C. S. Lewis Archives

Eternity again and again

I’ve posted before on eternity, but there is much to say on this endless subject. The first thing to figure out is what eternity is. There are two main contenders:

Eternity is time without beginning or an end, sometimes called sempiternity.
Eternity stands outside of time. It is a perspective on time, but not time itself. Eternity is nunc stans, from the Latin meaning remaining now, unchanging. Ordinary time is nunc fluens, time that flows or passes.

The second way of thinking about eternity is often attributed to Plato (Timaeus 37c-e), but it became theologically significant in the work of Augustine (Confessions, book 11). God, and only God, is eternal. Earthly time, temporal time, is so insubstantial and illusory as to border on non-being (Erie, p 62). Just as humans can only find fulfillment in God, so they can only find fulfillment in eternity. God and eternity are virtually the same thing.

Now is a ceaselessly moving point between past and future. It is ephemeral, and totally lacking in substance. For this reason, time has no value. I was going to write, “ordinary time just is,” but the thing about time is that its substance, moments, have no substance. They are gone the instant they have begun.

Eternity is the opposite. It is always present and everywhere. In eternity all time is now. How to make sense of this? I like the simple explanation of C. S. Lewis. He is answering the question how could God hear every prayer uttered by all who are praying at the same time.

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The baby logic of C. S. Lewis: Jesus was either mad, bad, or God

A popular way of thinking about God among evangelical Christians is C. S. Lewis’ forced choice strategy: Jesus was either mad, bad, or God (pp 52-53). Chuck Colson, Nixon’s hatchet man, was sentenced for obstruction of justice. He spent seven months in prison, and there become an enthusiastic evangelical Christian. It was this choice between mad, bad, or God, he said, that convinced him to become a Christian (Silliman, p 120).

What does Lewis mean?

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse . . . . But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Lewis, p 52)

Right away the equation of madness with thinking you’re a poached egg, while amusing, biases the question. It assumes that there is only one degree and type of madness, total bonkers, and that madness today looks like madness then. What if Jesus was neither mad, nor bad, nor God? Why are these the only three choices? What if Jesus were mad in a way that was a socially recognized, even acceptable, form of deviance?

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Around the time of Jesus, there were a number of men running around Judea and the Galilee claiming to be the Messiah predicted in Jewish scripture. After the Dead Sea Scrolls were finally published (in the late 1980s), Israel Knohl wrote The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There he refers to the “son of God” text, one who would be “great over the earth.”

These are exactly the terms in which the archangel Gabriel described Jesus in the annunciation to Mary (loc 789-790).

He would be “the son of God and son of the Most High.” (loc 793-794)

Michael Wise has made a similar argument in The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus, also based on the Dead Sea Scrolls. His point, like Knohl’s, is that the idea of the suffering servant of God would have been available to Jesus during his lifetime. It was not a subsequent invention. If this is so, then Jesus could have been filling a socially recognized role, badly needed during the turmoil following Herod’s death (4 BCE).

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Dawkins, Christianity, and the Meaning of Life

Dawkins, Christianity, and the Meaning of Life.* Many readers will be familiar with Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, among other works promoting atheism. Darwinism, argues Dawkins, offers a better explanation of what we observe in the world than does the assumption of a creator God.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. (1995, p 133)

The world is exactly as it appears to be if there were no God and no higher purpose to human life.

The trouble is, the world is also exactly as it appears if there were a creator God and a higher purpose. One doesn’t look at the world as a blind set of facts, and conclude there is no God. Instead, one begins with a general outlook on life, and then chooses the facts that support this view. Unlike so much in life, our religious views are not primarily expressions of early childhood experiences. People seem to choose, and change, their worldviews later in life, often in the late teens or twenties.

Consider the basic questions of life: why are we here, what’s the meaning of our lives, where are we going, what may I hope, what should I do? One does not find these answers in the facts; the facts are interpreted in terms of these questions.

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C. S Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed and my grief.

This is my second post on C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, the story of his loss of his beloved wife, Joy. Their relationship is portrayed in the movie, Shadowlands.

In my first post, I compared Lewis’ loss with the accounts of a pair of literary writers, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion. In this post I compare Lewis’ loss with my own recent loss of my wife of forty years, E. This post feels different; my loss is still so raw.

Lewis lost his faith—for a little while. I have less faith to lose.

Actually, it’s not quite true to say Lewis lost his faith in God. He lost his faith in a benevolent God, imaging that God inflicts pain because he can.

Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’? (p 41)

What reason, he asks, can we have, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is good? Doesn’t all the evidence suggest the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But what if Christ were mistaken? “Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning.” (p 42)

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Grace is not free

Grace is not free.

The Christian concept of grace (charis, Χάρις) has puzzled me for years. Its definition seems a good place to begin. Still, I hate to start with a definition, so I’ll start with a story.

During a British conference on comparative religions, the participants were heatedly discussing what’s unique about Christianity. C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” he asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” (Yancy, p 45) *

It’s a good point, but not strictly true. Hindus and Muslims believe in Grace, understood as God reaching out to humanity with love. Jews believe in chen (חֵן), a version of grace. Nevertheless, it is Christianity that has developed the concept most fully.

The standard definition

In Christianity, grace is the love and mercy given to us by God as a free gift. It is nothing we have earned.

Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become . . . partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. (Catechism of the Catholic Church)

This definition leads some to see grace as part of a faith over works teaching. It leads others to think that if grace is free then it must be easy. Both conclusions are wrong. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace.”

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Christianity and technology

Christianity and technology.

Beginning in 1943, a small group of Christian intellectuals began to think seriously about the post-war world. The United States and Britain had talked about victory since the beginning of the War, but no one was certain, and many had grave doubts. But by 1943 victory was in sight, even if its details were not.

These Christian intellectuals included Jacques Maritain, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T. S. Eliot. Auden and Eliot were poets, and Lewis, an Oxford don, is probably best known for his for his children’s fiction, Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve posted about Lewis and Weil elsewhere on this blog. The relationship among these men and woman was rich, complex, and varied. Some worked together, some alone.

The Problem

The problem they worried about is what sort of people the winners of this war of civilizations would become. What values could substitute for that of winning the war? Would the technological thinking that won the war destroy the values we fought for? It might, they argued, and they only thing that could stop it was an education that fosters humanity, sensibility and pity.

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God is the one who remembers

God is the one who remembers. Everything. Everyone, every being, is remembered by God. A God who understands human weakness, but also a God who judges each of us. Everything you or I do matters, because it will be remembered by God. Those who made the Holocaust possible will be remembered by God. My Grandson, who contributes a large portion of his small salary to charity will be remembered. Remembered and judged by God. For all eternity. But that’s it. God does not punish the bad or reward the good. In the end we return to the stardust from which we came. But God knows. Forever. Kind acts and cruel acts are not the same. God knows the difference and remembers, even when humans have forgotten. Everything you do is of eternal significance.

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Why we need pain. A bad answer by C. S. Lewis

Why we need pain. A bad answer by C. S. Lewis.

If God is all good and all powerful, why is there so much pain and evil in the world? It’s a classic question, known as theodicy, or the justice of God. The problem starts with the insight that the Lord who loves righteousness is at the same time an awesome and terrible presence. God is not just good. He is terrifying. As Lewis puts it,

For it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain tops and thunderclouds with “the righteous Lord” who “loveth righteousness.” (pp 13-14)

It’s a simple point that sometimes gets lost. We worship God not just because of his goodness, but because of his power, an experience that fills us with awe and dread. Why else is it death to see the face of God? (Exodus 33:20) *

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