ABSTRACT
Exegesis, with its many criticisms, is standard equipment for students and pastors, and many are conversant with the sophisticated hermeneutical theories of Bultmann, Ebeling, Fuchs, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Sermon design has always been the mainstay of homiletics, with new patterns and forms for sermons emerging with some regularity. Preaching is an exercise of the imagination, in that the gospel is faith seeking expression. The preacher's use of imagination does not begin by establishing the reality of God. It begins with the witness to that reality in the Bible. Historical imagination is necessary because no document can say everything necessary about an event. Just as Hermes was the messenger of the gods, the imagination is the mediating activity that links and confronts different orders of reality, worlds of experience, and modes of discourse. Coleridge made the distinction between the fancy and the imagination.
