Best of It: C. S. Lewis - The Christian Individual

[Series Index]

[Today we move into Part 2 of Making the Best of It by John Stackhouse. We will look at three twentieth century theologians Stackhouse considers resources for the recovery of Christian realism: C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He devotes about forty pages to each of these men. My aim is to extract some salient points and put them in one post. There is no way I can do his fascinating reviews justice, so you’ll need to get the book and read it.]

Chapter 2 – C. S. Lewis: The Christian Individual

Narrative

As a storyteller himself, one of the things Lewis tapped into was the narrative nature of the Bible … creation and fall, redemption, and consummation. Lewis used the narrative as an interpretive lens evaluating life.

Lewis believed that world was created good, but immature. There was a “nascent shalom” at Eden but the world is to evolve beyond that primitive state. The fall resulted in total depravity … not total in the sense of having become abjectly evil, but total in that it has touched every aspect of our being. Redemption in Christ includes salvation but Lewis seemed particularly attuned to sanctification; we die to ourselves and enter the process of taking on the image of Christ.

Culture

Stackhouse, quoting from an Essay, Christianity and Culture, writes:

“On the whole, the New Testament seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important.”

By “innocent,” Lewis seems to mean that it can still be seen as a good thing to be undertaken, rather intrinsically something evil to be avoided. (54)

Four reasons why culture can be a proper undertaking:

1. The need to earn a living.
2. Culture can be harmful, so “it is therefore probably better that the ranks of the ‘culture-sellers’ should include some Christians – as an antidote.”
3. Pleasure.
4. To awaken the unconverted to “something more” points toward the gospel. (54)

One of the key points Stackhouse makes about Lewis is that he has little to say about the church or society as whole. Quoting Lewis, “To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone, and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters.” (55) This was Lewis before he became a Christian but Stackhouse points out that little seems to have changed afterward.

Lewis generally saw the workplace, the economy, and societal institutions as cursed by stupidity and alienation. These institutions seem not to be his focus. From Good Work and Good Works:

The main practical task for most us is not to give the Big Men advice about how to end our fatal economy – we have none to give and they wouldn’t listen – but to consider how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as possible. (56)

The application of Christian principles to various spheres of life was to come from Christians as they lived their vocations in those spheres. No grand agenda on issues of civil authority and civil obedience were forthcoming from Lewis.

In eschatological terms, Lewis did not embrace the dualistic notion of disembodied spirits as the ultimate destiny of humanity. Heaven is the place where things become more firm, thick, and vivid, not less so. There would be a new creation that would somehow be both continuous and radically discontinuous with our present reality … is not an unmaking but a remaking. Is something being remade or replaced? Stackhouse suggests that Lewis’ answer would have been, “yes.”

Lewis seems to have in view individuals on the path toward sanctification, “looking for the world to come, taking pleasure as he finds it, and contributing to the common good as he can.” (60)

This observation by Stackhouse was particularly insightful:

Inasmuch as the cumulative influence of Christians in society affects public institutions, however, Lewis’ concern was not to subvert public institutions nor to convert them to their final messianic state, but to revert them back to their traditional sources and purposes in God’s providence. In this view Lewis was truly a cultural conservative (and not merely reactionary or contrarian), not because he entertained any romantic view of the inherent goodness of society at some point in the past, but in the deep sense of one who continued to see the goodness and order of God over and in all earthly affairs. Lewis had not given up on the structures God has place in the world, and he believed that the Christian is to contribute as he can to any attempt to recover these healthful, helpful gifts. (60)

Later in the chapter Stackhouse concludes:

Thus he characterized contemporary culture as neither the apex of civilization’s advance (so the self-flattery of modernity) nor as the nadir of pseudo-sophisticated barbarism (so both the premodern critics). Lewis saw modern society as he saw all societies: as a mixed field, showing the fruit of worthy human efforts under Providence and also showing the fruit of evil human efforts aided by the Evil One. (69)

For Lewis, culture always demonstrates three elements in tension.

1. Culture is always plastic: we are always shaping it (as, to be sure, it shapes us), and it is not inexorable, permanent, or linear.
2. Culture always is also marked by the intransigence of evil and the active resistance of evil agents, human and diabolical.
3. Culture is yet under the providence of God, who has promised to redeem the whole world. Thus Lewis felt neither optimism nor pessimism was appropriate; rather, he advocated a realistic hope for both now and the future. (69)

Anti-City?

An interesting side note that Stackhouse picked up on that I’ve noticed as well is Lewis’ distaste for the city. In the Narnia Chronicles, London is a place to be escaped. All the cities mentioned are places of evil. In The Great Divorce, Hell is a city and Heaven is a countryside. Stackhouse wonders if Lewis need to reflect more on Heaven as the New Jerusalem.

What do you think?

There is so much more in this chapter but I’ll leave it here. What are your thoughts about Lewis’ “Christian individual?”

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Comments

[Travis Greene]

Lewis is essential, but yeah, he didn't seem to have much of an ecclesiology, which is kind of odd for an Anglican.

It's also true that he rejected dualism ("We must, indeed, believe the risen body to be extremely different from the mortal body: but the existence, in the new state, of anything that could in any sense be described as 'body' at all, involves some sort of spatial relations and in the long run a whole new universe. That is the picture - not of unmaking but of remaking. The old field of space, time, matter and the sense is to be weeded, dug and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not."), but I think he was still affected by it in a lot of his thinking ("You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body."). Probably a result of his classical education.

It's ironic that, as much as he critiqued modernism, he was still subject to many of its assumptions and biases. Which he'd be the first to admit (and does somewhere, I'm pretty sure).

[Michael W. Kruse]

Travis, Lewis was an odd mixture of things. Another aspect of Lewis' thought that Stackhouse points out is that Lewis was strongly attracted to the idea of monarchy yet in a fallen world he believed democracy was needed in order to check sinful human beings.

I think your point about inklings of dualism are probably right on. I've had my questions about that as well.

[Travis Greene]

Yeah, he says somewhere that if there was no original sin, patrilineal kingship would be the only lawful government. You can see this train of thought at work in Perelandra. I can't really figure this out, other than just as another example of his general old-world conservatism.

I certainly don't mean to sound overly critical...I can only wish to think with his depth, wit, and clarity. My blog is named after a quote from

Miracles

. But we do our heroes a disservice if we don't acknowledge their flaws.

[Michael W. Kruse]

None of us gets it all right. If I'm going to exclude everyone's views I believe has got some things wrong, then I will end up talking to myself. :-)