Rigney / Taylor Lewis on the Christian Life

Becoming Truly Human in the Presence of God
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5058-4
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Theologians on the Christian Life

C. S. Lewis excelled at plumbing the depths of the human heart, both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the corrupt. From science fiction and fantasy to essays, letters, and works of apologetics, Lewis has offered a wealth of insight into how to live the Christian life.  In this book, Rigney explores the center of Lewis's vision for the Christian life-the personal encounter between the human self and the living God. In prayer, in the church, in the imagination, in our natural loves, in our pleasures and our sorrows, God brings us into his presence so that we can become fully human: alive, free, and whole, transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.

Joe Rigney (PhD, University of Chester) serves as a fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College. He is a husband, a father of three, and the author of a number of books, including The Things of Earth; Strangely Bright; and More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rigney, Joe

Taylor, Justin

Leseproben

Introduction

The best way to learn about Lewis “on the Christian life” would be a book club. If I had my druthers, every person reading this book would join me in a small group (about ten or so individuals) to read and appreciate what Lewis can teach us about the life of faith. We’d read The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, the Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, The Four Loves and Letters to Malcolm, The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces. We might read some of the apologetic works, like Miracles or the Problem of Pain, and we’d supplement it all with some of Lewis’s essays, sermons, and letters.

The method would be simple. We’d begin reading a book aloud to one another, and I would periodically interrupt to ask a question or make a comment or a connection to something else in Lewis or the Bible. The interruptions would be prime opportunities to press whatever Lewis is saying into our own lives. After the interruption, we’d resume reading. This rhythm of reading and questioning, reading and application, reading and appreciation, would afford a far richer vision of Lewis on the Christian life. For one thing, you’d be getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. More than that, you’d begin to feel the organic unity of Lewis’s thought, what his friend Owen Barfield meant when he said, “What he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”1 Immersing yourself in this sort of Lewis book club would help you to enjoy and not merely contemplate Lewis, and therefore (hopefully) enjoy and contemplate God more deeply.2

But, alas, this book club is not to be. Instead, the best I can offer is this volume on Lewis on the Christian Life. I wish it were a better book. I wish I were able to do the subject matter justice. I owe Lewis so much, and I have only gone deeper in debt through writing this book.

How the Sausage Was Made

A book like this about a thinker like Lewis immediately presents the author with a structural challenge. Some books on Lewis are organized by topic (Will Vaus’s Mere Theology, and Donald Williams’s Deeper Magic). Some are organized biographically (Devin Brown’s A Life Observed). Some seek to provide an overview of Lewis’s major works and are thus organized by his writings (Clyde S. Kilby’s The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, and Wesley Kort’s Reading C. S. Lewis). I toyed with each of these approaches at one time or another. One of my editors initially suggested structuring the book as a reverse engineering of The Screwtape Letters. At one point I considered trying to root everything in Mere Christianity, bringing in other works as they unfolded naturally there. I wrote over thirty-five thousand words structured around the theme of dualisms (see below). But in the end, none of these approaches seemed to work.

Now, most authors do not spend so much time telling you about all the books they didn’t write. I doubt many readers are all that interested in how the sausage is made; you’ve come for the eating. I mention these struggles for two reasons. The first is apologetic, and that in both senses. I want to apologize for failing to do my subject justice, and I want to defend myself against certain accusations. Whatever weaknesses remain in this book, they are not because of laziness. But the second reason is the more important, and it will take some explaining. To understand it, I’ll need to tell you something about those thirty-five thousand words that I had to abandon (or rework).

After attempting some of the other structures, I settled on the theme of dualisms as the structure to unpack Lewis. The word dualism simply means two-ism. A dualism distinguishes between two things that are not identical. Not all dualisms are created equal. There are what we might call “both–and” dualisms and “either–or” dualisms. In either–or dualisms, the two things in question are mutually exclusive. This usually means that one of them is good, and the other is bad. Thus, we must make a choice between them. Both–and dualisms, on the other hand, identify two good things we may distinguish but must not separate. Instead, we must embrace them both.

These two types of dualism run throughout Lewis’s writings; for example, body and soul, enjoyment and contemplation, God and self, pride and humility. Because of our sinfulness, we are constantly mixing up the two varieties. When faced with a both–and dualism, we regularly choose one side over the other; we turn it into an either–or. On the other hand, when faced with a true either–or dualism, we try to keep both things. We refuse to make a choice. Much of Lewis’s writings may be seen as an attempt to correct this fundamental confusion. If we are discussing a both–and dualism, Lewis will dissuade us from choosing one and rejecting the other. He will try to keep us from becoming Martin Luther’s drunken peasant, who is always falling off one side of his horse or the other. Thus, Lewis will urge the wedding of reason and imagination. If we are discussing an either–or dualism, he will insist that we make a choice. We must not be like the people of Israel, halting between two opinions; or the disciples of Jesus, attempting to serve two masters. Thus, Lewis will write of the great divorce between heaven and hell.

Once you’ve learned to recognize the two types of dualisms, you will find them everywhere in Lewis’s writings. Thus, I initially chose to organize this book around the two types of dualisms. The first part would have been devoted to both–and dualisms. It would have been called “The Givens,” since these are the features of reality that are simply there and that we ought to receive as gifts from God. These include reason and imagination, enjoyment and contemplation, nature and arch-nature (or super-nature), Creator and creature, theory and reality, poetry and science, eternity and time, predestination and free will, masculinity and femininity, body and soul, pleasures and Joy (with a capital J).

The second part would have covered either–or dualisms, and I would have called it “The Choice.” I say “The Choice” and not “The Choices” because Lewis believed that in the end, the Choice is singular, even if it comes to us in a variety of guises. There are many manifestations of the Choice, but at bottom it is the same. This fundamental Choice I call God versus self. Now, in one sense, this is a both–and dualism. Both God and self are good and should be embraced. But the Choice in question is which of these will be at the center? Will it be God, or will it be ourselves? That is the fundamental Choice.

From there, we would have seen how this Choice appears in any number of other dualisms: angels versus demons, pride versus humility, maturity versus autonomy, self-knowledge versus morbid introspection, and beauty versus utility. The Choice appears in our family life, where it becomes affection versus possession. It shows up in our sexual lives, where it is Eros versus lust. And it is in our social lives, where it is friendship versus the “Inner Ring,” and membership versus equality. In our pleasures, it is deciding between self-restraint and repeated indulgence (what Lewis called “encore”). In our view of ourselves, it takes the form of good pretending versus bad pretending. And, of course, in the end, the Choice leads us inexorably toward either heaven or hell.

These chapters would have been punctuated by a number of narrative interludes that would have brought together different elements in the book. Ransom, Jane Studdock, Mark Studdock, Shasta and Digory, and Orual all show in clear ways the nature of the Choice that faces each one of us. But that book was not to be. Instead, I wrote this one. The Choice is still central; it appears in almost every chapter. But instead of accenting Lewis’s dualisms, I emphasize the end and goal of Lewis’s reflections on the Christian life—to help us so encounter the living God that we become our true selves. Becoming fully human in the presence of God—that is what Lewis thought the Christian life is all about.

An Invitation to Explore

As a result of this new focus, I loosened the strictures on organizing the chapters. In some of them, I use The Screwtape Letters and Letters to Malcolm as the launching point. Given the centrality of the Choice, this is a fitting way to discuss the Devil and prayer and church and so forth. Screwtape Letters is the Christian life from the vantage point of the demonic powers that seek to harm us. In it, Lewis shows us the world upside down so that we can better see it right side up. Writing from his basest self, he allowed his imagination to run down the ugly paths and tangled ditches of his heart, giving voice to them through a bureaucratic devil. In the preface, however, he notes that a full treatment of the Christian life would require a similar set of letters from the perspective of a guardian angel. Lewis doesn’t think such a book is...