Second Semester

Since the primary purpose of this blog is to give those who’ve never attended seminary some understanding of what it’s like, I should probably take a moment to lay out what I’m taking this semester. My schedule is:

• From Text to Sermon (an introductory preaching class)
• Pauline Letters (further New Testament and Greek work)
• Ages of Faith and Reform (church history from ~1000 CE through the Reformation)
• Systematic Theology (the organized structure of what we believe, and how we develop that structure)
• Foundations of Christian Worship (the history, structure, and purpose of the liturgy)
• Loss & Grief (pastoral recognition of and response to the many varieties of loss and to the grieving process in its varied forms)

Once again I am finding that the courses dovetail nicely, allowing me to make connections–probably my favorite learning activity of all. They also build on what we studied last semester. In many respects, the first semester at Wartburg is “Introduction to Studying Theology,” and now that the groundwork has been laid, we can really start getting into the meat of things (to mix metaphors a bit). Here are a few observations as I finish up my third week of classes:

• I have a LOT of reading to do this semester. I thought last semester had a lot of reading, but I didn’t know nuttin. The trouble this semester is that almost all of the reading is really interesting, so it’s hard to know what to leave out. I just hope I can keep all the balls in the air until the semester is over.
• It’s really interesting to take Systematic Theology, with its strong intellectual emphasis on thinking about what we believe and why, at the same time as my liturgy class, which focuses on how our worship expresses our theology. They feel like opposite ends of a spectrum, and seeing both at the same time highlights both the contrasts and the compliments of the two approaches.
• Everything we learn will have applications in the parish, but sometimes those applications occur more at the ‘forming my thinking’ level, and sometimes at the ‘practical technique’ level. Loss & Grief is the first course that feels like I will learn some practical techniques in addition to having my thinking formed.

So far I’m enjoying them all, but I’m really enjoying Systematic Theology. I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, but I’m enjoying the reading and the way the course is making me think. I’m also really enjoying Pauline Letters and the chance to learn more about how Pauline thought has shaped Christianity. There are days when my classes make me feel totally inadequate, and other days when I feel like I’m making vital connections and can almost feel myself being shaped. Either way, these courses are what I envisioned when I pictured myself in seminary, and I’m very excited to work through everything on my plate.

“Just” Prayer…

Have you ever noticed this? You’re in a small group setting, whether an organized group or class or just some friends gathered together, and someone is going to lead the group in prayer. They begin, and the first words you here are “Lord, we just pray that…”

I have been trying for a couple of years now to understand why I react so negatively to this formulation. I’m not reacting to the person–some of my favorite people begin their prayers this way. I’m not reacting to social indicators–it seems to cut across boundaries of education level and economic status. I believe I hear it more from laypersons than from ordained/consecrated leaders, but that could be because either a) the prayers I hear from clergy are usually written ahead of time rather than spontaneous, or b) training and experience in prayer writing leads one away from this formulation.

“We just pray…” ‘Just’ here means merely. Is one telling God that this is a tiny little prayer–insignificant, really? If so, woe to you if you’re lifting up someone else’s prayer concern–it might not be so tiny to them. Is one saying “Um, God, sorry to bother you, I know you’re busy and all, but do you think you could find time to…?” God has time to attend to each and every one of us as we need that attention; we don’t need to try to slip something into God’s busy calendar. Is one saying “You know, God, it would be nice if you could deal with this, but if you can’t, that’s cool.” If that’s how you feel about your prayer, then why pray at all?

“We just pray…” I think what bothers me about this phrase is that it seems to minimize the prayer. Prayer should never be minimized, never be merely. Prayer is the most important conversation one has, and its worth should be recognized, not minimized. I’m not saying that prayer must be solemn, or formulaic, or rote. I’m not questioning the sincerity of those who use this phrase. I recognize that my reaction to “we just pray…” is a personal issue, and that I need to be gracious in my heart when I encounter it. I think the phrase is usually unintentional, perhaps a bit of boilerplate as one’s brain is gearing up for the actual prayer request, and that people rarely even realize they’re using it.

I’m certainly not the best you’ll find at public prayer. My prayers are very hit or miss. But I hope, and pray, that all of the words of my prayers are always intentional, however much they miss the mark in other ways. How about you? Does hearing “we just pray…” bother you, or not? Can you analyze your reaction, either way, enough to explain it? Let me know what you think.

C. S. Lewis: A Grief Observed

This is my final reflection post on my readings in C. S. Lewis for J-Term. This post is on A Grief Observed, with a bit of summary thrown in. If you’ve read any of my other C. S. Lewis posts, you know the drill.

A Grief Observed consists of C. S. Lewis’ stark and poignant journals begun after the death of his wife. Originally written in an attempt to deal with his raw emotions, Lewis questioned keeping such a journal even as he was doing it:

“What would H. [Lewis' wife, Helen Joy Davidman] herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? … I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? … But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down … I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to H. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence” (A Grief Observed, 9-10).*

Lewis later decided that there might be value in publishing the journal for others to see.

Lewis is straightforward in his depiction of the awkwardness others feel being around him, the mental fog and forgetfulness grief brings, and his seeming inability even to remember how his wife looked: “I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination” (15). He worries about forgetting what his wife was like. Speaking of meeting a man he hadn’t seen in ten years, and how different the actual man was from Lewis’ remembered image of him, he says, “his actual presence … was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already?” (19-20)

There are two salient things about A Grief Observed. The first is that, even in the midst of emotional agony, Lewis continued to write lucid, polished prose. Yes, the prose could have been edited after the fact. However, I don’t believe he edited much. If he did edit, he did nothing to make himself look better, or to dilute the raw intensity of the emotions he was feeling and his observations of those emotions. I suspect that by this point in life Lewis’ mind was so well-trained at observing, and then ordering and recording those observations, that it was second nature to him, and even when distracted he produced writing that few can match. Also, since he was writing in an attempt to distract himself from his pain, I suspect he concentrated on the writing as much as he could, even though it was initially only for an audience of one.

The second salient thing is that this man, who converted to Christianity through the force of his own logic and then brilliantly expounded that logic as a Christian apologist, could be brought, at least briefly, to doubt everything he had come to believe. I understand (intellectually) how grief can do this to someone, but to witness it, however vicariously, is astounding. As Lewis puts it, “you never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?” (22-23). In another passage, which every pastor would do well to memorize, Lewis states it even more baldly: “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (25).

Later, on a literal ‘dark night of the soul’, speaking of the idea that H. is at peace ‘because she is in God’s hands’ Lewis puts it even more bluntly:

“But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. … Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?” (27-29).

Later Lewis admits that this was written in despair, calling his questions “filth and nonsense” (33). Still, such language, from a man who spent the better part of two books (Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain) trying to establish that God is indeed “by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’,” shows the power of grief to ravage the spirit and shake the foundations of one’s beliefs. However, he continues to struggle with questions of faith. Even as he thinks he is regaining his faith, he wonders if he is just rebuilding a house of cards only for it to be knocked over again in the future. Later (it is impossible to determine how much later–Lewis does not track the actual passage of time in the book), as his grief begins to be less raw, genuine faith begins to re-emerge. “And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted” (46).

Eventually, Lewis begins to examine the writings themselves, and tries to come to some conclusions about them and about what he felt. It comes as a relief to the reader when he writes “still, there are two enormous gains–I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum–nor all that fuss about my mental image of her” (61-62). Lewis still has questions for God: “Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?” (68). This is strongly evocative of passages in The Great Divorce, where that is exactly the choice certain souls must make if they are to stay in Heaven. Finally. Lewis recognizes the futility, in human terms, of some of the questions we ask of God:

“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask–half our great theological and metaphysical problems–are like that.” (69)

In closing, I should point out how interesting it was to read Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, and A Grief Observed ‘back to back’, as it were. Coincidentally or not, there is an arc to the content of these four books. Reading them in that order, many things in the later works recall or seem to reference passages in the earlier ones. One gets a true sense of a great mind grappling with weighty questions and coming to conclusions it finds satisfactory. And the prose–the effervescent, dappled, genial and utterly lucid prose–is a joy and a delight. I cannot wait to find time to dip into some of Lewis’ other apologetic writings, and need to make time for his fiction as well. Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for a most engaging January.

*All quotations are taken from C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, HarperOne, 1994.

C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce

This is the third in my series of reflections on my J-Term reading in C. S. Lewis, this time on The Great Divorce. I present it with the standard disclaimer.

The Great Divorce has been recommended to me several times in the last year or two, and I now see why. The book is Lewis’ extended meditation on the differences between Heaven and Hell and on why some people end up one place and some the other. Presented as a dream of the narrator, the book postulates that souls in Hell are free to travel to Heaven, where they will be welcomed. However, Heaven is a difficult place for souls visiting from Hell. All matter is impenetrable and potentially harmful, water and grass no less than wood and stone, because the souls themselves are insubstantial and tenuous. The visiting souls must solidify to be able to stay in Heaven, and solidification involves a simple but fundamental change.

C. S. Lewis is at his best as a writer when he is characterizing things. Be it a simple analogy to explain a point, a descriptive picture to set a scene, or a portrait of an individual, Lewis paints with words as few others can. This ability is vividly displayed in The Screwtape Letters, in Screwtape’s descriptions of petty human traits and actions that tempters can seize upon to make souls fit for Hell. It is even more brilliantly displayed in The Great Divorce, where Lewis portrays the souls from Hell primarily by letting them speak for themselves. Their conversation indicates their character more indelibly than any description. The characters are varied and fascinating: the employer who considers himself a decent chap and only wants his rights; the intellectual who insists on preserving his ability to make free inquiry the end rather than a means to knowledge; the martyr to circumstance and the actions of others; the painter who is too busy wanting to paint Heaven to actually look at it and accept it for what it is; the woman who sacrificed her whole life trying to make her husband better only to have him not appreciate any of it; the woman who had nothing but love for her son (to the exclusion of her husband and daughter); the man who pictured himself the hero of a great tragedy because his wife was so busy being full of love for the world that she never acknowledged how unselfish he was being to her and how put upon that made him feel.

These, and the other, visitors from Hell all have one thing in common: they have chosen to place themselves at the center of their existence. Early on, the narrator learns that Hell is vast because its denizens cannot long bear to be near each other; eventually, each new arrival moves to the edge of the occupied area and builds a dwelling of his or her own. These dwellings are gloomy, leaky, dimly lit, and miserable, but they are unmistakably theirs. If someone else builds a dwelling too close, the one who was there first might pack up and move again, which means Hell is replete with empty buildings and empty streets, no matter how many souls are there.

To be able to stay in Heaven, a soul has only to place God at the center of its existence, leaving self aside. This will allow the soul to enter into the fullness of Divine love, which will in turn solidify the soul so that, instead of a place of difficulty and danger, Heaven becomes the paradise it is meant to be, a place of light, love, and the freedom from human cares. Those already in Heaven are more than willing to help those visiting from Hell, and are often sent expressly to do so, greeting the visitors on their arrival and explaining the simple choice they must make in order to stay. But there can be no conditions on this choice, and when visiting souls try to insist on that choice being conditional upon something else, they find themselves drifting back to Hell.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the book is when the narrator is told that, even though Heaven had looked to be on top of an immense cliff when approached from Hell, he had actually entered Heaven through a minuscule crack in the ground like the one at his feet. For all its vastness to those inhabiting it, Hell is “smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World” (The Great Divorce, 138).* Souls from Heaven cannot visit Hell to help those there, because they would not fit. A soul filled with the love of God is too big for self, too big to fit into a realm of petty human preoccupations and trivialities and wounded pride. I find this a beautiful image.

Lewis’ concept of Hell builds on what he writes in The Problem of Pain, where (quoting or paraphrasing a writer named von Hügel) Lewis says that “the characteristic of lost souls is ‘their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves’” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, 124-25). I find it interesting to contrast this vision of Hell with that of Jean Paul Sartre as expressed in his play No Exit, where Hell is other people. Either way, Hell is personal and it is very human. To Lewis, it is the ultimate expression of The Fall, played out in an individual human life: the willful choice of the desires of self over those of God. Although the events in The Great Divorce are but those of a dream, that dream is portrayed so well that it stays with me in the waking world. I will not soon forget The Great Divorce, and suspect that I shall return to it again and again.

*All quotations are taken from C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, HarperOne, 2001.

C. S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain

I here present some reflections on The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis, part of my J-Term reading. Again, if this does not interest you, I thank you for coming and bid you peace.

“‘If God were good, He would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.” (The Problem of Pain, 16)* From this simple statement, C. S. Lewis begins his brilliant examination of the problem of human suffering. I will say at the outset that I am in awe of Lewis’ ability to frame his argument in a simple, straightforward, yet almost inexorably logical fashion. I now look at this question in an entirely new light after reading this book.

Lewis begins by defining Divine Omnipotence. Building on a quotation from Thomas Aquinas, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God,” Lewis argues that because creation has a certain form and substance, some things become mutually contradictory, and therefore intrinsically impossible, even for God. I am going to have to resist the urge to quote at length, but allow me one. Speaking of the intrinsically impossible, Lewis states:

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You can attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.”

Lewis takes human free will as a given. From this he builds the case that (I am simplifying here) freedom to choose implies things to choose between, which in turn implies objects with fixed properties of their own. Not all such fixed properties of a given object will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given individual, and therefore “if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. … If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie” (23-24). In other words, not getting everything we want is built into the system by the way the system works, all because humans were given the freedom to choose.

Lewis next takes up the question of Divine Goodness. The problem is that we want to define God’s love and goodness merely as seeing to it that we are happy all the time. Lewis spends a goodly amount of time defining Divine love as something more, using several different examples of human love, and concluding that God’s love for us is a desire to see us made better, to fulfill God’s aspirations for us as beings created in God’s image: “whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want” for “God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature” (46-47). We have no choice about the kind of love God gives us. “To be God–to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response–to be miserable–these are the only three alternatives” (47).

Mostly, we are miserable, and we are miserable because we have chosen, and constantly choose, to do other than what God intends for us (again, I am greatly simplifying Lewis’ argument here). Using similar terms to those he used in Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that we feel shame because we know we are not behaving as we should, that there is a standard of behavior to which we do not measure up. Indeed, we cannot measure up, because we are fallen creatures. In what I regard as one of the central passages in the entire work, Lewis discusses the possibility of God preserving us from the consequences of our bad choices:

“It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so one forever. If the miracles ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a world thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice.”

Again, the nature of the system defines the permissible outcomes.

To this point, Lewis has only been defining his terms; he has not yet grappled with the reason for pain per se. Pointing out that “the human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it” and that “we can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities” (90), Lewis makes the case that only pain is strong enough to bring us back to focusing on God: “pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (91). He continues this argument in what I regard as the other central passage in the book:

“Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can plausibly be looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility … most deserves praise.” (94)

Pain exists because, having turned from God freely as a result of being created with the ability to choose for ourselves, it is the only method God has of calling our attention back to him.

Lewis spends the rest of the book working out the particulars of this position in regard to various aspects of Christian doctrine such as Hell and Heaven. He also takes up the notion of animal pain and suffering, questioning the degree to which animals can be said to suffer pain in statements that would have members of PETA up in arms. But the crux of his argument has been made. I don’t know if anyone finds it a comforting argument; I don’t know that Lewis intended anyone to find comfort in it. I feel he was trying to answer one of the great “Why?”s asked of Judaism and Christianity through the ages in a rational and systematic way. I can find no fault with his answer, even if I might want to quibble with some of the particulars. I can wish it were otherwise–that pain did not exist–but I see the sense of Lewis’ approach, and my rational, scientific side appreciates his cause-and-effect logic. In the end, I find myself convinced.

*All quotations are taken from C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

C. S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

This is the first of my reflection posts on my C. S. Lewis reading for J-Term. If you’re not interested in my thoughts on C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, go in peace.

Originally a series of radio talks given in Britain during 1942, Mere Christianity is Lewis’ attempt to explain the basics of Christianity to non-Christians. I find the idea that England in 1942 considered itself “part of a ‘post-Christian’ world,” and that Lewis believed that England “had never in fact been told in basic terms what the religion is about” (Kathleen Norris, Foreword to Mere Christianity, xix) to be interesting. I’ve been told that 40% of Americans surveyed list their religion as “None”; apparently this is not new, and not confined to America. Still, as a 21st-century American, I live in a nation which presumes that everyone knows at least the basic facts about Christianity, whether or not they consider themselves believers. Call me historically unaware, but I am surprised that citizens of a country whose monarch was and is the “Defender of the Faith” needed to have the basics of Christianity explained to them.

Lewis makes it clear that, although a layman in the Church of England, he is attempting to lay out only those things common to all denominations of Christianity (as he understood such, at any rate). He is not trying to espouse a particular denominational point of view, nor is he attempting to weigh in on any of the major theological questions. This, combined with Lewis’ clear and polished–yet seemingly effortless–writing, makes the book a wonderful ‘primer’ on Christianity. To me, however, the most interesting portion of the book is Book One, where Lewis attempts to logically establish the existence of God.

Lewis’ argument runs as follows: people constantly complain that the behavior of others is unfair, that it does not meet some sort of understood Standard for human behavior. More often than not, the others will respond, not by disavowing the Standard, but by attempting to prove that their behavior really does fall within it. This Standard, then, is something universally acknowledged, even if the details are not always agreed upon. No matter what you call it–the Law of Right and Wrong, the Rule of Decent Behavior, or Moral Law–if all people understand it to exist, then it must come from somewhere other than human invention, there must be a Power behind the law. Slowly, building his argument and answering potential objections as he goes, Lewis moves toward the postulate that this Power behind the law is God. And not just any God, but the Christian God, who made the world and wants it to work a certain way, which humans call “good” and which is expressed in the Law of Right and Wrong. In summarizing his position, Lewis recapitulates the reasoning that brought him from atheism to Christianity as an adult convert himself:

“And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? … Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality as senseless–I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple.” (Mere Christianity, 38-39)*

Whenever I examine attempts to establish the existence of God via reason and deduction, I use the following lens: What would I have made of this at age 25, when I was an adamant Secular Humanist and claimed that “I don’t need the concept of God to explain the universe to my satisfaction”? At that age, I staunchly rejected claims that morality could come only from God, feeling that humans had learned over the centuries what people should and shouldn’t do in order to live together as peacefully as possible, and that ‘God’ was invoked merely to back up enforcement of sanctions for breaking the rules. Lewis acknowledges and answers objections such as mine as he builds his argument. I suspect that my cocksure ignorance would not have allowed me to recognize the truth of Lewis’ arguments, but I think I would have had a hard time countering them. Lewis’ examples are so clean, simple, and basic, his illustrations so straightforward and compelling, his writing so lucid, that it is hard to dismiss him rationally. Lewis’ greatness as a Christian apologist lies, I feel, in his statement that “it is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason.” (139)

Having rejected atheism, Lewis lays out what it means to believe that Christ is God incarnate who died to save us from our sins. With particular emphasis on how accepting Christianity should alter a person’s behavior, Lewis examines the cardinal virtues (Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude), social morality, sexual morality, marriage, forgiveness, charity, hope, and faith. Although he occasionally states things which cause me to wonder–Did Moses really forbid usury for all, or only when lending to a member of the tribe? (85) Does the Lord’s prayer really make it “perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven”? (116)–I find Christianity as explained by Lewis to be inspiring. I particularly like the gems of common sense found throughout the book. Some examples:

“We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ;we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.” (64)

“There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members.” (112)

“In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?” (122. This one particularly stings.)

“The rule for all of us is particularly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” (131)

“Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.” (148)

Finally, Lewis spends some time discussing the Doctrine of the Trinity. To do so, he, an educated and intellectual layman, gives his views on Theology, calling it “practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a few very simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones–bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected” (155). As someone who has temporarily made Theology the focal point of his life, I find this very comforting.

*All quotations are taken from Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, New York: HarperOne, 2001.

J-Term

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had a wonderful Advent and a joyous Christmas. What with the end of fall semester in mid-December and then finishing all the delayed preparations for Christmas, I was having a hard time feeling the spirit of the season this year. Then, on Christmas Eve, we went to our daughter’s Sunday School Christmas program at St. John’s Lutheran in St. Donatus, IA. It was a joyous and joy-full presentation, with good music, fun choreography, and enjoyable performances by all involved. I came away lighter in heart, bouncier in spirit, and finally ready for the coming of our Lord. Just in time.

I survived fall semester, and actually did quite well. The uncertainty I was experiencing at the end of the term made me decide for certain to get off of the paper chase treadmill and take all of my classes as Credit/No Credit from now on (see this post for further details). Now that Christmas break is over, we are in that glorious interval known as J-Term: four weeks, one class, choose one of the prepared options or build your own. Many people travel for their J-Term class, in order to fulfill the Wartburg cross-cultural immersion requirement. I have (or soon will have) classmates in the Holy Land, Iceland, France, Guyana, both North and South Dakota, Texas, and other places. Others stay on campus to take a class offered at Wartburg. And some folks design an independent study.

I’m in the last group. Tami is in Gettysburg, PA, for the Diaconal Ministry Formation Event, required of everyone getting an MA in Diaconal Ministry. You are strongly encouraged to attend during J-Term of your first year, so Tami did. With our daughter in school, that leaves me committed to being here and being Dad, so I designed an independent study. The idea came to me in September, when I (once again) saw the C. S. Lewis books on the bookshelf in my office and lamented not having time to read them. Suddenly I just thought “January,” and a J-Term class was born. I found a professor willing to sponsor and evaluate what I do, and I was set.

I will be reading and reflecting on the following books by C. S. Lewis:

• Mere Christianity
• The Problem of Pain
• The Great Divorce
• A Grief Observed

If time permits and I have the inclination, I can add other works to the list. My reflections will take the form of posts on this very blog, at least one post per book. I will put “C. S. Lewis” in the title of the posts, so if you are not interested you can just skip them. Otherwise, I hope you’ll join me in my reflections, and I also hope that perhaps you’ll be inspired to read some C. S. Lewis yourself. He is one of the more readable authors you’ll find, and really knew how to turn a phrase.