God in the Dock: The Apologetics of C.S. Lewis

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=  The Chronicles of Narnia The Imagination of C.S. Lewis =
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= God in the Dock -The Apologetics of C.S. Lewis =
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'''BY LELAND RYKEN'''
 
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The most important lessons that we can learn from C.S. Lewis’ Narnian Chronicles are the ones that Lewis himself wanted us to learn. It so happens that Lewis said enough about literature in general and the Narnian books in particular that it is possible to read Lewis’ classic children’s stories with the author himself.<br>One of the most important pieces of advice that Lewis gave to readers of literature is that they must receive a work of literature instead of using it. Lewis wrote, “A work of…art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used’. When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities” (emphasis added). According to this line of thought, “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”<br>This is not to deny that we should make use of what we read. It is instead a caution to let stories set their own agenda of concerns according to the order created by the author, not to impose our own agenda on them according to our own timetable as we progress through a story. Lewis’ rule of thumb was to let stories “tell you their own moral” and not “put one in.” The relevance of this to the Narnian stories is that the religious aspects of the stories usually do not appear until approximately halfway through the books. Many Christian readers are impatient with that and force the opening chapters into something that Lewis did not intend.<br>The second warning that Lewis gave is not to reduce works of literature to a set of ideas. He claimed that “one of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy…at all.” To regard a story “as primarily a vehicle for…philosophy is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us.” Works of literature “are complex and carefully made objects. Attention to the very objects they are is our first step.” This, too, should steer us away from how many Christian readers deal with The Chronicles of Narnia.
 
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<br>''How the Narnian Stories Were Composed''
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'''BY ROGER NICOLE'''
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<br>In addition to the general guidelines for reading literature, Lewis left us some very useful tips for reading the Narnian stories in particular. For example, Lewis famously said that “all my seven Narnian books…began with pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures.” Thus The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe “began with a picture of Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” Just as we are recovering from the shock of that revelation, Lewis adds, “This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’”<br>Just in case we might think that we cannot possibly have heard things correctly, Lewis also gave us another passage of similar import — only more shocking. In countering the assumption of some of his readers that he “began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children,” Lewis claimed that “at first there wasn’t even anything Christian about [the stories].”<br>The order of composition suggests an order of reading. If we follow the lead of Lewis himself, a major lesson we can learn from the Narnian stories is that they are first of all stories — adventure stories, fantasy stories, children’s stories. These narrative features are not simply “a disguise for something more ‘adult’.”
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I<br>n modern English the words apology and apologize indicate regret because some statement or action was offensive and wrong. This is not the case for “apologetics” in theology, for that discipline is intended to manifest “a point of view is right.” It is intended for those who differ in order to win them over, or for those who agree in order to confirm them in the truth for which the apologist testifies.<br>It is in this sense that C.S. Lewis is recognized as an “apologist,” for a number of his works are intended to manifest the adequacy of the Christian outlook over against a “naturalist” position, which asserts that the universe is simply a great material mass functioning in terms of its own mechanism or laws without any possible intervention from the outside and specifically without a creative or governing power of a mind. C.S. Lewis was very well prepared for this task because until late in his twenties he was a devotee of atheism without any reference to Jesus Christ and was twenty-nine years old before being converted and embracing a Christian world-and-life view. Thus, he was more knowledgeable than many Christian apologists who know the views that they dispute only from the outside. He also experienced personally the gravity of the problems that the atheist has to face and the way in which such problems may force a person of integrity to look beyond atheism for a suitable philosophical and religious outlook. C.S. Lewis wrote about his own experience in 1933 in an autobiographical volume entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress, in the manner of John Bunyan, and again in Surprised by Joy (1955).<br>His first contribution to apologetics was entitled The Problem of Pain, published in October 1940 as part of The Christian Challenge Series (it was reprinted ten times by 1943). He dealt there forthrightly with the question: “If God is almighty and supremely loving, why does He permit pain in this universe?” He showed how pain is inevitable for real persons wherever sin exists. Who could imagine what a frightful world it should be if sin could grow without restraint? C.S. Lewis proceeds in his analysis in an orderly and lucid manner, dealing with this difficult subject in a way that a lay person can readily understand. From time to time, he has striking comments that remain unforgettable, like the following: “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell” (p. 41). From 1941–44, he delivered a series of thirty-three broadcast talks whose titles describe well their contents:
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<br>''How the Narnian Stories Became Christian Classics''
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1941: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe (5 talks)<br>1942: What Christians Believe (5 talks)<br>1943: Christian Behaviors (12 talks) <br>1944: Beyond Personality; or, First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity (11 talks)
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<br>Of course this does not mean that we need to abandon our conviction that the Narnian Chronicles are Christian classics — stories in which Christian experiences and doctrines are movingly embodied. In the same passage in which Lewis claimed that initially there was nothing Christian about the stories, he added, “That element pushed itself in of its own accord.” So there is a Christian dimension to the stories, as we have known since our first encounter with them. In a letter that Lewis wrote a year and a half before his death, he said that there is “a deeper meaning behind” the surface details of the stories.<br>The key to the religious meanings of the Narnian stories is the figure of Aslan. When at age forty Lewis decided to try to make a story out of his mental pictures of “a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion,” at first he “had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. …Once He was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.” <br>It is pretty obvious that Aslan pulled not only the stories together but also the religious vision of the stories. Lewis himself said as much: in the letter quoted above, Lewis said that “the whole Narnian story is about Christ.”
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First published separately in three volumes, these lectures were gathered together under the title Mere Christianity and often republished. The term mere in this title means “pure,” as it did in old English. The emphasis is to deal with major views largely common to all denominations in Christendom.<br>In 1943, The Screwtape Letters appeared, and this is probably C.S. Lewis’ most popular writing. Here we have a course by correspondence in which a master demon, Screwtape, instructs Wormwood, a novice in the art of tempting human beings and preventing on their part a true allegiance to God and the Gospel. This gives an opportunity to look on the Christian claims from below, so to speak, not with some artificial adornments provided by self-deceitfulness or charity in considering others, but with a kind of cynical realism that penetrates into the actual motives that people ordinarily attempt to hide. C.S. Lewis can cast a critical evaluation of many moves and motives that are flourishing under the umbrella of genuine Christianity. With sharp discernment and superb control of language, gained perhaps in his scholarly studies in early English literature, his wit and discernment surface on every page as some of the following quotations evidence:<br>“We have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is [God’s] invention, not ours. He made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one” (p. 41).<br>“A moderate religion is as good for us as no religion at all — and more amusing” (p. 43).<br>“It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one” (p. 56).<br>“A good many Christian political writers think that Christianity began going wrong and departing from the doctrine of its Founder, at a very early stage. Now, this idea must be used by us to encourage again the conception of a historical Jesus to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and ‘humanitarian’ lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantage of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifest. In the first place they all tend to direct man’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical” (p. 106).<br>If these few quotations arouse your appetite, get the book and you will find much more than this sample. The volume entitled Miracles: A Preliminary Study appeared in 1947, very shortly after Dr. E.W. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, published The Rise of Christianity, in which he denied the factuality of all miracles recorded in the New Testament, including those concerning the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The word preliminary in the title should not be mistaken for elementary, for it is a rather technical vindication of supernaturalism versus naturalism defined as a view that nothing exists except nature, that is, the gigantic interlocking of all particles of matter existing from times immemorial. Nature cannot explain the origin of rational thought, and even less provide a basis for morality and conscience.<br>We are led, therefore, to recognize a powerful and purposive reality beyond the material world, who is the creator and sustainer of all that exists. With this in view, it is not strange that there would be occasions in which interaction between this power and His world might occur where the laws that govern matter might not function as they ordinarily do.<br>C.S. Lewis then devotes an essential chapter to the “Grand Miracle” of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. Then he discusses miracles of the old creation with “the Divine Man focusing for us what the God of Nature has already done on a larger scale” (p. 169). The miracles of the new creation are those in which a “reversal” is manifest, principally the resurrection, which is fundamental for the whole of Christianity.<br>A brief epilogue and two appendices conclude the book. Throughout we can appreciate the great qualities of C.S. Lewis, his earnestness, his meticulous care not to leave any gaps in his reasoning, his thorough commitment to Holy Scripture, and his marvelous style. Dealing with objections to the virgin birth of Christ, he says that some opponents of it “think they see in this miracle a slur upon sexual intercourse (though they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to bakers)” (p. 115). That parenthesis is worth the price of the book!
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<br>''Spiritual and Moral Lessons from Narnia''
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''Dr. Roger Nicole is professor emeritus of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, and he is author of Our Sovereign Saviour.''
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<br>One level of Christian meaning in the Narnian Chronicles is the moral vision embodied in the stories. It is the story of a great, cosmic struggle between good and evil — and the need of every creature to choose between them. The vision of the stories corresponds to Lewis’ view of the world itself, which in one of his essays he described as a universe in which “there is no neutral ground” and in which “every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” <br>In addition to this moral vision, the Narnian stories embody a theological vision. At the heart of that vision is the figure of Aslan, who represents Christ. Thus the qualities attributed to Aslan, the acts that he performs, the ways in which he relates to characters in the stories and the characters to him, the devotion that he elicits from those who believe in him and follow him — all these are an implied picture of the Christian life. We will not go wrong, therefore, if we simply view the story of Aslan as the story of Christ. The parts of the stories in which Aslan is an active participant can thus be read devotionally, and in fact this is how Christian readers intuitively assimilate the stories.<br>Generating outward from this christological center of the narrative world of Narnia are more general Christian themes. The stories as a whole cover the same metanarrative (“big story”) that the Bible presents. Within the mode of the fantasy story genre, we read about the creation of the world; the fall of that world from an original innocence; the struggle between good and evil (or Christ and forces of darkness) throughout fallen history; the atoning, substitutionary death and the resurrection of Christ; and the eschatological end of the world and beginning of eternity. It is no stretch to say that the Bible itself forms the subtext of the Narnian stories.<br>As we revisit the contours of salvation history in the Narnian stories, we are also led to contemplate the outline of Christian doctrine. Chief among these doctrines is what might be called the doctrine of God. From the stories we get a picture of God as creator, as judge, as sovereign, as the one who guides history to His ends, and as the one who saves. A view of the person emerges strongly as well. Its chief tenets are that people are moral agents who must choose for or against God, and that people have a dual capacity for great good and great evil. A doctrine of evil also emerges strongly, as we are continuously aware of the tremendous power of evil in the world and its ultimate defeat by Christ (the Christus victor motif).<br>The final lesson that we need to learn in regard to this spiritual depth in the stories is that the religious meanings are embodied in the form of narrative fantasy. As readers we need to experience and relish the stories as children’s stories first of all. The religious meanings can be trusted to reveal themselves at the points in the narrative (chiefly the parts where Aslan is an active character) where Lewis intended them to be present.
 
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''Dr. Leland Ryken is professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and he is author of The Christian Imagination.''
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Revision as of 04:04, 8 May 2008

 

God in the Dock -The Apologetics of C.S. Lewis

BY ROGER NICOLE

I
n modern English the words apology and apologize indicate regret because some statement or action was offensive and wrong. This is not the case for “apologetics” in theology, for that discipline is intended to manifest “a point of view is right.” It is intended for those who differ in order to win them over, or for those who agree in order to confirm them in the truth for which the apologist testifies.
It is in this sense that C.S. Lewis is recognized as an “apologist,” for a number of his works are intended to manifest the adequacy of the Christian outlook over against a “naturalist” position, which asserts that the universe is simply a great material mass functioning in terms of its own mechanism or laws without any possible intervention from the outside and specifically without a creative or governing power of a mind. C.S. Lewis was very well prepared for this task because until late in his twenties he was a devotee of atheism without any reference to Jesus Christ and was twenty-nine years old before being converted and embracing a Christian world-and-life view. Thus, he was more knowledgeable than many Christian apologists who know the views that they dispute only from the outside. He also experienced personally the gravity of the problems that the atheist has to face and the way in which such problems may force a person of integrity to look beyond atheism for a suitable philosophical and religious outlook. C.S. Lewis wrote about his own experience in 1933 in an autobiographical volume entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress, in the manner of John Bunyan, and again in Surprised by Joy (1955).
His first contribution to apologetics was entitled The Problem of Pain, published in October 1940 as part of The Christian Challenge Series (it was reprinted ten times by 1943). He dealt there forthrightly with the question: “If God is almighty and supremely loving, why does He permit pain in this universe?” He showed how pain is inevitable for real persons wherever sin exists. Who could imagine what a frightful world it should be if sin could grow without restraint? C.S. Lewis proceeds in his analysis in an orderly and lucid manner, dealing with this difficult subject in a way that a lay person can readily understand. From time to time, he has striking comments that remain unforgettable, like the following: “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell” (p. 41). From 1941–44, he delivered a series of thirty-three broadcast talks whose titles describe well their contents:

1941: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe (5 talks)
1942: What Christians Believe (5 talks)
1943: Christian Behaviors (12 talks)
1944: Beyond Personality; or, First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity (11 talks)

First published separately in three volumes, these lectures were gathered together under the title Mere Christianity and often republished. The term mere in this title means “pure,” as it did in old English. The emphasis is to deal with major views largely common to all denominations in Christendom.
In 1943, The Screwtape Letters appeared, and this is probably C.S. Lewis’ most popular writing. Here we have a course by correspondence in which a master demon, Screwtape, instructs Wormwood, a novice in the art of tempting human beings and preventing on their part a true allegiance to God and the Gospel. This gives an opportunity to look on the Christian claims from below, so to speak, not with some artificial adornments provided by self-deceitfulness or charity in considering others, but with a kind of cynical realism that penetrates into the actual motives that people ordinarily attempt to hide. C.S. Lewis can cast a critical evaluation of many moves and motives that are flourishing under the umbrella of genuine Christianity. With sharp discernment and superb control of language, gained perhaps in his scholarly studies in early English literature, his wit and discernment surface on every page as some of the following quotations evidence:
“We have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is [God’s] invention, not ours. He made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one” (p. 41).
“A moderate religion is as good for us as no religion at all — and more amusing” (p. 43).
“It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one” (p. 56).
“A good many Christian political writers think that Christianity began going wrong and departing from the doctrine of its Founder, at a very early stage. Now, this idea must be used by us to encourage again the conception of a historical Jesus to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and ‘humanitarian’ lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantage of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifest. In the first place they all tend to direct man’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical” (p. 106).
If these few quotations arouse your appetite, get the book and you will find much more than this sample. The volume entitled Miracles: A Preliminary Study appeared in 1947, very shortly after Dr. E.W. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, published The Rise of Christianity, in which he denied the factuality of all miracles recorded in the New Testament, including those concerning the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The word preliminary in the title should not be mistaken for elementary, for it is a rather technical vindication of supernaturalism versus naturalism defined as a view that nothing exists except nature, that is, the gigantic interlocking of all particles of matter existing from times immemorial. Nature cannot explain the origin of rational thought, and even less provide a basis for morality and conscience.
We are led, therefore, to recognize a powerful and purposive reality beyond the material world, who is the creator and sustainer of all that exists. With this in view, it is not strange that there would be occasions in which interaction between this power and His world might occur where the laws that govern matter might not function as they ordinarily do.
C.S. Lewis then devotes an essential chapter to the “Grand Miracle” of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. Then he discusses miracles of the old creation with “the Divine Man focusing for us what the God of Nature has already done on a larger scale” (p. 169). The miracles of the new creation are those in which a “reversal” is manifest, principally the resurrection, which is fundamental for the whole of Christianity.
A brief epilogue and two appendices conclude the book. Throughout we can appreciate the great qualities of C.S. Lewis, his earnestness, his meticulous care not to leave any gaps in his reasoning, his thorough commitment to Holy Scripture, and his marvelous style. Dealing with objections to the virgin birth of Christ, he says that some opponents of it “think they see in this miracle a slur upon sexual intercourse (though they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to bakers)” (p. 115). That parenthesis is worth the price of the book!

Dr. Roger Nicole is professor emeritus of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, and he is author of Our Sovereign Saviour.



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