Abstract
This paper argues that a dominant strain of contemporary Christianity operates on an implicitly materialist ontology that contradicts the teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth. While verbally affirming transcendence, this theology locates causality, agency, and transformation primarily within material processes, moral effort, institutional mediation, and linear spiritual development. Against this framework, the Gospels—and their Qur’anic clarifications—present faith as an imaginative, childlike mode of participation in divine reality, wherein inner apprehension precedes and enables outward manifestation. This paper proposes that imagination is not ancillary to faith but its operative core, and that the Kingdom of Heaven functions according to laws fundamentally incompatible with materialist assumptions.
I. Defining Materialist Christianity
Materialist Christianity does not deny God explicitly. Rather, it relocates divine action into frameworks governed by material causality.
Its defining features include:
- Linear Spiritual Progression
Growth is conceived as accumulation: more knowledge, more discipline, more moral competence. - Deferred Transcendence
The Kingdom is postponed to the afterlife or abstracted into metaphor, leaving present reality governed by ordinary causation. - Instrumental Faith
Faith becomes assent to propositions or trust in institutions rather than a transformative mode of perception. - Suppression of Imagination
Imagination is treated as childish, subjective, or dangerous—useful for illustration but not for ontology.
The result is a Christianity that believes in miracles but expects none, affirms heaven but lives as if reality is closed, and reveres Jesus while quietly neutralizing his epistemology.
II. Jesus’ Concept of Faith as Ontological Imagination
When Jesus asks, “Do you believe that I can do this?”, he is not requesting doctrinal affirmation. The question operates at a pre-rational level.
The structure of the question reveals three simultaneous inquiries:
- Does your inner world admit this outcome as possible?
- Is your imagination constrained by present conditions?
- Can you inhabit a reality not yet visible?
In Gospel usage, faith (πίστις) functions not primarily as belief about something, but as participation in a reality not yet materially instantiated.
This is why Jesus repeatedly links outcomes to faith:
- “According to your faith it will be done to you”
- “Your faith has made you well”
- “All things are possible to the one who believes”
These statements are unintelligible under a materialist ontology but coherent under an imaginative–participatory ontology, where reality unfolds from inner apprehension outward.
III. Children as Epistemological Authorities
Jesus’ elevation of children is not moral sentimentality but epistemological reversal.
Children:
- Animate objects effortlessly
- Do not distinguish sharply between inner and outer worlds
- Experience imagination as world-generating rather than fictive
In a materialist worldview, this is immaturity.
In Jesus’ worldview, it is native citizenship in the Kingdom.
“Unless you become like children” is therefore not ethical advice but an ontological demand: one must recover the imaginative permeability that allows divine reality to be received.
Materialist Christianity, by contrast, educates believers out of this mode of being.
IV. The Qur’anic Clarification: Imagination Without Autonomy
The Qur’anic accounts of the infant Jesus—speaking from the cradle and giving life to clay birds by God’s permission—function as theological clarifications, not competitive christologies.
They establish three crucial points:
- Divine action does not require cognitive maturity
- Creative power operates most fully where self-reliance is absent
- Imagination aligned with God becomes causally effective
The insistence on “permission” does not reduce Jesus; it protects the ontology of dependence. The imagination of Jesus is not autonomous fantasy but transparent participation in divine will.
Materialist Christianity finds this disturbing because it collapses the boundary between inner vision and outer reality without appealing to technique, merit, or authority.
V. Heaven and Hell as Ontological Outcomes
Under Jesus’ teaching, Heaven and Hell are not merely judicial destinations but fully realized modes of being.
- Heaven: complete dependence, unrestricted imaginative participation in God’s reality
- Hell: radical self-reliance, imaginative closure, isolation within the self
Materialist Christianity redefines Heaven as a reward and Hell as punishment, thereby obscuring their existential logic.
Yet Jesus repeatedly associates condemnation with:
- Self-justification
- Trust in one’s own righteousness
- Refusal of divine reign
Hell is thus the logical terminus of a materialist ontology.
VI. The Cross as the Collapse of Materialist Power
The crucifixion is unintelligible under materialist assumptions.
If power derives from control, mastery, or moral strength, the cross is defeat.
If power derives from radical dependence, the cross is revelation.
Jesus’ final act is not assertion but entrustment:
“Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
This is the ultimate imaginative act: surrendering all visible reality while holding an unseen one as more real.
Materialist Christianity venerates the cross symbolically while resisting its epistemology.
VII. Conclusion: A Choice of Ontologies
Christianity cannot remain neutral between two incompatible frameworks:
- Materialist Christianity
- Faith as belief
- Growth as accumulation
- Imagination as illusion
- Power as control
- Kingdom Christianity
- Faith as imagination
- Growth as dispossession
- Imagination as participation
- Power as dependence
Jesus belongs unequivocally to the second.
To follow him is not to improve oneself spiritually, but to relearn how reality works.
The Kingdom of Heaven does not obey material causality.
It responds to imagination purified of self-reliance.
And this is why, in the end,
children rule the Kingdom.