A literary invention?

In about 1970, a friend, then in the Army, an English major and later an English professor, sent me a letter that contained this on the gospel writers:

I do not believe in some unknown Jewish writer or writers that much greater than Shakespeare: I do not even believe in a mortal man able to write some of the lines of Christ. And most of all, I do not believe in anyone either convinced of Christ or trying to create a new religion, who could write those lines I still don't wholly understand, that render His isolation complete, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

That line in dramatic effect is greater than anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Its mystery is stupefying. And no spreader of any gospel would have invented it; only a man who was there and who heard it, and who felt compelled to tell all other truths would have put it in his account of the one he believed was his savior.

More recently, from an interview with Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind:

For historians, Holland notes the crucifixion is the most unusual aspect of the four gospel accounts. Although several ancient religions include stories of the death and resurrection of gods, none of these religions would tell of their gods dying in a painful, humiliating way. Moreover, they would not have depicted their gods as subject to crucifixion which Holland describes as “paradigmatically the punishment visited on slaves.”

Even to its initial audience, Christianity was radically counter-cultural.

Furthermore, the character of Jesus is a “bizarre” and “unfathomable” mystery. Harder asked Holland to explain his own quote from Dominion: “Nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature.”

Holland notes that if Jesus is purely a literary character, he is the most remarkable literary creation of all time. To replicate Jesus, an author would have to write a character that is simultaneously human and divine. Then, the author would have to portray him in such a way that people two thousand years later in continents the author has never heard of will still believe this figure is God and man.

It would take an unbelievably gifted author to accomplish the task if it were possible at all. And yet, four different authors managed to do so. Although Holland does not undertake to prove the historicity of the gospel story, he argues that categorizing Jesus’s parables and gospel stories as mere fiction does not solve the riddle. Either the gospel authors channel a historical Jesus or there is profound mystery in how such an uncanny story could have been written, gained prominence, and remained influential two thousand years later.

Furthermore, Holland credits the idea of human dignity itself to the imago dei found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The very idea and gut instinct that all humans have inherent dignity is theological, he claims. Thus, he names humanism as a Christian heresy that removes God while still privileging humanity with a dignity that all others should respect. .... (more)

Davison Drumm, "Historian Tom Holland on Christianity and a World Transformed," Juicy Ecumenism, March 12, 2025.

Is Pascal's Wager a good bet?

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist. He is also a Christian, author of the soon-to-be published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A recent column was titled "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God." From that:

...I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. ....

[An] underrated argument I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” ....

.... We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. ....

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon? ....

As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Douthat's column is behind a subscription wall. I read it by getting a free, limited, subscription.

Ross Douthat, "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God," New York Times, Feb. 7, 2025.

Integral to humanity

From a review of Alister McGrath's Why We Believe:

His latest book, Why We Believe, provides McGrath with another opportunity to defend belief in the face of those who deride it as at best irrational and weird and at worst, dangerous. It coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the Christian Nicene Creed, first adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and still used today as a profession of faith by those with official positions in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Churches.

But as McGrath rightly says of a creed – a word taken from the Latin credo, “I believe” – it might be a description of what a Christian believes, but it’s a limited statement. To truly understand belief, he argues, we need to see it lived. As he reminds his readers, CS Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most high-profile atheists-turned-Christians, as well as the creator of Narnia, understood that “the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary… creeds cannot convey either [Christianity’s] imaginative appeal or its subjective impact.”

McGrath’s basic premise is that belief, rather than being outmoded and unscientific superstition, is integral to being human. In a rewriting of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, he argues that homo sapiens needs to make sense of life, not merely survive it. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson would put it, we are meaning-seeking creatures. Beliefs, whether humanist, or Christian, or that of another religion, shape the way we understand and experience the world.

The most interesting issue about faith and its understanding of human nature, after all, is how it keeps bubbling up, not only in people’s everyday lives but in public discourse. While humanists, as McGrath points out, believe in the inherent goodness of people, a Christian such as Miss Marple understands the simultaneous capacity for its opposite. Only this autumn, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead reached for Christian theology in her Reith Lectures to help explain evil. It was, she argued, an absence of good, and its antidote to evil was therefore to practise goodness – in other words, the development of virtue that theologians and philosophers from Aquinas onwards have been advocating.

McGrath uses this book to take on Dawkins et al once more: he complains that the New Atheists “degraded and rationalised faith”, and treated it as though it were “simply a form of data”. But he also gives an account of belief’s many facets, from the search for a big picture to the difference it makes to navigating a difficult world. He perceptively comments on how suffering, once seen as a connection between Christians and Christ, is now often perceived as a problem by Christian thinkers drawn into trying to rationalise pain. .... (more)

Catherine Pepinster, "Atheists, you don’t even understand what ‘belief’ is," The Telegraph, Jan. 9, 2025.

Blind faith?

Greg Koukl argues that "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'," not the thing, the word:

I have a suggestion. I want you to forget talking about faith—your faith, others’ faith, even the Christian faith. Here’s why you should take my advice.

Sometimes a word outlives its usefulness to communicate accurately. ....

It’s virtually impossible nowadays to use the word without people subconsciously adding “blind” or “leap of” as modifiers. Indeed, some find it impossible to understand faith in any other way since, in their minds, irrationality is central to any definition of religious faith. ....

That’s what they mean when they talk about religious faith. Is this what you mean when you use that word? I hope not, since that isn’t what the biblical authors meant. Pistis, the Greek word for faith, means active trust, and the biblical context reveals over and over again that this trust is based on evidence like reliable witnesses, rational reflection, and convincing proofs. ....

When talking about your own act of faith, use the word “trust.” When talking about the content of your beliefs, use the word “convictions”—e.g., you put your trust (not faith) in Christ based on your confidence in your Christian convictions (not faith).

Instead of saying that you believe in the resurrection (“belief” words have the same liability), say, rather, “I’m convinced Jesus rose from the dead,” or just, “Jesus rose from the dead.” These statements invite a request for reasons, which you can then give. ....

Greg Koukl, "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'" Stand to Reason, August 1, 2024

Old-fashioned truths

In September 1947, the cover of Time, perhaps then the most important American weekly magazine, portrayed C.S. Lewis. The cover article, uncredited, but in fact by Whittaker Chambers, former Communist spy, now a Christian witness against that ideology, described Lewis to Time's readers. (Lewis didn't much like this portrayal):

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his horn rimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking—to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience—he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly —his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers—to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job—the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C.S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.

Since 1941, when Lewis published a witty collection of infernal correspondence called The Screwtape Letters, this middle-aged (49) bachelor professor who lives a mildly humdrum life (“I like monotony”) has sold something over a million copies of his 15 books. He has made 29 radio broadcasts on religious subjects, each to an average of 600,000 listeners. Any fully ordained minister or priest might envy this Christian layman his audience.

That audience is the result of Lewis’ special gift for dramatizing Christian dogma. He would be the last to claim that what he says is new; but, like another eloquent and witty popularizer of Christianity, the late G.K. Chesterton, he has a talent for putting old-fashioned truths into a modern idiom. .... (more)

Whittaker Chambers, "Don v. Devil," Time, September 8, 1947.

Moods

C.S. Lewis on faith:

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to 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. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Chapter 11 "Faith" (1952)

"Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice"

Douglas Murray's choice this week in his series, "Things Worth Remembering," is a sermon delivered by C.S. Lewis soon after the outbreak of World War II:

When I was at Oxford, I met the actor Robert Hardy, who told me that, as an undergraduate, he was fortunate enough to have had Tolkien as his tutor in Anglo-Saxon literature and C.S. Lewis as his tutor in Medieval English.

Both men became most famous for creating their own fantasy worlds—Tolkien with the Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis with his Chronicles of Narnia series, which are often thought of as children’s books, but which are much more than that. ....

Lewis was not only a writer of scholarly books and popular fiction. He was also, perhaps, the foremost Christian apologist of the mid-twentieth century. His books and lectures—Fern-Seed and Elephants is a very good place to start—did something that very few people can do today.

Most professors, not least of literature, have no interest in communicating with a wide audience. They play games for other people in their field. They also seem to take exceptionally obvious or untrue ideas and try to spin them out in a way that makes really rather banal observations seem infinitely more complex than they are.

Lewis had the opposite skill—a real skill—which was to distill a lifetime’s learning and make complex and deep ideas not just understandable but relatable. ....

The selection that Murray has chosen is from a sermon Lewis delivered in 1939, “Learning in Wartime.”   Murray:

It is a profoundly important message. Essentially, it is this: do not put off what you have to do in your life until the times are optimal. Because they never were optimal, and they never will be.

Human life, he notes, was always filled with distractions, alarms, panics, and tragedy. That is not what makes it remarkable. What makes life remarkable is that we get on with what we have to do in spite of these things. Alone among the creatures, we have the capability to understand the world around us and to have some sense of where it might be going. That could push us into despair and despondency. But the history of mankind is not that. It is that we did and do remarkable things, in spite of such knowledge. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: C.S. Lewis on Keeping Calm in Chaos," The Free Press, March 10, 2024.

The hinge of history

On the importance of knowing whose birth we will celebrate on Christmas (John 1:14):

Who then was Jesus, really?

You cannot even ask the question without implicitly choosing among answers. The very wording of the question, in the past tense ("Who was Jesus?") or the present ("Who is Jesus?"), presupposes its own answer. For those who believe his claim do not say that he was divine, but is divine. Divinity does not change or die or disappear into the past. Furthermore, if he really rose from the dead, he still is, and is very much alive today.

The Importance of the Issue

The issue is crucially important for at least six reasons.

1. The divinity of Christ is the most distinctively Christian doctrine of all. A Christian is most essentially defined as one who believes this. And no other religion has a doctrine that is even similar. Buddhists do not believe that Buddha was God. Muslims do not believe that Muhammad was God: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet."

2. The essential difference between orthodox, traditional, biblical, apostolic, historic, creedal Christianity and revisionist, modernist, liberal Christianity is right here. The essential modernist revision is to see Christ simply as the ideal man, or "the man for others"; as a prophet, rabbi, philosopher, teacher, social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, reformer, sage or magician—but not God in the flesh.

3. The doctrine works like a skeleton key, unlocking all the other doctrinal doors of Christianity. Christians believe each of their many doctrines not because they have reasoned their own way to them as conclusions from a theological inquiry or as results of some mystical experiences, but on the divine authority of the One who taught them, as recorded in the Bible and transmitted by the church.

If Christ was only human, he could have made mistakes. Thus, anyone who wants to dissent from any of Christ's unpopular teachings will want to deny his divinity. And there are bound to be things in his teachings that each of us finds offensive—if we look at the totality of those teachings rather than confining ourselves to comfortable and familiar ones.

4. If Christ is divine, then the incarnation, or "enfleshing" of God, is the most important event in history. It is the hinge of history. It changes everything. If Christ is God, then when he died on the cross, heaven's gate, closed by sin, opened up to us for the first time since Eden. No event in history could be more important to every person on earth than that.

5. There is an unparalleled present existential bite to the doctrine. For if Christ is God, then, since he is omnipotent and present right now, he can transform you and your life right now as nothing and no one else possibly can. He alone can fulfill the psalmist's desperate plea to "create in me a clean heart. O God" (Ps 51:10). Only God can create; there is even a special word in Hebrew for it (bara').

6. And if Christ is divine, he has a right to our entire lives, including our inner life and our thoughts. If Christ is divine, our absolute obligation is to believe everything he says and obey everything he commands. If Christ is divine, the meaning of freedom becomes conformity to him.

Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, IVP, 1994, pp. 151-152.

Right and Wrong

C.S. Lewis on Natural Law:

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"—"Why should you shove in first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard? Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football. ....

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair. ....

C.S. Lewis, "The Law of Human Nature," Mere Christianity, Chapter 1, 1943.

Boredom

From a First Things review of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life:

Money and honor, the traditional rewards of work, do not satisfy because money begets the need for more money and honor is fleeting. Even pleasure is tiresome after a while. Who, in the waning days of a vacation, has not itched to get back to a “normal” routine? In reaching the limits of work and pleasure alike we are prone to boredom, disillusionment, and depression. Gary proposes that leisure and liberal education can remedy these unpleasant states. I agree. But the escape from boredom may require a still more radical transformation of will, and that transformation may be something we cannot accomplish by ourselves. ....

Why does nothing seem interesting, everything dull and gray? The answer might be not that the world is boring, but that we ourselves are dull, shallow, and malformed. This ignorance and lack of formation is partly due to the usual suspects of modern culture—vacuous television programs, electronic devices in general, the advertising industry—but we have allowed these influences to shape us. ....

The bitter truth is that we modern Americans are privileged to have enormous potential for leisure and liberal education; yet we cannot seem to understand or desire it. ....

The stubborn characters who appear in C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce illustrate the immense difficulty of such an escape. In this short fantasy, heavenly spirits welcome their visitors from Hell, urging them to forget themselves and embrace the great joy and release that await them in Christ.

Instead, almost to a person, the visitors refuse to relinquish their hard-won identities. The bishop wants to continue his intellectual questioning and paper-giving; the painter insists upon continuing to paint; the mother protests that her love for her son is more important than anything else. All perversely refuse to see the beauty that is right in front of them... Perhaps only prayer can really deliver us from our willful pride and self-centeredness, traits that seem to stick with us despite our best efforts. .... (more)

Elizabeth C. Corey, "Leisure and Liberality," First Things, Oct., 2023.

Will the tide turn?

From a review of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (by Justin Brierley with a foreward by N.T. Wright):

...[T]he implosion of the New Atheism was more than just an ironic farce. It revealed an important fallacy. The movement exalted science as the replacement for religion. But whereas science can tell us about physical reality, it cannot be a guide to moral values, as the atheist schism itself demonstrates.

The New Atheism had unintended consequences. “I thank God for Richard Dawkins,” says Brierley. “New Atheism has revitalized the intellectual tradition of the Christian church in the West.”

The church, he says, had been woefully unprepared for this frontal attack on the faith. “With the four horsemen at their heels, the church was forced to put down its tambourines and guitars and pick up its history and philosophy books again.” As a result, “Arguably, the last two decades have seen the greatest revival of Christian intellectual confidence in living memory as the church has risen to the challenge.” ....

Whereas the New Atheists insisted that religion is the source of everything bad in the world, recent historical research has proved the opposite. Classicist Tom Holland documented the casual and pervasive cruelty of the Greeks and Romans, who considered pity to be a weakness and who most emphatically did not believe in the innate human dignity of all. His book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World shows that beliefs such as the equal worth of all human beings and our duty to help the vulnerable cannot be found in the ancient world—or anywhere else, really, much less as a result of naturalistic evolution—and are unique to Christianity, which has spread them even to the secularists. This has powerful apologetic implications. When the New Atheists bring up atrocities committed by Christians—at which the ancient Greeks and Romans would not have batted an eye—they are appealing to a distinctly Christian ethic! Those who criticize the ethics of the Bible are presupposing the ethics that the Bible has given them! Similarly, when progressives demand social justice, racial equality, the rights of women, and respect for the marginalized, they are drawing on the Christian heritage they tend to repudiate. .... (more)

Gene Edward Veith, "Is the Tide Turning on Religious Belief?," Acton Institute, Sept. 13, 2023.

I wanted reasons

I received James Como's Mystical Perelandra two days ago. In his first chapter, he describes his discovery of C.S. Lewis, a discovery that feels very much like my own and also, I'm sure, the experience of many others:

.... I have always been an argumentative person, even as a child. I wanted reasons, and if they came my way I would question them. And, my goodness, could Lewis argue! He broke down an adversary's ideas to their underlying assumptions, often unexamined and false, confronted counter-arguments, then eventually, after what his friend Owen Barfield would later call "dialectical obstetrics," nailed down his point. So the very first, and enduring attraction, was intellectual.

Then came imaginative propulsion. That began with The Great Divorce, combining fantasy, the psychology of sin, and argument. Soon I made the voyage to Malacandra, that is, Mars, in Out of the Silent Planet: greater fantasy, astonishing literary psychology (Lewis knew his readers' expectations and played upon those keys like a virtuoso), and — argument. But in this case, there was also a design that invited participation, a puzzle to be solved, a correspondence. And so entered Myth, a story that "could have been historical fact" but, even if not, so conveyed a truth, or a collection of truths, that it was not only compelling but convincing: yes, one could say, I see how those truths hang together.

Next came holiness. Perelandra proved irresistible, as narrative, argument, spiritual psychology, and as sanctifying myth. For decades I have been re-reading it and dwelling within it, and I do not know how Lewis could have produced it except as a mystical irruption strained through his mightily equipped intellect and story-telling genius.

For me what followed Perelandra was no footnote, for The Chronicles of Narnia, "The Weight of Glory" (Lewis's central statement of Joy), "Transposition," "The World's Last Night," "Meditation in a Toolshed"(!), and so many other essays, along with Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters (for two months I studied Lewis's manuscript in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), and eventually the landmark novel Till We Have Faces (his best literary fiction, both he and I agree) — all these and more...

My own first significant encounter with Lewis was Mere Christianity, and it changed the direction of my life. I also started looking for more: books by and about Lewis, books he cited, and so on. With the help of friends, I've visited the Wade Collection at Wheaton College, Lewis's home in Headington, his colleges (Magdalen College in Oxford, and Magdalene College in Cambridge), and supped at the "Bird and Baby" where the Inklings once gathered every week.

Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis & His Favorite Book is for sale at Amazon on paper and as a Kindle download.

When the rain, wind, and floods come...

From a review of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation:

Christianity is a worldview that requires intellectual nurturing and development beginning at childhood. Christians who emphasize emotion and modern America over historical Christianity and tested truths stand on a foundation of sand. As the parable illustrates, when the rain, wind, and floods come, only the house built on the rock prevails.

Rena Mainetti, "Testimony and the Dangers of Anti-Intellectualism," Juicy Ecumenism, Aug. 1, 2023.

Boundary lines

From "Christian Apologetics," delivered by C.S. Lewis “to an assembly of Anglican priests and youth leaders ... at Carmarthen [Wales] during Easter, 1945”:

...I insist: that wherever you draw the lines, bounding lines must exist, beyond which your doctrine will cease either to be Anglican or to be Christian: and I suggest also that the lines come a great deal sooner than many modern priests think. I think it is your duty to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.

This is your duty not specially as Christians or as priests but as honest men. There is a danger here of the clergy developing a special professional conscience which obscures the very plain moral issue. Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defence of those opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of another.

Even when we have thus ruled out teaching which is in direct contradiction to our profession, we must define our task still further. We are to defend Christianity itself — the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. This must be clearly distinguished from the whole of what any one of us may think about God and Man. Each of us has his individual emphasis: each holds, in addition to the Faith, many opinions which seem to him to be consistent with it and true and important. And so perhaps they are. But as apologists it is not our business to defend them. We are defending Christianity; not 'my religion'. When we mention our personal opinions we must always make quite clear the difference between them and the Faith itself. St Paul has given us the model in I Corinthians 7:25: on a certain point he has 'no commandment of the Lord' but gives 'his judgement'. No one is left in doubt as to the difference in status implied. ....

Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the traditional language of Christianity. ....

To conclude—you must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every Ordination examination. .... (the essay)

C.S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics," God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970.

Not Christianity at all

My denomination experienced the conflict between "modernism" and "fundamentalism" in the early 20^th century. My grandfather, I think, was among the "modernists." Unlike many Protestant denominations the conflict didn't result in a split, but it did result in many prospective pastors choosing to attend a seminary other than ours.

I identify with Machen's argument. From the Introduction to J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism:

...[T]he great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called "modernism" or "liberalism." Both names are unsatisfactory; the latter, in particular, is question-begging. The movement designated as "liberalism" is regarded as "liberal" only by its friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts. And indeed the movement is so various in its manifestations that one may almost despair of finding any common name which will apply to all its forms. But manifold as are the forms in which the movement appears, the root of the movement is one; the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism—that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity. The word "naturalism" is here used in a sense somewhat different from its philosophical meaning. In this non-philosophical sense it describes with fair accuracy the real root of what is called, by what may turn out to be a degradation of an originally noble word, "liberal" religion. ....

What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture; may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age?

It is this problem which modern liberalism attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion—against the Christian doctrines of the person of Christ, and of redemption through His death and resurrection—the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting "the essence of Christianity." ....

...[I]t may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category. It may appear further that the fears of the modern man as to Christianity were entirely ungrounded, and that in abandoning the embattled walls of the city of God he has fled in needless panic into the open plains of a vague natural religion only to fall an easy victim to the enemy who ever lies in ambush there. ....

...[O]ur principal concern just now is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene. In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend. Here as in many other departments of life it appears that the things that are sometimes thought to be hardest to defend are also the things that are most worth defending. ....

In setting forth the current liberalism, now almost dominant in the Church, over against Christianity, we are animated, therefore, by no merely negative or polemic purpose; on the contrary, by showing what Christianity is not we hope to be able to show what Christianity is, in order that men may be led to turn from the weak and beggarly elements and have recourse again to the grace of God.

Christianity and Liberalism is now in the public domain, and can be downloaded as a pdf here. There is also a new edition with a foreward by Carl Trueman that can be ordered at Amazon.

An enemy of irrationality and lazy thinking

If you don't know her books and essays, you should. From "The Remarkable Dorothy L. Sayers":

.... Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), author of sixteen novels, ten plays, six translations, and twenty-four works of nonfiction, was an accomplished writer in multiple genres. Many admirers of C.S. Lewis have heard of her; she usually merits a handful of page references in the index of his biographies. Another class of reader — the fan of paperback mystery novels — knows Sayers as the creator of the memorable, near-perfect Lord Peter Wimsey. Yet again, dramatists might have performed her play The Zeal of Thy House. It is a testament to the breadth of her career that so many different readers know her name, if not all her works. ....

Sayers had a hard-hitting, humorous, competent style, and reading her would benefit many Christians today, particularly those inclined to use their faith as a cover for sloppy thinking. She had little patience for masking inability with piety, and her writing bears out her commitment to quality craftsmanship. ....

Her first novel, Whose Body?, was a murder mystery introducing Lord Peter Wimsey, an elegant gentleman-detective. Peter is brought in to solve the case of a dead body, lying in a bathtub and wearing nothing to help with identification but a pince-nez. He does so with suavity and humor. After some initial hurdles, Whose Body? came to the attention of an American publisher, who brought Sayers to the attention of the British market from the long way around. A second novel, Clouds of Witness, followed shortly thereafter.

Sayers would go on to write twelve novels, numerous short stories, and even a few faux histories about her whimsical hero. Wimsey, in turn, transported her from surviving month to month to a stable-enough income to support herself and others. ....

...Sayers had hit upon a thesis that was to drive both her fiction and nonfiction Christian works. Christianity was interesting and not only interesting; it was the best story ever told. This was not a new idea to Christendom, as anyone familiar with G.K. Chesterton knows, but Sayers gave it a twist. If the story of Christianity really was the most remarkable of tales, and if Jesus was a dangerous firebrand, then it was the responsibility of Christians to keep the romance alive. Yet the opposite had happened. Overuse of ecclesiastical language, stale curates, and excessive talk of Christ being meek and mild had made the Lion of Judah boring. She was blunt on this point. “Nobody cares…nowadays that Christ was ‘scourged, railed upon, buffeted, mocked and crucified’ because all those words have grown hypnotic with ecclesiastical use.” But if one wrote that Christ was “spiked upon the gallows like an owl on a barn-door,” this would not only get people’s attention, it would recall what actually happened to Him. ....

...I have avoided focusing on Sayers’s personal relationships. They are surprising at times and certainly worth noting, but she would have wanted her works to come first as the best expression of herself. Every one of her writing stages — the novelist, the Christian, and the scholar — exhibit something of her humorous personality, boldness in controversy, and her willingness to put her intellect at the service of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. .... [S]he knew irrationality and lazy thinking when she saw it; I suspect that she would have been as intimidating an interviewer as ever [C.S.] Lewis was in his Oxford rooms. .... (more)

Lindsey Scholl, "The Remarkable Dorothy L. Sayers," C.S. Lewis Institute, June 7, 2018.

The times we are in

Alan Jacobs responding to criticism by someone who thinks he doesn't know "what time it is":

.... But I think I do know. It’s time to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It’s time to seek the good of the city in which we live as pilgrims. It’s time to preach the Gospel in season and out of season. All these metaphors of disaster are just distractions from our undramatic daily calling. “The rest is not our business.”

Alan Jacobs, "absolutizing (slight return)," The Homebound Symphony, June 14, 2023.

Somewhere outside

"Apologetics in an Age of Despair" begins with a reference to C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength:

...[T]he character Mark describes his life as “the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.” Along with his wife, Mark functions as a personification of modernity, and his beliefs represent many secular people today. Yet through the events of the plot, Mark becomes awakened to transcendence. While imprisoned and subjected to psychological torture, he has a profound moral experience:

There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment.

Gavin Ortlund, "Apologetics in an Age of Despair," TGC, June 12, 2023.

Utterly joyful

Rev. Tim Keller died today. If you were to search this blog for references to him, his books, interviews with him, incidental references, etc. you would find many — far more than I expected when I did so this afternoon. I haven't read most of his books, but I have read The Reason for God (2009), certainly one of the best modern apologetics.

Years ago Mike Potemra wrote about his visit to Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the church Keller started in NYC and pastored for many years. Potemra was greatly impressed:

Not enough good things can be said about the ministry of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The senior pastor, Tim Keller, is justly acclaimed for his Biblical preaching, which is both (unostentatiously) learned and deeply moving. And thousands of people, mostly young professionals, are attracted there every Sunday. ...I went to the evening service at Redeemer and was rewarded with one of the most spiritually affecting services I have ever encountered. The music at the evening services is provided by a six-piece jazz combo. .... The band was simply great, its uptempo songs almost danceable; and now listen to some of the lyrics: “Sinners, whose love can ne’er forget the wormwood and the gall...”

The convicting message of sin and depravity — wormwood and gall! — could not be clearer in these lyrics. And yet the music is, at the very same time, utterly joyful. This is the Christian message in miniature: Suffering, failure, and heartbreak exist, they are — at least in this world — not abolished; but they are transfigured into something beautiful. This is the Christian understanding of joy: laughter and beauty in the full awareness and experience of tears.

The Rev. Keller’s sermon was terrific, relating God’s presence in the burning bush to the “FIRE” that blazed in the mystical experience in 1654 of Blaise Pascal. But the band had the final word, doing a splendid job with the instrumental postlude, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” by Joe Zawinul. .... I strongly encourage visitors to NYC to give Redeemer a try....

Mike Potemra, "The Gospel in Miniature," National Review Online, Nov. 22, 2010.

Time well wasted

From an appreciation on Twitter:

The older I get, the better C.S. Lewis gets. His wisdom gets keener, and his insight clearer year by year. Like Aslan, he grows as I do.

I can understand why some folks who didn’t grow up in Narnia with the Pevensies may not warm to those stories. Jesus himself tells us that it is hard to relearn the wisdom of childhood once we’ve allowed the accumulation of years to dilute our ability for faith and wonder.

But Lewis didn’t just write stories for kids. The Ransom Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) was meant for adults. It is well told fiction, well taught theology, and well wrought social commentary. Those who appreciate what Orwell does with 1984 should watch a master at work in That Hideous Strength.

Lewis understood that good fiction can do all sorts of things, and that the best fiction can do the most important things—chief among them is telling the truth.....

...[I]f fiction is not your cup of tea, there is still no shortage of good—perhaps even the best—Lewis. His Preface to Paradise Lost is high art. More than a mere literary psychology of Milton, tracing his thought through Homer and Virgil and Beowulf, Lewis provides a psychology of Satan and litters the page with keen insights into human nature, evil, and the dynamics of the Fall. ....

Another gem that many overlook is his book on medieval cosmology disguised as literary criticism, The Discarded Image. Perhaps no other work has helped me understand the spirit of the Renaissance, with its humours, and hierarchies, and music of the spheres. More still, it helps us see what shaped the men who shaped the world. ....

His Studies in Words is a heady shot of philosophical philology served neat with no chaser. .... And many have never heard of his academic magnum opus, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) and this is a shame. It really is an engaging work, despite its rather drab title. It is a fascinating study of a logocentric world turned into words again.

I have largely avoided his most “popular” titles (Miracles, Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, etc.), because their ubiquity is its own testimony. Of course they are worth reading, and it is time well wasted.

Lewis is not overrated, people are simply not interesting enough these days to be sufficiently interested. To borrow from Chesterton, there’s no lack of wonder, only a lack of wonderers.

You will neglect Lewis to your own intellectual and imaginative impoverishment. ....