How Imagination Engages your Heart and Moral Character

Recently I read Alister McGrath’s new biography of C.S. Lewis. I found it interesting to see that for C.S. Lewis as a deist before he came to a saving faith in Jesus Christ, rationality wasn’t enough to get him over the threshold into believing in God. It took the use of his imagination for him to come to faith. The issue was not only one of truth, but also of meaning and grasping its significance through using his imagination. And it was through the influence of his friend Tolkien that he was helped to see this missing link. Alister McGrath described it like this:

“Tolkien helped C.S. Lewis realize that the problem lay not in C.S. Lewis’ rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance […] Tolkien thus helped C.S. Lewis realize that a “rational faith” was not necessarily imaginatively and emotionally barren.”