LaGrave Avenue
Christian Reformed Church
The Real C.S. Lewis
His Life and Writings: Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity, and other writings
“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Paulo F. Ribeiro
MBA, PhD, PE, IEEE Fellow
March 7, 2004, AD
Grand Rapids
The joy of the Lord is our strength. Neh. 8:10
The Apologist's Evening Prayer
From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly
concrete Person.
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold,
adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its wine. In it God shows himself to us. That He
answers prayers is a corollary—not necessarily the most important one. What He does is learned from what He is.”
Introductory Words
Good Morning. Thanks for the opportunity
Presentation: Brazilian Style – Audience Participation:
Talking Points, Share our insights …
Why Lewis:
The most important Christian writer of the 20th century.
A man who has had, and is having, a profound effect on this world.
Lewis wrote about many different subjects with a truly integrated Christian
Perspective (theology, politics, education, English literature, children’s stories,
science fiction, etc.):
The Pubs went silent.
Politics: crime, obscenity, capital punishment, conscription, communism, fascism, socialism, war, vivisection, the welfare state, the atomic
bomb, tyranny,
"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" has had had on theories of punishment. The prevailing idea was that prisoners were sick people
who needed therapy--and that included all the techniques that modern psychology and technology could bring to bear to achieve behavioral
modification. Sentences were open-ended, and the prisoner was not released until he was "cured.“
Lewis objected strenuously. Prisoners, he said, need to be punished, not "cured" in that sense. The sentence must be fixed, so that the
prisoner knows at least the approximate date of his release. Treating the prisoner as a patient robs him of his dignity and constitutes an
unwarranted assault on his personality and character.
Introductory Words
I discovered C.S. Lewis when in college (1974). Since then I have read and re-read
almost everything he wrote. He has had a tremendous influence on me in several
ways (just ask my wife). She says: “too much!”
-He has helped to overcome chronological snobbery and the temptation to be
relevant.
-He has helped me to think more objectively by his rigorous, precise, penetrating
logic, vivid, lively, and playful imagination.
-He has helped me to have a better sense of the real world.
-He shows my insensitivity and inability to enjoy God's daily gifts.
-He always points me to the ultimate source of Joy: Christ.
-His theology may not be perfect, but the practice was exemplary.
Among the books I have read and enjoyed with much profit are: Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Problem of
Pain, The Abolition of Man, Miracles, Pilgrim's Regress, Poems, Letters to an American Lady, Letters of C.S. Lewis, The
Narnia books, Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength, Experiment in Criticism, God in the Dock, The Four
Loves, The Weight of Glory, and everything else.
Introductory Words
Born in Belfast in 1898.
Educated in England (prep school then at Malvern College
and finally by a private tutor.
Enlisted in the army in 1917, saw front-line combat and was
Wounded in France. Returned to his studies after the war, graduated in 1922 and
became a fellow of Magdalen college in 1925.
An atheist in his boyhood, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931 and became
famous as a result of his wartime religious talks on the BBC, and his children's
books.
Lewis was part of the Oxford literary circle known as the Inklings, whose members
also included J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.
Married Joy Davidman Gresham in 1957, an American with whom he had
corresponded for a number of years.
Died on November the 22nd 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas.
"The Christians are right; it is Pride that has been the chief
cause of misery in every nation and every family since the
world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people
together; you may find good fellowship and jokes and
friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But
Pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only
enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.“
Mere Christianity
Introductory Words
I relate to C.S. Lewis' story in Surprised by Joy in many
respects: the experiences of the painful, melancholy, yet
"joyful" yearnings (he calls sehnsucht).
Although the scenery was very different: tropical
ocean, samba, soccer … “there is no sin on the south
side of the equator,”
I still suffered from the stabs of joy… there was an
immediate connection.
Several years later I found myself not far away from the
land of Narnia (PhD at University of Manchester 19821985).
I became a “freak” (according to my children): house,
cars, everything-Lewis-Narnia ….
Is this an American thing?
Then I am glad to be an American.
“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side
of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning,
but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with
the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament
are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some
day, God willing, we shall get in.”
The Weight of Glory
His Main Battle Grounds
1 – Needs of the West: Theology in Fiction: Aslan as Christ
2 –Theology in Popular Language: Mere Christianity
3 – The Devil: Screwtape Letters
4 – Fighting Moral Subjectivism: (MC, Abolition of Man, Poison of Subjectivism)
5 – Longing for Joy: Surprised by Joy and The Weight of Glory
6 – Selling Hell: That Hideous Strength, Great Divorce
7 – The Problem of Pain
8 – Theological Modernism
9 – Love
10 – Building Bridges (Past and Future)
Love + Suffering + Joy = Power released by splitting the atom of
the Trinity in the cup Christ drank on Calvary
'When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in
part shall be done away.' The idea of reaching 'a good life'
without Christ is based on a double error. Firstly, we
cannot do it; and secondly, in setting up 'a good life' as our
final goal, we have missed the very point of our existence.
Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own
efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice
and un-breathable air of the summit, lacking those wings
with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished.
For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes
and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.
"Man or Rabbit?"
Interesting facts about Lewis:
Accent: Oxford with an Irish tinge
Voice 1 Voice 2 Voice 3
Number of books sold …
Breath of subjects …. (*)
1947 Time Magazine article
Declined honors from Winston Churchill
Adored In America (all over the world, we are working in Brazil …)
Sharing Time???
(*) APOLOGETICS, EDUCATION , CHILDREN’S STORIES, ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS,
FRIENDS, LONGING, "MERE CHRISTIANITY“, MODERNISM AND SECULARISM, MYTH AND
IMAGINATION, SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY
The Many Sides of Lewis:
Lewis, the distinguished Oxford literary scholar and critic;
Lewis, the highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children's literature;
Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics, the Knight
of Orthodox Christianity (Champion of Mere Christianity);
Lewis, the soldier and faithful friend (from Arthur Grieves to Tolkien)
Lewis, the masterful teacher and tutor;
Lewis, the private man and with family problems (Father, Warren, Mrs. Moore)
Lewis, the romantic yet rationalist (Baptized imagination)
Lewis, the thoroughly converted man (The Pilgrim’s Regress)
Lewis, surprised by marriage (the “Joy” of his life)
Lewis, the aggressive debater and humble/gentle man
Lewis’s Appeal
Invitation to meditation
Natural point of contact: longing for meaning
Avoidance of the technical jargon of the theologians.
Allow me to illustrate the power of the apologetics of longing with a testimony.
A few years ago I introduced CS Lewis to an engineer in Virginia who was going through
an existential crisis. I presented him a copy of Mere Christianity.
…. After several months after reacting against some of the statements he came to me and
said, I in the hall, Paulo ….
In another case, I presented a copy of the same book to a Brazilian Professor (nominal
catholic) ….
Two months later, he could not control his excitement … he told me that he had introduced
Lewis to another friend who was seriously looking for some spiritual answers.
Interdenominational Appeal
Almost Reformed
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because
I see it but because by it I see everything else.”
"From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good
resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive scratchings, all the Protestant
doctrines originally sprang. For it must be clearly understood that they were
at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope: indeed, more than hope,
fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal
life. The doctrine of predestination, says the Seventeenth Article, is `full of
sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons.' . . . Relief and
buoyancy are the characteristic notes.”
Interdenominational Appeal
Lewis on Calvinists and Puritans
"Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their
enemies bring any such charge against them. On the contrary ....
Calvinism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true.
It sprang from the refusal to allow the Roman distinction between the life of
religion and the life of the world. Calvin's picture of the Christian was less hostile
to pleasure, but then Calvin demanded that every man should be made to live the
fully Christian life.
This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that Elizabethan
Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside the main
forward current of life. In their own day they were, of course, the very latest
thing. Unless we can imagine the freshness, the audacity and the fashionableness
of Calvinism, we shall get out whole picture wrong. It was a creed of
progressives, even revolutionaries."
The Search For Joy - The Unifying Theme of C.S. Lewis’ Life
The Search for the inexpressible
"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, . . . I feel a certain shyness. I
am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret
in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it
by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also
which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the
mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves;
the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both . . . "
It was not until his Christian Conversion that Lewis understood what he was seeking
Lewis found joy in Greek and Nordic Mythology, Music, Literature, Nature,
Friends...
Surprised by Joy:
Lewis calls "the shape of my early life."
Summary
Less an autobiography more an account of his religious ups and downs
from childhood
From an almost lack of religion in his early experience ...
Of his hectic efforts in boarding school to create a satisfying spiritual
realization
Of his retreat into atheism ..
The long and painful return through nature, spiritualism and philosophy to
Theism and finally to Christianity.
The Development of a Tough And Holistic Christian Mind
The Chronology
The First Years - Born to Nine
•Born on November 29, 1898 at Belfast
•Father, Albert James Lewis, was a lawyer and mother, Flora Augusta
Hamilton Lewis, a descendent of clergymen, lawyers, and sailors.
•Father - sentiment and passion
•Mother irony, coolness and the capacity for happiness.
•Lewis description of his father not very positive.
•Lewis's mother died before he was ten, but she had already started him in
French and Latin.
Surprised By Joy
•Lewis and his brother (three years older) were left alone
in a large house and spent endless hours in their
respective imaginative worlds of Animal-Land and India
•Lewis learned Sehnsucht (sen-zart), - longing from
looking out of the nursery windows, but there were not
genuine religious experiences.
•The house was rich in books and the brothers read widely. They lived almost
in their imagination.
•One day the young Lewis stood beside a currant bush in flower there
suddenly and mysteriously arose in him "as if from a depth not of years but
centuries" the memory of an earlier happy morning. Though it happened in an
instant of time, he felt that "in a certain sense everything else that had ever
happened tome was insignificant in comparison.“
•It was the beginning of his search for joy.
Surprised by Joy
•At ten, Lewis was sent to school in hated
England. Under the tutelage of Oldie, who
flogged his boys with and without excuse but
taught them to think logically.
•At twelve, he went to Campbell College, not far from the Lewis home in
Ireland, but his stay was cut short by illness which gave him happy weeks on
his own.
•From 13 to 15 he was back in England at a small prep school he calls
Charters. Here at last he began to love the English countryside, but here he
also lost his faith, and his simplicity.
•Other things which led him to atheism were the occultism imparted to him by
a matron at the school, a natural pessimism, and particularly the reading of
H.G. Wells, and Sir Robert Ball.
•At fifteen he won the classic scholarship to "Wyvern" College, located in the
same English town as Charters.
Arthur Greeves
Surprised by Joy
•Though Lewis's brother had attended Wyvern and liked it, he
himself concluded that this school, like most other such college
in England, produced not the understanding and fraternal man
described in its catalogue but rather a "bitter, truculent,
skeptical, debunking, and cynical intelligentsia" dominated by
social struggle and priggishness.
•One of the few valuable assets of Wyvern was Smewgy, a hard but
courteous teacher and taught his boys to be scholars without being pedants.
•In religion Lewis at this time suffered the conflict, as he says, of maintaining
that God did not exist and being angry with him for not existing.
•Lewis prepared for university entrance under the tutorship of a tall, lean
shabbily dressed but ruthlessly dialectical man named W.T. Kirkpatrick
in Surrey. He found this the happiest period of his life.
•He read abundantly in literature of all sorts, including much of Homer
and other Greek authors in the original. His atheism was strengthened.
Surprised by Joy
•Lewis had been living two lives. One was filled with the bustle
of ordinary pleasures and miseries while the other was secret,
imaginative, and full of longing for Joy.
•During his illness while at Campbell he had first found delight in fairy tales
and fallen under the spell of dwarfs. Northerners and Norse mythology became
part of his life. Under Smewgy he had indirectly discovered not more
Northerners but the power and fire of Mediterranean myth. And of course there
was plenty of King Arthur and early Britain.
•Joy, "that central music in every experience," pressed its illimitable claims upon
him and spread its glory in unbearable waves to the roots of his being. Yet the
time came when Joy disappeared and the memory of it teased him.
•Meanwhile his atheism grew bolder and Christianity came to mean ugly
architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry, and God a great transcendental
Interferer. He wanted to tell God and every body else that his innermost
being was marked: No Admittance.
Surprised by Joy
•At this time he says he was made up of two separate
elements: one the longing for Joy, the other a fixed and
certain belief in scientific materialism.
•Then he discovered in Yeats and other men who while disbelieving Christianity yet
thought there was a world behind, or around the material world, and he was
temporarily persuaded to believe in magic and occultism.
•It was at this point that he, came upon a copy of George Macdonald's Phantastes in
a bookstall. Alongside the romantic elements in the novel, Lewis found something
new, a bright shadow that he later discovered to be the voice of holiness.
•Always in the past Joy had been separate from the ordinary world; in Macdonald he
found, to his surprise, that the bright shadow transformed all common things while
itself remained unchanged.
His imagination was baptized. It was the beginning of the road back.
“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not
know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes
to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
. . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous. “
Surprised by Joy
Surprised by Joy
•At 18 he took the scholarship examination for
Oxford and was elected. But a war was in
progress, and the day he was nineteen he found
himself in the front-line trenches in France.
•A brief illness gave him three weeks in an army hospital where he first began to
read G.K. Chesterton and loved him in spite of his religious element.
•He was wounded in April by a British shell falling short of its German target.
•In January 1919 he was discharged from military duty.
•He ridicules his experience of taking sixty German prisoners of war; what
happened, he says is that they simply appeared with their hands up and ready to
surrender.
•Back at Oxford, he began to make friends who were to influence his future.
•Just when the New Psychology was causing him to doubt his whole experience
of Joy, some of his closest friends began to turn Christian.
Surprised by Joy
•With Barfield in particular he debated violently and
learned much. It was he who destroyed forever in
Lewis the easy belief in "chronological snobbery,"
•He also convinced Lewis that abstract thought can
give indisputable truth and is therefore a different sort
of from experience of the senses.
•Finally Lewis was forced to conclude that logic itself
participated in a cosmic Logos. He also became
convinced of a cosmic Absolute but did not assume it
would ever get personal.
•Lewis was twenty-three when he finishes Greats and, because he could find no
position, decided to remain for a fourth year at Oxford.
•Almost immediately he was drawn to a brilliant young man named Nevil Coghill
and was shocked to discover him a Christian and thoroughgoing supernaturalist.
Surprised by Joy
Magdalene College
•At the same time it dawned on him that
all the authors on whom he could really
feed (Macdonald, Chesterton, Dr.
Johnson, Spencer, Milton) saw things
through Christian eyes.
•Even the most religious of the Pagans
(Plato, Virgil...) had some of the same
quality. They had roughness and density
of life.
He still thought Christianity only a myth, a good philosophical framework on
which to hang Absolute Idealism.
•He became a temporary lecturer for a year and was then elected a Fellow of
Magdalene College in 1925, when he was 26 years old.
•Christians now began to appear all around him - men like Dyson, Tolkien ..
•He re-read Euripides' Hippolytus and Joy returned to his heart.
Surprised by Joy
•A thought is not simply a thing inside one's
head and isolated from its object.
•Introspection can only find what is left
behind and cannot operate while the original
thought exists.
•It is a terrible error to mistake the track left
behind for the thing itself.
•Immediately Lewis knew he was looking in the wrong place to find Joy he
had sought, that his hope to find some mental content on which he could lay
his finger was wholly futile, for this was and would always be simply the
"mental track left by the passage of Joy.“
•Not only must joy look to its object, but a desire owes all its character to its
object, for the object is the very thing which makes it desirable.
•He had always been wrong in thinking that he desired Joy itself.
The Trout Inn
Surprised by Joy
•Now teaching philosophy at Oxford, Lewis
began to have real troubles with the
Absolute. He lectured on a philosophical
"God" but distinguished it from "the God of
popular religion" and insisted that there
could be no personal relation with Him.
•But now two hard blows struck him.
•He read G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man
and was shaken by its theistic rationale.
•Shortly afterwards the toughest of all the
atheists he had known sat beside the fire in
Lewis's room and said, "Rum thing. All that
stuff about the Dying God. It almost looks
as if it had really happened once."
Surprised by Joy
•Lewis thought that nobody could be safe from God if this man
were not.
•There followed a time in which all the strands steadily platted
themselves into an invincible whole in which Lewis's inner
being. It seemed to him that God was surely after him as a cat
searching for a mouse.
Tolkien
•You must picture me, he says, alone in that room in
Magdalene, night after night, feeling whenever mind lifted
even for a second from work, the steady, unrelenting approach
of Him whom I earnestly desire not to meet. That which I
greatly feared had at last come upon me.
•It was in the Trinity Term of 1929 that he capitulated. As he
knelt down in prayer and admitted that God was God, he felt
himself the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
Williams
Surprised by Joy
This walk in the grounds
of Magdalen College was
the site of a long
conversation between
Tolkien, C.S.Lewis and
Hugo Dyson, after which
C.S.Lewis became
converted to Christianity.
That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of
1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps,
that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then
see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which
will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home
on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high
gates to prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting
his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?
Surprised by Joy
•It was conversion to Theism only, not Christianity and not
belief in a future life. They came later.
•I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we
set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God,
and when I reached the zoo I did.
•It was thus that the Hound of Heaven overtook and conquered his prey.
•Shortly after Lewis died, Clyde Kilby wrote that Lewis was "a man who had
won, inside and deep, a battle against pose, evasion, expedience, and the
ever-so-little lie and who wished with all his heart to honor truth in every
idea passing through his mind."
•Almost forty years after Kilby's words have been very verified through the
detailed scrutiny of Lewis's life and writings.
Mere Christianity - Excerpt from Preface:
It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring
anyone into that hall, I have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not
the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a
place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose
the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think preferable. It is true
that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time,
while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not
know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting
unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into the room
you will find that the long wait has done some kind of good which you would
not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You
must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin
trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all
you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its
paint and paneling.
Mere Christianity
Book I: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
I. The Law of Nature
II. Some Objections
III. The Reality of the Law
IV. What Lies Behind the Law
V. We Have Cause to be Uneasy
Book II: What Christians Believe
I. The Rival Conceptions of God
II. The Invasion
III. The Shocking Alternative
IV. The Perfect Penitent
V. The Practical Conclusion
Mere Christianity
Book III: Christian Behavior
I. The Three Parts of Morality
II. The "Cardinal Virtues"
III. Social Morality
IV. Morality and Psychoanalysis
V. Sexual Morality
VI. Christian Marriage
Book IV: Beyond Personality or First
VII. Forgiveness
Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
VIII. The Great Sin
I. Making and Begetting
IX. Charity
II. The Three-Personal God
X. Hope
III. Time and Beyond Time
XI. Faith
XII. Faith, level II
IV. Good Infection
Mere Christianity
Book I - Right and Wrong as a Clue to the
Meaning of the Universe
An Engineering Perspective
A Flow-Chart Approach
Mere Christianity
End of the
Story
Do you believe
in the existence
of a Moral Law?
No
Yes
What Kind:
A Force
(Power)?
An inconsistent Power
End of the
Story
No
Yes
No
A God ?
No
A Force/Power is a sort of a
tame and convenient God .
Is there anything
or anyone
behind the Moral
Law?
End of the
Story
Are you tricking
me with a
religious talk?
Yes
No
We are trying to find
truth and the meaning of
the universe.
Yes
Are you
interested?
No
End of the
Story
Yes
Mere Christianity
How can we find out more about the
thing behind the moral law and
the meaning of the universe?
Looking into the
The Universe He Made
He is
a great artist
But you cannot know
a man by looking at
the house he built.
Looking inside ourselves,
where He wrote the moral
laws
He is
quite merciless.
The universe is
a very dangerous place.
End of the
Story
The Moral Law ells you to do the
straight thing and it does not seem to
care how painful, or dangerous, or
difficult it is to do.
The Moral Law does not give us any
grounds for thinking that God is “good”
in the sense of being soft and nice..
The Moral Law is as hard as nails.
If God is like the Moral Law, then
HE IS NOT SOFT.
No
Do you want
to proceed?
at your own
risk?
End of the
Story
Yes
End of the
Story
Mere Christianity
Is He an Impersonal
Absolute
Goodness ?
No
Is He a Personal
absolute
Goodness ?
If the universe is not governed by an
absolute goodness, then all our efforts
are in the long run hopeless.
Yes
Absolute Goodness is either the great safety
or the great danger - according to the way
you react to it.
God is the only comfort and supreme terror
No exceptions, or
allowances
permitted.
End of the
Story
No
End of the
Story
Yes
Have you broken
the Moral Law?
Do you think you need
Forgiveness?
Yes
Yes
Do you want to
find out more
about God
No
End of the
Story
Christianity tells how the demands of the Moral Law,
which we cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how
God Himself becomes man to save man from the
disapproval of God.
Beginning of Chapter 1 of the Great Story ...
Which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better
than the one before.
Mere Christianity
“My reason for going around in this way was that
Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced
the sort of facts I have been describing.
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them
forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say
to people who do not know they have done anything to repent
of and who do not feel they need any forgiveness. It is after
you have realized that there is a Moral Law, the Power
behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put
yourself wrong with the Power - it is after all this, and not a
moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
Mere Christianity
The Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable
comfort. But it does not begin with comfort; it begins with
dismay.
In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one
thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you
may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort you will
not get either comfort or truth - only soap and wishful thinking to
begin with and, in the end despair.
All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts - to understand
the questions which Christianity claims to answer.”
Mere Christianity
Book 2 - What Christians Believe
Who was (and is) Christ?
Lunatic?
God?
It does Not Make Sense
It is beyond my senses
Great Moral Teacher?
It is non-sense
Mere Christianity
Book 2 - What Christians Believe
The Cosmic Equations - Calculus for Life
( 0) God  (Universe)
Creation
 (Universe)dx. dy. dz  (Good )
 ( God ' s... Will )  ( Evil )
Fall
d
( Evil )  ( Sin)
dt
 ( Man' s... Sins)  ( Death)
 ( Jesus' ... Suffering...& ... Re surrection)  ( Death)
Redemption
 ( Death)  ( Eternal... Life)
Mere Christianity
The C.S. Lewis Catechism
Q1. Why does man need God?
A1. Because God made man to run on God Himself
Q2. Why did God give free will to man allowing evil to come into the picture?
A2. Because free will is the only thing that makes possibly any love or goodness
or joy worth having.
Q3. What did God do to restore / redeem man?
A3. God Himself becomes man to save man from the
disapproval of God.
Q4. What is formula of Christianity?
A4. That Christ was killed for us, that His death washed out our sins, and that by
dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is
what has to be believed.
Q1 - says in a less elegant way what Augustine said 1500 years ago. "Though hast created us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until
they find their rest in you."
Q2 - Lewis leaned more to the semi-pelagian or Arminian side of things on free will than he did of the classiscal reformers (e.g. Luther,
Zwingli, Calvin). They all would agree on free will before he Fall, but Lewis held to the idea of free will after the Fall.
Re point three, he seems to operate with the Anselmina view of the atonement, which is held to by Calvinists, Lutherans, and most
evangelicals.
Mere Christianity
The C.S. Lewis Catechism
Q5. Is salvation by God's predestination or by human choice?
A4. "I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel
my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this
affair. I was decided upon... I chose, yet it really did not seem possible to do the
opposite."
Mere Christianity
"Faith... is the art of holding onto things your reason has once
accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change,
whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that
I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very
improbable: but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which
Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods
against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is
such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get
off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist,
but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent
on the weather and the state of its digestion."
"... As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain
children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only 'as
harmless as doves' but also 'as wise as serpents.' He wants a child's
heart, but a grown-up's head."
He took in more, he felt more, he remember more, he
invented more … His writings record an intense
awareness, a vigorous reaction, a taking of the world into
his heart … His blacks and whites of good and evil and
his ecstasies and miseries were the tokens of a capacity
for experience beyond our scope.
Austin Farrer on C.S. Lewis
Conclusion
It is the way Lewis thoroughly integrated his Christian faith into his scholarly
work that leaves the largest legacy and which has impressed me and blessed me
most.
Lewis taught me... how to long for God and seek true joy.
How to integrate a Christian worldview with my vocation, my family life, and my
inner self.
If go to Lewis for ultimate answers you will be disappointed. In all his writings,
Lewis tried to point to Christ.
The impact of Lewis on my life has been great. He has challenged me to grow in
my faith so that I’m not afraid to engage spiritually and intellectually with a
world hostile to God. But above all he has taught me that the power of the
imagination is one of the greatest tool we have to bridge the gap into the secular
mind. My tropical-Latin-culture- mind found in Lewis a way to conciliate
samba, soccer, engineering, theology, joy … which is consistent with a
Reformed worldview.
Next Weeks
• March 14
– Morality, Ethics
– Screwtape Letters
– Theological Essays
• March 21
– Myth, Imagination
– Narnia and Trilogy
• March 28
– Love, Pain and Suffering
– Shadowlands