Heresy in Narnia, the (hit?) Single…

In the spirit of Amazon’s new imprint Kindle Singles (which they describe as “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length”), I have adapted the research from my thesis work into a “single” of its own. It’s too long to be an article, but probably not enough for a book. Perfect for the short-attention-span age we are living in, no?

More on C.S. Lewis the Orthodox Theologian…

Is someone trying to tell me something?

I’ve been running into this theme a lot lately. I can’t say I am that attracted to the Eastern Orthodox church - I actually kinda like that cheezy sort of rock ‘n roll contemporary church culture with its simple sing-it-again choruses.

But theologically, I have found repeatedly that the conclusions I come to are either very close to or an exact reflection of what the Orthodox already believe. But Orthodoxy seems a long way off for a Mennonite boy. Maybe I should check it out. I drive by the one and only Orthodox church in my city every day on the way to work.

With all this in mind, the post I stumbled upon today was extra-interesting. He says that C.S. Lewis led him to Orthodoxy. So Lewis is the path, eh? I am on this path too?

But, many of you have read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity without realizing just how much Orthodox theology was embedded in this book. In fact, it is Lewis’ capability to take complex theological language and turn it into mere Christianity that makes him so beloved by so many.

It’s an interesting post. And it links to a number of other ones relating Lewis to Orthodoxy. Enjoy.

In praise of partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable

“Reason erects a stop sign to this prejudice. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted? And if so, by whom? Where? And how conclusively? Or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this one passes to the realization that our own age is also a period, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so engrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.“

(Lewis gives Owen Barfield credit for teaching him this all-important principle.)

In his essay ”Historicism“, Lewis calls chronological snobbery ”the vulgarest of all vulgar errors, that of idolizing as the goddess History what manlier ages belaboured as the strumpet Fortune. Chronological snobbery is self-defeating, for the more up-to-date the look is, the sooner it will be dated.

In “An Experiment in Criticism” Lewis asks the avant-garde critic, “If you take your stand on the prevalent view, how long do you suppose it will prevail? …All that you can really say about my taste is that it is old-fashioned; yours will soon be the same.” Lewis freely confesses in a letter, that “in talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable.”

Peter Kreeft. “How to Save Western Civilization“, C.S Lewis for the Third Millennium.

Another quake?! Seriously?

So there was a 7.4 last night again, almost in the same spot as the first one. I can’t say I noticed it though. I was fast asleep and maybe I’m getting used to them as it took a phone call from a radio station back home to rouse me. “Are you ok? What’s your read on the last quake?” says they. I respond with, “Huh? Wha? What time is it? There was another quake?” And honestly their tone was so urgent that I wondered if I should be jumping up to get the kids. That has been a huge problem throughout this whole thing. Japanese reporting is measured and calm, focusing on facts. Western reporting seems really prone to screeching “Oh my God!!! How are you feeling about all this!??!?” And then somehow somebody’s opinion or feelings get warped into a news story that presents itself as fact. And then boom, I’ve got worried parents telling me to come home.

But hey, I actually do have a C.S Lewis related point to report in the blog. The Quakebook project is doing well and looks like it is going to raise a good chunk of money for the victims. In the song I wrote to accompany the book (previous post), the verse in the middle where I attempt a lyrical stroll into the the area of theodicy, the first two lines (Some say that pain is right / Like a medicine that goes down hard) were influenced very much by The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed. The second two lines (But some say in darkest times / We will rage against the dying light) were a hat tip to that little bit of atheist in me that still worries, along with the Dylan Thomas poem I’m alluding to, that this life really is all there is.

Tohoku Quake and Tsunami

The events of the last two week have wiped out my blogging and all thoughts about Mr. Lewis. Some thoughts I jotted down in the first week:

The quake hit on Friday, and at first it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. We are two hours south of Tokyo and initial reports were all very conservative, talking about death tolls under 500 people. We were actually kind of impressed, considering the death toll in Haiti not so very long ago.

But that has all turned out to be very very wrong. I suppose the death tolls are still relatively low, but nothing feels low about 10,000 people, especially when people you know are crying because of lost relatives and friends in the north. Everyone is trying to do the “life as usual” thing but it’s not so easy to do. Today we had a graduation ceremony at my son’s school. As soon as the speaker mentioned the disaster, half the place was in tears. The Japanese are very good at “gaman” (enduring hardship) but as an emotion-expressing foreigner, I kind of hate that at times. Seems like a national cry might be a better idea.

Personally I find it hard to escape a certain sense of dread, like a dark voice in the back of my head that mocks my faith in light of the apparent meaningless of something like this. You can’t blame terrorists or human evil. Sometimes the earth just up and kills all kinds of people at random, and like Shusaku Endo repeated so many times in that haunting novel of his, God is silent.

I find myself reverting to a sort of fairy tale to make some sense of it. I would like to believe that the only problem is that our communicators are broken - that once long ago in a unfallen time, God had such an intimate relationship with his creation that we would know long beforehand about any natural irregularities, and always be safely out of the way. Maybe we are just crippled by our inability to hear the Creator, and we live out of step with his creation because of it.

I know some people will be offended by my telling of such children’s stories at a time like this, so I will stop. Today the panic seems to be getting worse instead of better. No one is sure whether or not we will be running from a radioactive cloud within the next few days or not. Frankly, I start to think that Twitter and Facebook are more interesting as a study in human psychology than they are useful for getting clear and true information. You have your fear-mongers and your under-staters, and everyone in between. And CNN can be even worse with their “possible scenarios”.

The question “What is Truth?” confronts me on so many levels in a crisis like this.

C.S. Lewis on Capitalism and Socialism

In Mere Christianity Lewis says some things that are very relevant to the discussions taking place these days (particularly in America) about the value of socialism versus capitalism. It’s interesting how he manages to now come down dogmatically on either side. A wise, though these days somewhat rare, approach.

To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience… If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, “advanced,” but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned—perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing… (Mere Christianity)

Here’s a bit of the left-wing Lewis. I can almost picture him throwing rocks and dodging tear gas from behind the barricades at an anti-globalization protest (ok, maybe not that far…)

…every one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them… (MC)

Ouch for those of you in marketing. And yet, even this quote is preceded by the sort of stern call to personal responsibility that would receive a standing ovation from James Dobson himself:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands… (MC)

To finish, one more quote from Lewis the Progressive. I thought this was an interesting quote, as it questions, boldly, the very foundations of our capitalist economic system.

Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest—what we call investment—is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life. (MC)

Part 3: More Rob Bell, and why not, because it’s not really about him, is it…

I suppose I could once again apologize for going on about Rob Bell, but I won’t do that, because the truth is, I am not really that concerned with Mr. Bell himself. The issue raised by the big twitter avalanche, however, I am very interested in. As Mike Todd has been saying, it is a conversation we need to have. And I don’t want it to die down just yet.

The thing about talking about hell is that we need to realize, and I think more and more people are, that there is very little certainty about the details. An honest look at the whole sweep of scripture references to hell reveals a variety of metaphors to rather than a unified understanding. Very few people, I hope, think that hell is an actual furnace somewhere, or a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The fact that such metaphors are used are a good hint that we are dealing with something that is beyond complete and comprehensive human understanding. So, God uses the language of myth and metaphor to try and break it down for us a little.

Lewis was so strong when it came to using imagination to help us wrestle with our understanding of difficult concepts. A number of times Lewis presents an idea or a metaphor not as his final and definitive belief, but more in a spirit of “I wonder if perhaps it might be like this?” Personally, I think there is such strength in this approach. What is the point of clinging rigidly to an understanding when no one understanding is a complete and comprehensive model? Perhaps that is the arrogance that we need to continue moving away from, because many still do think they have gained an absolute understanding.

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