figurative language of Psalm 51 allows us to share David’s feelings of guilt and remorse.  

Modern people tend to be as suspicious of emotions as they are of imagination, but emotions, the authors insist, “are essential for human cognition and successful human relationships” (65). To achieve a full and accurate understanding of the narrative portions of scripture, we must attune ourselves “to the understated ways in which biblical narrators relate emotions—those of God, those of other characters in the stories, and their own” (65). Often, the Bible withholds details of how characters feel about their situations, forcing us as readers to fill in the emotional gaps.  

To illustrate, the authors unpack the tragic tale of Tamar, who is raped and abandoned by her half-brother Amnon, only to be avenged by her brother Absalom when her father David does nothing to punish his son—and later, by Absalom’s rebellion against David (2 Samuel 13-18). Although the Bible’s “relative silence [less than two verses] about Tamar’s mental state after she had been raped has led many to conclude that her emotions did not matter to God, to the biblical authors, or to any of the other characters in these chapters,” Heim and Oetter argue that an imaginative attempt to get inside her mental state will reveal that “Tamar’s pain led to a rebellion resulting in a civil war that almost tore the entire nation apart and nearly extinguished the two siblings’ entire family” (66). It does so, in part, by encouraging us to extend our sympathy for Tamar to Bathsheba, who was compelled to David’s bed as Tamar was to Amnon’s.  

As the authors’ hermeneutic of imagination helps us sympathize with the pain of Tamar (and Bathsheba), it enables us to feel God’s righteous anger over sin and injustice and to experience the awe and wonder—whether joyous or fearful—that the characters of the Bible feel in God’s presence. “The wonder that Scripture evokes is transformative because it affects our whole being, our bodies, our emotions, our intellect, and our volition. In other words, it fires our imagination and builds our faith” (70). Transformation is the key word here, a holistic transformation that involves all of us: heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Readers of A Hermeneutic of Imagination are likely to be most challenged by the chapter on the humorous dimensions of scripture. Can there really be sarcasm in the holy Word of God? The answer, of course, is yes, for the Bible contains the fullness of humanity in all its nobility and depravity. The passage that anchors Heim and Oetter’s chapter on humor is Micah 6:1-7, which divides into two unequal halves. In verses 1-5, God, through the prophet, condemns Israel for her apostasy and ingratitude. In verses 6-7, an unnamed Israelite responds:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
    and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (ESV)

Though a surface reading of the passage suggests not only that the responder is truly repentant and godly, but that God would be pleased by his seemingly sincere offer of his firstborn son, an imaginative reading uncovers the blasphemous, mocking tone of the clearly unrepentant speaker.

The hyperbolic nature of the gifts offered reveal them to be insincere and laced with sarcasm, while the sudden shift from “thousands” and “ten thousands” to a single offering magnifies the incongruence. “[F]linging the offer to sacrifice his firstborn child in the prophet’s face, he intends it as an acerbic insult to God, for it sarcastically combines what appears to be the ultimate sacrifice with a practice that is explicitly prohibited according to the biblical witness” (88-89). Were that not insulting enough, the authors demonstrate that the final verse should be translated “the fruit of my belly for the sin of my throat.” “The ‘fruit’ of the belly,” the authors explain, “refers not only to children but also to excrement, waste matter discharged from the bowels after the unclean food has been digested” (90). 

Many of the imaginative analyses that Heim and Oetter present rely on their knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, a fact that strengthens their argument that translators of the Bible are wrong to think that their job is to provide smooth translations that remove all difficulties for modern readers. The authors attribute this in part to “a popular misunderstanding of the Reformation doctrine of the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture” (115). The Bible was not meant to be easy reading; it calls for intense study and engagement. Dynamic equivalent translations offer understandability “at the expense of the Bible’s literary profile and quality. The drive for communicative efficiency obscures most of the Bible’s imaginative quirks and features—elements that the original authors and editors used to invite imaginative engagement” (119). 

Heim and Oetter are fine apologists for their hermeneutic of imagination. In their concluding two chapters, they even extend its benefits to include two different areas of the Christian life. First, they offer it as a method and paradigm that can bridge the divide between those who treat the Bible theologically and those who treat it as an “academic artifact” (128). Second, they champion it as a practice and a discipline that can challenge readers today to expand their vision of God’s will for the earth to take in center and margin alike, that which is safe and familiar as well as that which is foreign and peripheral.

I recommend A Hermeneutic of Imagination for its boldness, its clarity, and its holistic vision, but I did come away from it with some reservations. By the end of the book, the authors stretch

their hermeneutic so far that it comes to signify little more than reading carefully and using a Bible encyclopedia. I was often reminded of Percy Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” a great essay to be sure, but one in which the Romantic poet claims a domain for poetry that takes in everything, including his final claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world! 

More seriously, the authors are not always consistent in their hermeneutic. In their opening chapter, they write that “when we now encounter a statement like Psalm 82:6 (‘I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you”’), we do not take this statement literally and conclude that God is speaking to rival gods. Rather, we interpret the passage appropriately. The refusal to use our imagination would have led to a misinterpretation” (17-18). 

I find this ironic, since the authors seem unaware that Michael Heiser, an imaginative interpreter if there ever was one, demonstrated, in his The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, that Jewish readers would have precisely read this verse to refer to other created beings that share God’s spiritual nature but are not eternal. I fear that in this case, Heim and Oetter allow a modern, anti-supernatural bias to “blind” them to the possibility that Psalm 82 means what it says. 

On the flipside, I felt that in their final chapter they did not include enough nuance when they concluded that “social justice plays a central role in the Old Testament. A hermeneutic of imagination resists the temptation to relativize this truth because the emphasis of the New Testament is elsewhere” (172). They do well to remind us of the strong Old Testament focus on justice for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land, but the phrase “social justice” carries too much Marxist identity politics baggage to be used without qualification. They needed to work a bit harder to put themselves in the minds of the biblical writers and not allow modern notions of social justice to skew exegesis into eisegesis.    

Still, these are minor criticisms. A Hermeneutic of Imagination has the potential to strengthen churches and seminaries, providing both with the necessary tools and paradigm to pursue “an exciting adventure of the mind that is at once theologically rewarding, intellectually compelling, and transformative” (177).

Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 30 books include Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education, From Aristotle to Christ, From Plato to Christ, From Achilles to Christ, Apologetics for the 21^st Century, Atheism on Trial, and Ancient Voices: An Insider’s Look at the Early Church.