Trey Harris is a pastor in North Carolina, and a student together with me in Portland Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program in Semiotics. In our program, we read lots of deep and heady books, then comment on them to each other in a weekly forum. In the following post, Trey offers wisdom and poetry inspired by Paul Mariani’s God and the Imagination.
God and the Imagination
Paul Mariani’s God and the Imagination suggests that imagination is not simply a minor human function, but a divine faculty—a place where Creator and creature meet. Here, imagination is described not as the act of making things up, but as the way we participate in God’s ongoing creativity. When Mariani writes, “God and the imagination are one,” he means that our ability to imagine reflects God’s creativity within us.
From the first words of Genesis—“In the beginning …”—creation unfolds as a work of divine imagination. The Logos —the Word —does not hammer the cosmos into being, but calls it forth with speech, weaving chaos into harmony through utterance, breath, and beauty. Here, imagination is not idle fantasy, but the very engine of revelation, turning void into vision.
Creation itself is the first act of signification. God doesn’t merely make things—He makes things mean. Light signifies day, darkness signifies night, and humanity bears the image, the sign, of its Creator. Imagination, then, is the human capacity to participate in this sign-making and sign-reading that structures reality itself.
Logos
When the Logos “takes on flesh,” as John proclaims, God’s imagination steps into human form. In Christ, reality is upended: the first are made last, the servant is crowned Savior, and death itself blossoms into resurrection. This is divine imagination at work, overturning the old and ushering in the new.
When Logos takes on flesh, the divine signifier becomes signified. Christ is not merely a sign pointing to God but God made readable, tangible, and interpretable. This incarnational semiotics disrupts any split between sign and reality—the medium is the message, the Word is the flesh. Christian imagination learns to read the world through this logic: that the material doesn’t merely point beyond itself but participates in what it signifies.
This suggests that Christian imagination operates semiotically—reading the world as a sign, recognizing Christ as the interpretive key that unlocks creation’s meaning. The incarnate Logos becomes both sign and interpreter, revealing that all reality participates in divine signification.
Interpretation of Signs
The church, then, becomes a community of interpretation—reading Scripture, sacraments, and creation as interlocking sign systems that reveal God’s ongoing speech. Baptism and Eucharist function as imaginative-semiotic acts: water signifies death and resurrection, bread and wine become body and blood. These are not empty symbols but participatory signs where the imagination trained by faith perceives divine presence within material form.
To live faithfully is to step boldly into imaginative freedom—to glimpse God’s handiwork in all things, to sense His creativity pulsing beneath the ordinary, and to see blank spaces as invitations for new wonders. In this way, Christian imagination becomes a living theology: discovering the hidden within the visible and joining the ongoing creation God continually calls forth.
God and the Imagination
In the beginning,
There was wonder,
Logos speaks tenderly
Breaks the silence without shattering itGod and the imagination are one.
He is the pulse beneath creation’s skin
The breath that turns chaos into order
Dust into likenessTo wonder is freedom
Seeing a world that is not yet
And call it good.Then Logos takes on flesh
Flips the world over
First is now last
A servant is now a SaviorThis is imaginative freedom
This is white space—
where God still dreams the world awake
Still speaking tenderly
Still breaking silence into songTrey Harris
Timeless River
“The river remembered, the river imagined. And the real river like God, flowing outward forever. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
Paul Mariani
I loved that line. Mariani captures how memory and imagination meet—where what was and what could be blend like light on water.
The Tennessee mountains have a way of preaching without words. In the fall, they never look the same twice. I can sit on the porch for hours, rocking slowly, watching the forest breathe. Each leaf carries its own story, its own hue, and you can see it eight or nine different ways depending on the hour or the heart.
That could be what imagination really is: the holy act of seeing again.
Like Mariani’s river, we remember and we imagine, and somewhere in that current we meet the real thing—God—flowing outward forever.
Poetry helps me practice that kind of vision. When I revisit my old poems, I can still feel what I felt then, yet it has changed. The memory stays, but the meaning grows. That’s the beauty of a metaphor—it refuses to stay still. It lets what once was become new again, whispering that even our seeing can be redeemed.
Tennessee Mountains
The Tennessee mountains hum under their breath—
a low gospel through spruce and fog.
They rise not to impress but to remember,
their ridges folding like prayers
Someone forgot to finish.I have seen them eight, nine ways—
blue as forgiveness,
green as first love,
gray as an old hymn fading.They are never the same twice,
and neither am I.
Each return is both pilgrimage and mirror,
the mountain teaching me again
how to stay,
how to change,
how to see.Trey Harris
