C.S. Lewis

Feb 23 | Pastor J.D. | No Comments |

John Piper did his annual biographical sketch this year on C.S. Lewis. I would highly recommend listening to or reading it. He’s got some GREAT stuff in there, and even for you Lewis-o-philes, it’s not the ‘normal’ stuff. Here are some of my favorite stuff:

The Difference in Gospel and Religion

This was probably my favorite… probably not stuff you are familiar with:

“A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always
want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a
substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a
substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of
course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves,
tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.” (Letters of C. S. Lewis/1966, p. 277)

“In reality Tyndale is trying to express an obstinate fact which meets us
long before we venture into the realm of theology; the fact that
morality or duty (what he calls ‘the Law’) never yet made a man happy in
himself or dear to others. It is shocking, but it is undeniable. We do
not wish either to be, or to live among, people who are clean or honest
or kind as a matter of duty: we want to be, and associate with, people
who like being clean and honest and kind. The mere suspicion
that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was
really done as a duty subtly poisons it. In philosophical language, the
ethical category is self-destructive; morality is healthy only when it
is trying to abolish itself. In theological language, no man can be
saved by works. The whole purpose of the ‘Gospel,’ for Tyndale, is to
deliver us from morality. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘Puritan’ of modern
imagination—the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and
richer souls do without thinking of it—is precisely the enemy which
historical Protestantism arose and smote.” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 187)

Taking Life Seriously

This one is a little more familiar, but it is still so good…

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person
you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you
would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption
such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we
are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these
destinations. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked
to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are
mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is
immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and
exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” (C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 15)

Responding to Academic Critics

Here’s one final one… I love this. I’d love to say this to a lot of people at certain schools who look on what we do here with such disdain. This also captures what I hope to be as a pastor. Context: Lewis was castigated by the academic theologian Norman Pittenger for his banal
oversimplification in explaining the Trinity on the popular level. Lewis said this in response:

“Most of my books are
evangelistic, addressed to tous exo [those outside]. . . When I
began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving
fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by
revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured
clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore
simply that of a translator—one  turning Christian doctrine, or
what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that
unscholarly people would attend to and could understand. . . . Dr.
Pittenger would be a more helpful critic if he advised a cure as well as
asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such work? What
methods, and with what success, does he employ when he is trying to
convert the great mass of storekeepers, lawyers, realtors, morticians,
policemen and artisans who surround him in his own city?” (C.S. Lewis,
“Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger,” in God in the Dock, pp, 181, 183)