It is intuitive that literary fiction should depend upon imagination. Christian theology, on the other hand, has typically approached the imagination with somewhat more caution. This is perhaps because anxieties over the foundations of Christian truth claims have traditionally complicated theology's imaginative sense. Whereas truth might be understood by theology as either revealed by God or discovered through reason, Christians have rarely warmed to the notion of truth as conjured by human imagination. Whatever the role of the imagination in Christian theology – and who could deny such a role in the monumental work of figures like Augustine of Hippo or Julian of Norwich or Karl Barth – most Christians would resist referring to theological or scriptural writings as mere fictions or imaginations.

Conventional intuitions notwithstanding, in recent years the imagination has come usefully to bridge literary (especially fictional) writing with theological (sometimes scriptural) reflection in a manner that might prove illuminative for the study of religion and literature at large. As critical theory has progressively reconsidered the simple givenness of any proposed truth, theology has found its own anxieties less singular. Consider Toni Morrison's reflections here on the practice of literary writing in her essay, “The Site of Memory”: