Rushdoony on fantasy

"One of the glorious lines of the Virgin Mary's Magnificat is Luke 1:51: "He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts." The Greek work dianoia is literally a thinking over, but it is here used in the sense of an independent reasoning, a reasoning without God, and hence "the imagination of their hearts."
As I have pointed out elsewhere and repeatedly, the Bible has nothing good to say about imagination ( Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Deut. 29:19; 31:21; Jer. 23:17: I Chron. 28:9 Rom. 1:21; II Cor. 10:5). Because ours is an age with a will to fiction, the role of imagination is extremely important.
Men who will not be governed by God's word will not be governed by reality, because reality is not of their making. God having created all things, reality reflects the mind of God, not man. Hence, it is the essence of sin to resort to imagination to escape God's law world.
This problem is very urgently practical one, because every facet of the life of modern man is governed by imagination. This is basic to humanism, and it affects all men born of Adam (Gen 6:5), and especially modern man. Because Christians are born into a fallen world, and often educated by it, imagination replaces reality in their thinking and governs it.
To illustrate: As I travel, I encounter a very large number of cases, virtually all alike, of near impotence in the face of reality. Since the writing of Revolt Against Maturity (1977), The Word of Flux (1975), and on or more tapes on the subject of the will to fiction, and imagination, I have had telephone calls and personal visits concerned with this problem. Men in their twenties and thirties, including newly-weds, are impotent with their often very beautiful wives unless they resort to fantasy. Other women are fantasized to replace the real women.
Why should an unreal female be exciting, and a far better and real woman not be so? The key is the essence of imagination: the fantasy woman is totally the creation and creature of man, whereas the real woman is God's creation and creature. it is essential to imagination to create a man-made world and a man-ordained decree of predestination. It is the essence of sin to demand such a world.
Moreover, fantasy refused to pay any attention to reality, because to accept reality is to accept God finally. As a result, all kinds of myths are propagated to replace reality. George Gilder, in Naked Nomads, made clear that the bachelor is physically, mentally, and morally the most unstable person in society. He is responsible for most crimes, has the highest suicide rate, and is very unstable person. The myth has it that he is the free "swinging," and happy playboy....
Imagination or fantasy must replace reality.
But this replacement of reality by fantasy is not limited to the sexual sphere. It is basic to the total life of modern man. It governs his law and his politics. Is it not a fantasy to believe that man's law can replace God's law? Is it not vain imagination to assume that , by setting aside God and His law, man can have a just social order? The only difference between Marxism and American democratic indifferentism is that the Marxist are more open and honest about setting God's reality aside in favor of their fantasy. The world today is dedicated to its sinful fantasies.
These fantasies, because they deny God's reality, are doomed. The Virgin Mary says, "He hath scattered the proud." This scattering and confusion has prevailed since the dispersion of the peoples at the Tower of Babel. Mary rejoices in a glorious process which is God-ordained, and she sees it triumphing over all enemies of God in due time. They are broken up, scattered, dispersed and confused.
These are the proud, or the arrogant, huperephanos. Proverbs 16:18 says, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." We fail to see the meaning of this sentence, unless we realize that pride has no sense of reality is therefore as surely doomed as a blind man on a strange mountain pass.
Paganism, however, has exalted pride and despised humility. Aristotle saw pride as the mark of the great-souled man. While earlier Greek thought, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, saw pride as a moral evil, later thought rejoiced in pride, and the Stoics in particular stressed it. Pride is seen by our Lord as evil (Mark 7:22) and an outworking of a depraved heart.
Some time back, Girdlestone called attention to Scripture's very telling uses of the word torah, usually translated as law, a meaning very important to our study here:
In 2 Sam. 7 there is recorded, first, the promise of God to keep an unfailing covenant with the seed of David, whose throne should be established for ever; and secondly, David's expression of thankfulness on account of this promise. In the opening of his song of praise (vv. 18,19) he say, 'Who am I, O Lord God and what is my house, that thou hast brought me hitherto? And this was yet a small thing in thy sight, O Lord God; but thou has spoken also of thy servant's house for a great while to come. And is this the manner of man, O Lord God?' The parallel passage (I Chron. 17:17) runs thus: "For thou hast also spoken of thy servant's house for a great while to come, and hast regarded me according to the estate of a man of high degree." The word translated manner in the one passage and estate in the other, is torah, which is generally rendered 'law'. The first passage might be rendered, "And this is the law (or order) of the man," and the second, "Thou hast regarded me according to the law (or order) of the man from on high.
What Scripture here declares is that the law, order, manner, and estate of man is Jesus Christ and His prophetic law word. Reality is not from man but from the triune God, and it is set forth fro us in the incarnate Word and His written word.
Jesus Christ orders life in terms of God's reality, whereas man's imagination seeks to re-order it in terms of the evil fantasies of man as god. Because fantasies are often "private," men fail to see their implications. Private fantasies become public acts and policies, and unreality thereby governs life. Judgment then is inescapable.
This collision course with reality is inescapable for individuals, groups, institutions, churches, and nations that live out their fantasies. The world was not made by man, and it will never serve man's fantasies."

R.J. Rushdoony
Systematic Theology Volume I page 474-476

Rushdoony on fantasy

http://pollys-peak.blogspot.com/2006/01/rushdoony-on-fantasy.html