A Thinking Reed

Category: C.S. Lewis

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus.

    Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party:

    It is not reasonable to suppose that such a Christian Party will acquire new powers of leavening the infidel organization to which it is attached. Why should it? Whatever it calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity; it will have no more power than the political skill of its members gives it to control the behaviour of its unbelieving allies. But there will be a real, and most disastrous, novelty. It will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time–the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind an degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great. Can any more fatal expedient be devised for increasing it than that of dubbing a small band of Fascists, Communists, or Democrats ‘the Christian Party’? The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient make-up we can find. And when once the disguise has succeeded, his commands will presently be taken to abrogate all moral laws and to justify whatever the unbelieving allies of the ‘Christian’ Party wish to do. If ever Christian men can be brought to think treachery and murder the lawful means of establishing the régime they desire, and faked trials, religious persecution and organized hooliganism the lawful means of maintaining it, it will, surely, be by just such a process as this. The history of the late medieval pseudo-Crusader, or the Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered. On those who add ‘Thus said the Lord’ to their merely human utterances descends the doom of conscience which seems clearer and clearer the more it is loaded with sin.

    All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: ‘Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?’ By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is eficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us. (from “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” in God In the Dock)

  • Aliens without sin

    Recently I’ve been reading A Case of Conscience by James Blish. This is a science fiction novel written in the 50s about a Jesuit priest/biologist studying a race of reptillian anthropoids on a distant planet. They have a seemingly perfect ethical society without friction or conflict, but also utterly destitute of religion or any sense of transcendence. He thus concludes that they are, literally, spawn of the Devil!

    I haven’t finished it yet, but it provides an interesting contrast with C. S. Lewis’ Out On the Silent Planet where an Earthman encounters “unfallen” extraterrestrials. One of the chief differences is that the aliens have a kind of natural rapport with God and the humans are almost uniformly malicious and predatory. Lewis expressed in a few different places his firm belief that nothing good could come from human encounters with extraterrestrials. He was convinced that we would treat them pretty much the way European colonists treated indigenous peoples. Being subject to Original Sin, he thought humanity should be quarantined.

  • Lord, teach us to pray

    This weekend we were visiting my family in my ancestral homeland of Western Pennsylvania. As is our habit, we attended the early service at the ELCA congregation in my hometown. This is a gem of a church and we always receive a warm welcome when we worship there, even though we don’t have a particular connection to the parish.

    Anyway, the pastor was on vacation but in his stead the ELCA bishop of the Northwestern Pennsylvania Synod, Ralph E. Jones, presided and preached. The Gospel lession was the story from Luke 11 where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and he responds by giving them the Lord’s Prayer as well as by telling them that their Heavenly Father is always ready to give them the gift of the Spirit.

    Bishop Jones’ sermon began with recounting a message he’d heard on a Christian radio station against the practice of “rote” pre-written prayers. God, the speaker suggested, wants prayers that come spontaneously “from our hearts.”

    However, Bp. Jones, good Lutheran that he apparently is, suggested, the problem with prayer “from the heart” is that our heart’s desires are often self-centered and misaligned with God’s will. What prayers like the Lord’s Prayer do through repeated use, he said, is form us in such a way that our thoughts and desires gradually come to be aligned with God’s will.

    As he put it, if I pray from my heart, I’ll spend a lot more time asking for things than praying for others or offering praise or thanksgiving. But the prayers of the Bible (and the tradition of the church) help us to readjust our vision and our priorities in line with God’s kingdom. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that pre-written prayers keep us in touch with “sound doctrine” and prevent our religion from becoming wholly privatized. I’m also reminded of Bonhoeffer’s dictum that our prayer should be rooted in God’s word, not in the poverty of our hearts.

    He also pointed out that, according to the Gospel text, the gift that God is always ready to give us when we ask in prayer is the Holy Spirit. Some Christians have been misled into the view that God will literally give us whatever we ask for if we have sufficient faith (this seems to be the root of some “prosperity gospel” preaching). But in this story at least, the gift of the Spirit seems to be chiefly what is promised. And the role of the Spirit is to form us into new people who love God and our neighbor.

    I don’t think this should be taken as an argument against “spontaneous” prayer or to say that we should only use pre-writter prayer forms. Personally most, though not the entirety, of my prayer life (pitiful as it is) consists of traditional prayers. I tend to think of prayers as tools for helping me to focus on God, and the great prayers of our tradition seem to me to do this best. This isn’t to say that Christians shouldn’t have recourse to spontaneous prayer, but I do think that Bp. Jones is right that those prayers need to be formed and directed by God as we believe he has revealed himself to us.

  • Fowl play

    Speaking of chickens, this review of a new book about the treatment of chickens under the conditions of industrial farming utterly fails to engage with the moral issue at hand.

    The author, Mick Hume, seems to think that factory farming is a mark of progress and anyone who questions whether the end (cheap meat) justifies the means (untold suffering of millions of sentient creatures) is nothing more than a know-nothing hater of humanity and enlightenment.

    At no point in the article does Hume consider whether we have any moral duties to animals. Nor does he try to argue that they can’t suffer or feel pain. He simply asserts a version of might makes right: people “need” cheap meat, so whatever we do to provide that is ipso facto a mark of progress.

    Hume seeks to discredit concerns about factory farming by asserting that what critics “really” oppose is industrialism and material progress per se:

    Like many issues to do with food and farming today, this chicken debate is not really about the details of different techniques for raising them. It is pecking at bigger targets: industrialised farming and, by implication, the social and economic advance of our society. The demand that we should all ‘reconnect’ with the animals that provide our food, for example, is really a call to turn back the clock on a social division of labour that has been developed over centuries.

    Of course, this is argument by armchair psychoanalysis and Hume has done nothing to prove this point. I’m not saying that there aren’t environmentalists and animal rights advocates who don’t look askance at our industiral economy, but one hardly needs to be a luddite to question whether the suffering we inflict on animals is justifiable, especially in light of the fact that, at least for most people in the Western world, meat is hardly essential to be healthy. It’s ridiculous on its face to claim that “complain[ing] about the ‘injustice’ done by humans to chickens … is to call into question the entire basis of human civilisation.”

    Interestingly, Hume writes that “Regular readers will know that, in an anthropomorphic age when those who suggest that man is superior to beast are branded ‘speciesists’, spiked writers rightly insist upon drawing a clear and uncrossable line between humanity and the ‘animal kingdom’.” As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, spiked is a resolutely secular publication, so I’m curious on what grounds they draw this “clear and uncrossable line.”

    But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, once you’ve given up the idea that there is a metaphysical difference between human beings and other animals and you’ve embraced the doctrine that we can do whatever we like to them, it’s hard to see why, in principle, “might makes right” can’t be extended to other classes, races, or whatever other group stands between us and our interests.

    One tires of pointing this out, but it’s possible to recognize degees of moral considerability among various creautres. That one can recognize that animals are wronged when they are treated in the ways characteristic of modern factory farming doesn’t imply that there is no significant moral difference between a chicken and a human being.

    (Note, I’m not vouching for the book under review, which I haven’t read. And thanks to Chip Frontz for sending along the link.)

  • On almost being liturgically indifferent

    See here for a well-informed (my comment excepted) discussion on things liturgical in light of the rumored forthcoming liberalization of the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass in the RCC. Obviously Protestants don’t directly have a horse in this race, but as Derek points out what the RCC does tends to affect Protestant bodies.

    I admit that I am still quite the liturgical philistine. As a parishoner at what is widely considered to be the flagship parish of Anglo-Catholicism in America it’s still very much a matter of casting pearls before swine in my case. 😉

    We still gravitate toward the Rite II Sung Mass rather than the High Mass in Rite I, due to the greater prevalence of congregational singing and participation. Maybe the sign of a true Protestant is that you have a hard time imagining a church service without lots of hymn-singing! I’ve certainly met some people whom I affectionately refer to as “liturgical fascists” – they genuinely seem to believe that the High Mass is objectively superior to any other possible service.

    For my part I think C.S. Lewis’ self-description fits me pretty well:

    [M]y whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is being snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit — habito dell’arte. (Letters to Malcolm, p. 5)

    Of course Lewis didn’t live to see some of the more banal, not to mention heretical, liturgies that have been inflicted on long-suffering Christian people in the last thirty years or so. Still, I can’t get too excited about arguments over liturgy, though of course I want worship to be reverent, reflect sound doctrine, etc. I definitely have my preferences – I probably feel most at home in a highish traditional Lutheran service that many Anglicans would probably consider pretty middle-of-the-road. But it’s not a hill I’m particularly willing to die on.

    I am glad that there are smart people like Derek, et al. who give this stuff serious thought since they’ll be the ones influencing the shape of worship for the rest of us in the future!

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves.

    In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson and Tolkien about the importance of myth and how Christianity is the “true myth.”

    In October he writes to his good friend Arthur Greeves:

    What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary […]. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

    Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

    Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amound to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened… (pp. 288-9)

    Lewis picks up on this distinction between the thing itself and the doctrines about it later in Mere Christianity where, in his chapter on Redemption, he emphasizes that the theories about the Atonement are not the objects of belief, but the event itself:

    Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. […] A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (pp. 54-56)

    What I find intriguing here is Lewis’s insistence that the “true myth” itself can “work on us” without our having an explicit theory about how it works. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. Many (perhaps most?) Christians throughout history have no doubt enjoyed Christ’s benefits without having much in the way of an explicit theory of Atonement. Maybe it’s a legacy of intellectualistic Protestantism to put so much emphasis on holding the correct doctrine. More sacramental forms of Christianity have always believed that the benefits of Christ’s work come to us in tangible (edible!) forms, not just through understanding.

    Of course, there’s a danger in reducing Christianity to a kind of “magic;” there must, we think, be some cognitive element. An interesting question is raised here about people who are severely mentally handicapped and may have little or no grasp of doctrine. Surely we don’t think that precludes them from being beneficiaries of Christ’s work? But, leaving aside these hard cases, it does seem that an understanding of the “how” might not be completely “separable” from the “what.” There might be understandings of the Atonement, for instance, that are so wrong-headed that they preclude a decent grasp on what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do for us. And it’s not clear to me at least that believing that “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself” doesn’t entail some further beliefs about how this works. “Narrative” and “story” have become important notions in some recent theology, but is first-order narrative sufficient without some second-order doctrinal reflection?

  • Lewis on morality and the State

    Here’s an interesting one, to Mrs. Edward A. Allen, February 1, 1958:

    I quite agree with the Archbishop that no sin, simply as such, should be made a crime. Who the deuce are our rulers to enforce their opinions about sin on us? — a lot of professional politicians, often venal time-servers, whose opinion on a moral problem in one’s life we shd attach very little value to. Of course many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes. But of all the sins in the world I shd have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State. We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let’s keep it in its place.

    I don’t agree with Lewis that homosexuality is a sin, but his view here is pretty progressive all things considered. Elsewhere he talks about defending gay people from the interference of “snoopers and busybodies” (letter to Delmar Banner, May 27, 1960). It’s clear that one of the things Lewis loathed the most was the moral busybody; he wrote in God in the Dock that

    of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

    I think Lewis was in many ways an old-fashioned liberal who wanted the State to mind its own business and leave him to mind his. Here he’s enunciating a version of J.S. Mill’s harm principle: that the State is only justified in using force against someone to prevent harm to others.

    This is a kind of libertarianism, or at least classical liberalism, but one based more on man’s fallen nature than on his intrinsic goodness like you get with the techno-utopian brand of libertarianism. Liberty is important not because people can be trusted to always do the right thing, but because it creates a sphere that protect us from other people’s moral certainties.

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters:

    To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952:

    It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

    To Clyde S. Kilby, May 7, 1959:

    To me the curious thing is that neither in own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question [of the inspiration of the Bible] in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone — both first class as literature — is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain…

    …That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

  • C. S. Lewis on Barthians

    I was reading selections last night from a volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters and came across an interesting (and rather amusing) one to his brother on February 18, 1940. Apparently Lewis had recently encountered a group of zealous students of this newfangled theologian Karl Barth:

    Did you fondly believe – I did – that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my “sterness” was their “slush.” They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. “Under judgment” is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face…

    I don’t know if Lewis ever changed his opinion about Barth in light of the latter’s developed thought, but it’s interesting to see Lewis, the old-fashioned Christian humanist and upholder of reason in matters of faith and morals, clashing with the upstart “neo-orthodox” theology. Certainly “Barthians” of various stripes seem to dominate much of the field of academic theology nowadays, which makes you wonder where Lewis would fit in if he were still around. His critical approach to the Bible would not find favor with a lot of conservative evangelicals, but the high value he placed on human reason wouldn’t sit well with various neo-Barthian, “radically orthodox,” and post-liberal theologies.

  • Wright on Lewis and some quibbles

    Readers might be interested in this critical appreciation of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by none other than N.T. Wright (who’s own Simply Christian has been called a Mere Christianity for the twenty-first century).

    Wright has much praise for Lewis of course, as well as some criticism. Some of the criticism hits the target, some of it not so much. I think Wright is, uh, right to point out that Lewis didn’t really engage with Jesus’ Jewishness and his proclamation of the Kingdom. I think that, to the extent that Lewis wrote about Jesus’ teaching and ministry, he generally portrayed Jesus as enunciating something like universal truths (Lewis, to be fair, was hardly alone in this).

    However, I’m less impressed by Wright’s criticism of Lewis’s views on heaven. Lewis no doubt had a strong Platonic streak (which I don’t necessarily consider a bad thing), but I think Wright underplays the way in which, for Lewis, the heavenly realm is more like the material world brought to fruition than a kind of “spiritual” or purely intellectual escape from the physical that some people have imagined. Granted that Wright is just writing about Mere Christianity here, but I think to get a fuller picture of Lewis’s views on the afterlife one would need to attend at least to The Great Divorce, “The Weight of Glory,” and maybe even The Last Battle.

    Part of the problem, too, is that Wright treats the “biblical” view of the world to come as clearer and more univocal than I, at any rate, find it to be. There have been a multiplicity of ways that Christians have tried to describe or make sense of “heaven,” “the new heavens and new earth,” and other expressions for the ultimate consummation of all things. And this is no doubt partly becuase the “biblical” view on such matters is not obvious, not to mention that we’re dealing with realities that are so far removed from ordinary experience that we quickly run up against the limitations of our language and concepts.

    As Lewis himself was well aware, the Bible doesn’t give us a literal picture of the resurrection life, but gives us images that point to essential features of it:

    The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’stemple. (The Weight of Glory, p. 34)

    Lewis goes on to explore what these images might indicate, but he’s not dogmatic about describing in any great detail what this will look like. And for good reason – the images we’re given in Scripture – the banquet, the New Jerusalem, the wedding feast, etc. – are hardly conducive to detailed maps of the afterlife. The point being that dismissing Lewis as simply baptizing Plato doesn’t really do justice to his reflection on the matter.

    Any Christian view of the afterlife, it seems to me, has to deal with the tension between change and continuity. We look for the resurrection of the body, but it’s also the resurrection of the body. That is, the New Testament posits both continuity with the present life and radical change (“what we will be has not yet been revealed,” “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body”). Lewis may not successfully navigate this tension, but I think he was aware of it and tried to do justice to both poles.

    The other point at which I think Wright is a bit unfair to Lewis is in discussing the Atonement:

    Lewis is right to stress that Christians are not committed to one single way of understanding the meaning of the Cross, and that as long as one somehow looks at the death of Jesus and understands it in terms of God’s love and forgiveness, that is sufficient to start with.

    But his idea—that (a) God requires humans to be penitent, that (b) we can’t because of our pride, but that (c) Jesus does it in and for us—though ingenious, places in my view too high a value on repentance (vital though it of course is), implies again that soteriology is about God doing something in us rather than extra nos (though I think Lewis believed that as well, but he doesn’t expound it here), and minimizes all the other rich biblical language about the Cross, not least the Christus Victor theme.

    Wright is correct that Lewis puts this account of the Atonement forward strictly as a way of thinking about the mystery that he has personally found helpful, and he even encourages the readers to “drop it” if they don’t. Lewis was very careful for the most part not to get into the finer points of dogmatic theology. We see this in his discussion of the Eucharist too. The important bit is the thing itself, not our theories about it. As Lewis says in his discussion of the Eucharist, the command is “take, eat,” not “take, understand.”

    That being said, I don’t think, even at the level of theological reflection, Lewis can fairly be accused of neglecting the notion that on the Cross God does something extra nos. It’s often been observed, for instance, that The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe works with a notion of Atonement that seems to combine elements of the traditional “ransom” theory as well as the satisfaction theory. Whatever one thinks of those theories, they are strongly “objective” in emphasizing a work that Jesus (Aslan) accomplished for us without our cooperation. Again, Wright is only directly discussing Mere Christianity, but it seems fair to point out that Lewis seems to have had a more multifaceted understanding of the Atonement than Wright implies.