I am reading Dr. Gary North’s The Covenantal Structure of Economics to prepare for a similar project on literature.
I was struck by this resounding theme in Dr. North’s book: “The concept of planning must be front and center in Christian economic theory” (29).
This planning must be future-oriented. It’s not irrational. It’s based on cause/effect forecasting. But it is imaginative. It’s not just focused on what is, but what could be.
In the appendix, Dr. North reprints his essay “From Reason to Intuition.” He writes:
Alfred Marshall, the influential nineteenth-century Cambridge economist, wrote that an economist ‘needs the three great intellectual faculties, perception, imagination and reason: and most of all he needs imagination.’
From the quotation’s context, I would say that Dr. North agrees with Marshall or at least does not adamantly disagree.
Why do I bring this up?
A biblical view of the imagination is the bedrock of a biblical view of literature.
Here’s how Northrop Frye, a famous 20th century literary critic, addresses the connection between literature and imagination:
So we begin to see where the imagination belongs in the scheme of human affairs. It’s the power of constructing possible models of human experience.
The Educated Imagination
That construction involves a particular use of language, and it’s the kind of language use that generates things like poem, plays, and novels.
The imagination can also generate ideas for resource allocation that get translated into the practical language of business plans.
Experiments in Criticism 