E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
Piper / Mathis The Romantic Rationalist
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4501-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C. S. Lewis
E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4501-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
John Piper is founder and lead teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. He served for thirty-three years as a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God; Don't Waste Your Life; and Providence.
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Half a Century since C. S. Lewis
He went quietly. It was very British.
While the Americans rocked and reeled, and the world’s attention turned to Dallas and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one Clive Staples Lewis breathed his last in Oxford just a week shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. Strangely enough, science-fictionist Aldous Huxley passed the same day, and in one calendar square, three of the twentieth century’s most influential figures were gone.
It was November 22, 1963—now more than fifty years ago.
C. S. Lewis is known best for his series of seven short fiction books, the Chronicles of Narnia, which have sold over 100 million copies in forty languages. With three of the stories already becoming major motion pictures, and the fourth in the making, Lewis is as popular today as he’s ever been. But even before he published Narnia in the early 1950s, he distinguished himself as a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, the world’s foremost expert in medieval and Renaissance English literature, and as one of the great lay thinkers and writers in two millennia of the Christian church.
Discovering Truth and Joy
Good Brit though he was, Lewis was Irish, born in Belfast in 1898. He became an atheist in his teens and stridently such in his twenties, before slowly warming to theism in his early thirties, and finally being fully converted to Christianity at age thirty-three. And he would prove to be for many, as he was for his friend Owen Barfield, the “most thoroughly converted man I ever met.”
What catches the eye about Lewis’s star in the constellation of Christian thinkers and writers is his utter commitment to both the life of the mind and the life of the heart. He thinks and feels with the best. Lewis insisted that rigorous thought and deep affection were not at odds but mutually supportive. And as impressive as he was in arguing for it, he was even more convincing in his demonstration.
What eventually led Lewis to theism, and finally to Christianity, was what he called “Longing”—an ache for Joy with a capital J. He had learned all too well that relentless rationality could not adequately explain the depth and complexity of human life or the textures and hues of the world in which we find ourselves. From early on, an angst gnawed at him, which one day he would express so memorably in his most well-known single book, Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”1
This World and the Other
Such is the heart of his genius, his spiritual genius. So few treat the world in all its detail and contour like he does, and yet so few tirelessly point us beyond this world, with all its concreteness and color and taste, with the aggression and ardor of C. S. Lewis.
And so for many, his impact has been so personal. For me, it was a six-word sentence in Lewis—“We are far too easily pleased”—that popped the hood on a massive remodeling of my soul:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.2
Does Jesus really find our desires not too strong but too weak? I had long professed Christianity, but this tasted so different from what I knew. It tasted! This affirmation of happiness and pleasure and desire and delight was, to me, so new in the context of the Christian faith. And Lewis was the chef.
My notions about God and the Christian life were exposed as mere duty driven, and my soul was thrilling at the possibility that Christianity might not mean muting my desires but being encouraged (even commanded!) to turn them up—up to God.
The Language of Hedonism Everywhere
Lewis was conspiring with others to help open my mind and heart to a new angle on God and life—that new angle being joy and delight—but my upbringing determined that there must be a final and decisive test for this freshman discovery: Will this hold in the Scriptures? I thank God my parents and home church had so clearly taught me that the Bible is trustworthy and inerrant and the final authority on every seemingly true line of thinking.
And with Bible open, it didn’t take long. Equipped with this new lens—the spectacles of joy—the Scriptures began popping like never before. Lewis’s hedonism was confirmed on page after page.
In God’s presence, says Psalm 16:11,“there is fullness of joy; at [his] right hand are pleasures forevermore.” I had no category for that until then. Or for the heart cry of Psalm 63:1: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Or for the holy longing of Psalm 42:1–2: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” As John Piper says, after Lewis helped open his eyes, “I turned to the Psalms for myself and found the language of Hedonism everywhere.”3
At last I was ready to hear Paul say, “Rejoice in the Lord” (Phil. 3:1). And the reprise: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). And Jesus: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44). As well as the glimpse we’re given into his very heart at the heart of our faith: “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2). And on and on.
Lewis’s help, just at this one point, has been invaluable.
Feel the Weight of Glory
And there’s even a little bit more to squeeze from the six-word sentence. Lewis would say that not only are we “far too easily pleased” when we settle for fixing our soul’s inconsolable longing on anything other than God, but also that we’re too easily pleased if we see God only from a distance and not soon be drawn into him. This, says Lewis, is “the weight of glory.” As a layman, Lewis didn’t preach weekly but occasionally had his chance at a pulpit. His most remembered sermon is one he preached under this title—“The Weight of Glory.”
The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination [of standing before God], shall find approval, shall please God. To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.4
Indeed, we are far too easily pleased when we pine finally for anything less than God—and when we ache only for seeing his splendor from afar, rather than going further up and further in, to being “accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.”5 The weight of glory “means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things.”6
Our Creator has written on our hearts not only to enjoy eternity as a spectator in his majestic stadium, watching happily from the bleachers, but also, being brought onto the field, given a jersey, and adopted as a full member of his team, to live in his acceptance and embrace. We never become God, but we do become spectacularly one with him in his Son and our glad conformity to Jesus (Rom. 8:29). Surely such is a weight of glory almost too great to even consider in our current condition.
No Ordinary People
When Lewis breathed his last and quietly slipped from this life, more than half a century ago now, he took one big step toward becoming the kind of glorious creature in the coming new creation that he speaks about in that sermon:
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 can 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. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—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 splendours.
This does not mean that we...
