LaGrave Avenue
Christian Reformed Church
The Real C.S. Lewis
His Life and Writings: Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity
“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.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
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
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
Born in Belfast in 1898.
Educated in England (prep school then at Malvern College
and finally by a private tutor.
Inlisted 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.
". . . when I can swim [or play soccer] no longer, if I have
not reached Aslan's country,
or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract,
I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise. . . ."
--Reepicheep, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Introductory Words
I discovered C.S. Lewis when in college. 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.
"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 Man
C. S. Lewis never claimed to be a theologian. He approached Christianity from a very
intellectual, academic, and honest way – not theological.
His Beliefs
Mere Christianity is the core set of beliefs held by the majority of Christians throughout the
ages. He believed that Jesus was literally born of a virgin, crucified, buried, and that He
physically rose again never to die again. Mere Christianity teaches the doctrine of the Trinity:
that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are all three God, and that God is one. C. S. Lewis tried to
demonstrate that the supernatural does exist and that miracles did occur. Mere Christianity
teaches that Christ died for our sins, that He was resurrected to prove that He conquered death
and that to receive forgiveness of sin one must respond in faith to Him.
The Themes
C. S. Lewis struggled with in his own life and subsequently addressed in his writings: the
problem of suffering and pain, the existence of the supernatural or the miraculous, and how
Christianity is the only world-view that consistently explains the nature of man and the
universe.
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 …)
What about Lewis’s reputation in the UK?
Sharing Time???
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 with the longing that this generation naturally feels.
avoids 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. 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 Formation of a Liberal and Orthodox Mind
Born into a bookish family of Protestants in Belfast, Ireland.
"There were books in the study, books in the dining room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep)
in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the
cistern attic, books of all kinds,"
A Life of Problems and Moments of Delight (Joy)
Lewis mother's death from cancer came just three months before Jack's tenth birthday, and the
young man was hurt deeply by her passing. On top of that, his father never fully recovered
from her death, and both boys felt increasingly estranged from him; home life was never warm
and satisfying again.
Transition From Christianity to Atheism
His mother's death convinced young Jack that the God he encountered in the Bible his mother
gave him didn't always answer prayers. This early doubt, coupled with an unduly harsh, selfdirected spiritual regimen and the influence of a mildly occultist boarding school matron a few
years later, caused Lewis to reject Christianity and become an avowed atheist.
University Life
Lewis entered Oxford in 1917 as a student and never really left. "The place has surpassed my
wildest dreams," he wrote to his father after spending his first day there. "I never saw anything
so beautiful." Despite an interruption to fight in World War I (in which he was wounded by a
bursting shell), he always maintained his home and friends in Oxford.
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 ourteous
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, like Browning with his Old Yellow Book, came
upon a soiled copy of George Macdonald's Phantastes in a bookstall.
•Browning's description of his own transport over his discovery applies
equally well to Lewis as he sat down to read:
A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,
And lights my eyes, and lifts me by the hair.
Surprised by Joy
•Alongside the romantic elements in the novel, Lewis found something new, a
bright shadow that he later discovered to be the voice of holiness.
•It was as though the voice which had called to me in the room, or in my
body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it eluded me by
proximity - something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side
of knowledge.
•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
•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.
Surprised by Joy
•Back at Oxford, he began to make friends who were to influence his future.
•Owen Barfield, an anthropologist, who became Lewis's "anti-self" and with
whom he argued night after night and on long walks. He found the new friends
to be man of high principles.
•Just when the New Psychology was causing him to doubt his whole
experience of Joy, some of his closest friends began to turn Christian.
•With Barfield in particular he debated violently and learned much. It was he
who destroyed forever in Lewis the easy belief in "chronological snobbery,"
Surprised by Joy
•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.
Surprised by Joy
•Christians now began to appear all around him - men like
Dyson, Tolkien ..
•He re-read Euripides' Hippolytus and Joy returned to his heart.
•On the intellectual side he read Alexander's Space, Time and
Diet and learned that all important principle that we do not
think a thought in the same sense in which we think Herodotus
is unreliable.
•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.
The Trout Inn
Surprised by Joy
•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.
•All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring," an object clearly
outside both his mind and body.
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.
•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.
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 everso-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.
Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis, Book Nine
CHAPTER THREE
This Side by the Darkness
Within an inch of him he had seen a face. Now a cloud crossed the moon and the face
was no longer visible, but he knew that it was still looking at him--an aged, appalling
face, crumbling and chaotic, larger than human. Presently its voice began:
"Do you still think it is the black hole you fear? Do you not know even now the
deeper fear whereof the black hole is but the veil? Do you not know why they would all
persuade you that there is nothing beyond the brook and that when a man's lease is out his
story is done? Because, if this were true, they could in their reckoning make me equal to
nought, therefore not dreadful: could say that where I am they are not, that while they are,
I am not.
They have prophesied soft things to you1. I am no negation, and the deepest of your heart
acknowledges it. Else why have you buried the memory of your uncle's face so carefully
that it has needed all these things to bring it up? Do not think that you can escape me; do
not think you can call me Nothing. To you I am not Nothing; I am the being blindfolded,
the losing all power of self defense, the surrender, not because any terms are offered, but
because resistance is gone: the step into the dark: the defeat of all precautions: utter
helplessness turned out to utter risk: the final loss of liberty. The Landlord's Son who
feared nothing, feared me.
"What am I to do?" said John.
"Which you choose," said the voice. "Jump, or be thrown. Shut your eyes or
have them bandaged by force. Give in or struggle."
"I would sooner do the first, if I could."
"Then I am your servant and no more your master. The cure of death is dying.
He who lays down his liberty in that act receives it back. Go down to Mother Kirk."
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
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."
C.S. Lewis: Making Pictures
To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking a about God at all, for
man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. Dorothy Sayers
". . . When [people] try to get rid of man-like, or, as they are called, 'anthropomorphic,'
images, they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds. 'I don't believe in
a personal God,' says one, 'but I do believe in a great spiritual force.' What he has not
noticed is that the word 'force' has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and
electricity and gravitation. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says another, 'but I do
believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all' -not
noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for
the image of some widely extended gas or fluid. A girl I knew was brought up by
'higher thinking' parents to regard God as perfect 'substance.' In later life she realized
that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding.
(To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this
degree of absurdity but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will
find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God, are,
in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out
to be even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology.
Miracles
Myth
Lewis believed that Christian truth must be defended with sound logic and
philosophy. But this apologetic needed to be explicated in order that its meaning
could be made clear to its hearers. That is why he felt this could best be
accomplished through the proper use of myths. By myth he did not mean legends
and fairy tales but a real unfocused gleam of truth falling on human imagination.
In his classic Experiment in Criticism, a book on how to read a book, Lewis lays
out six characteristics of literature that that make a myth:
1. it is extra-literary , or independent of the form of the words used;
2. the pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on such unusual narrative
attractions as suspense or surprise ;
3. our sympathy with the character is minimal;
4. myth is always fantastic and deals with impossibles and preternaturals ;
5. though the experience may be sad or joyful , it always is grave and never
comic;
6. the experience is not only grave but awe inspiring. We feel it to be
numinous. It is as if something of great moment has been communicated to
us.
Myth
From a theological perspective Lewis saw true myths as memories or echoes
of God Himself and He left us with human imagination as their receptor. He
explained this relationship in describing how he came to write the Narnia
Chronicles, as a mythological expression of the Gospel story:
"It was he [the imaginative man] who, after my conversion, led me to embody
my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic form, ranging from
Screwtape to a kind of theological science fiction. And it was of course he
who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian
stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavoring to
adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy tale was the genre
best fitted for what I wanted to say."
Lewis undertook the daunting task of awakening modernity's deadened
imagination to the eternal realities by telling stories of worlds of fixed moral
order, serenity and blissfulness. He had help from a few friends in
understanding imagination as a vehicle to convey the Reality who stands
behind and above the visible world.
"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery
to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The
mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had
never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never
seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow
made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the
divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house
with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to
be saved, but you--you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet
Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him
and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you
will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction.... God will
look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your
place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone,
because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove
is made for a hand."
"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting
symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense
of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims
upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to
Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels-welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is
desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A
door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double
bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn
away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will
become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty
house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming
was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a
commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in
time of trouble?"
"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What
was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my
pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and
always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend,
shipmate fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all
that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me.
Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have
none the less been always together, and created a scandal.“
CS Lewis
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
There was one candle on the
coffin as it was carried out into
the churchyard. It seemed not
only appropriate but also a
symbol of the man and his
integrity and absoluteness and
his faith that the flame burned
so steadily, even in an open air,
and seemed so bright, even in
the bright sun.
Peter Bayley at Lewis’s funeral
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.
“ Mr. Jack, ‘e never ‘ad no idea of money. ’Is mind was always set on ‘igher things.”
Lewis’s gardener
“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.” JRR Tolkien