Tag Archives: C. S. Lewis

Remembering God’s Way

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Eustace and Jill from Silver Chair by Dunechaser on Flickr

I am on a C. S. Lewis binge, rereading his Chronicles of Narnia.   The Silver Chair is this week’s read, in which Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole are given the mission of rescuing the Narnia Prince Rilian.  Near the beginning of the story, King Aslan gives to Jill four signs that will aid in their mission.  She is instructed to remember the signs by repeating them every day, telling them to Eustace and later their companion, Puddleglum. The discipline of the repetition will allow them to recognize the signs when she, Eustace or Puddleglum encounter them.  In the hardship of her journey she neglects the repetition and therefore they must face unnecessary challenges.

This act of remembering echoes God’s words to the Israelites while they were wandering in the wilderness, prior to entering the promise land.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:5-9)

The act of daily devotions can at time feel like a chore or empty ritual.  Yet to neglect the ritual is to open oneself to other, less healthy, less meaningful influences.  To read a passage of scripture, to pray the Lord’s Prayer, or to confess the Apostle’s Creed aides one in reorienting oneself to God’s mission and path. I confess I can easily be distracted from the main tasks of the day.  Asking for God’s guidance, courage and strength helps me stay true to my mission to trust, live and serve.  

How has daily time with God enhanced your life of faith?

Prayer: Lord God, only you know what is ahead for me today.  I ask you to guide my thoughts, words and deeds, that they might bring honor to you.

Love Wins or the Great Divorce?

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C. S. Lewis's Great Divorce

Yesterday I finished Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins.  I understand how evangelical can be upset with him, but as a Lutheran I don’t feel such judgement.   If I could use one word to describe God it would be Gracious.   God’s grace is infinite and total and I see it extending beyond this life.   Like Bell, I don’t understand how God can condemn someone to eternal, infinite punishment if they never had the opportunity to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I remember conversations I had with fellow students at Fuller Seminary where some thought that the church had the obligation to proclaim the Gospel to keep people from going to hell.  They believed that we HAD to preach it or else unbelievers would burn, even those in distant lands.

I do believe in proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ, but not as some cosmic obligation to keep people from hell.   I preach the good news because I am in love with Jesus, the creator of the universe and I am excited to have others experience that liberating love as well.  I am a participant in the new creation with Jesus and I am humbled that God can use someone like me to accomplish God’s will.  

Rob Bell does a great job of describing the incredible, awesome, overwhelming love of God for us.  However I do have qualms with him, such as how he misquotes Martin Luther as if Luther was a closet universalist.  Carl Trueman, Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, has written a length blog post on this very subject. See http://www.reformation21.org/articles/easy-virtues-and-cruel-mistresses.php.  Then again I disagree with Carl Trueman’s comparison of Love Wins with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.  But disagreements are part of  a healthy theological conversation.

In an earlier post, I wrote that I have been rereading parts of C. S. Lewis.  When I finished Bell’s book, I discovered that he had a section for further reading.  His second reference is this: “On hell, see C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.”  Later in the acknowledgments he thanks his parents for suggesting that while in high school he read C. S. Lewis.   I must agree.  I appreciate both writers, but the better IMHO is C. S. Lewis.  Next week I will move on to other topics.

What writer or artists has best help you see the magnificent love of God?

Images of Heaven

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Is this a Scriptural Image of Heaven?

Since it is still snowing in Minnesota, I need a brief glimpse of “paradise” to give me hope.  Many of us tend to recreate the new heaven and earth in our own favorite images and struggle with the images that scriptures uses.   Rob Bell in Love Wins has a comical reference to this:

Think of the cultural images that are associated with heaven: harps and cloud and streets of gold, everybody dressed in white robes. (Does anybody look good in white robes? Can you play sports in white robes? How could it be heaven without sports? What about swimming? What if you spill food on the robe?)

All of our images of heaven are somewhat speculative since they are describing something beyond our present ability to comprehend.  All language is symbolic, especially when it comes to God.  C. S. Lewis wrote a wise sermon, called The Weight of Glory.  In it he categorizes the Scriptural images of heaven:

The promise of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads.  It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe — ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars in God’s temple.  The first question I ask about these promises is: “Why any of them except the first?”  Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ?  . . . . I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols.

Lewis goes on to describe how we each turn our perception of “being with Christ,” into our own version of what friendship or camaraderie or human love is like here on earth.  Lewis concludes,  

The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our poor experience of personal love, with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and relieving each other, are supplied. 

What image of heaven most surprises or unsettles you?  What could that say about you?

I can’t lose.

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Yesterday I posted on hell; not fun to write.  Today I promised heaven and wonder if it will be as difficult to create.   I certainly can write about “longing” for heaven. 

Life Wins!

Today a cold rain continues to fall with the promise of snow tomorrow.  The calendar says spring, yet my physical  surrounding says “not yet.”  I long for the green and warmth of spring, for the hope of life renewed.

I think yearning for heaven is an appetite within us.  C. S. Lewis wrote extensively about this yearning or desire in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.   Lewis argued that just like a man in a desert longs for water, so we, as creatures made for heaven, yearn for God’s joyful presence.  This yearning is an indication that we are not just material creatures, but have a spiritual dimension.   How could this spiritual yearning have developed out of only material longings?  We are spiritual beings seeking our spiritual home.

 Rob Bell argues in Love Wins that Jesus came to reconnect heaven and earth.

What Jesus taught, what the prophets taught, what all of Jewish tradition pointed to and what Jesus lived in anticipation of, was the day when earth and heaven would be one. The day when God’s will would be done on earth as it is now done in heaven.  The day when earth and heaven will be the same place.  As it’s written at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21: “God’s dwelling place is now among people.”

Lewis and Bell both believe that Jesus accomplished the reconnection in his life, death and resurrection.  Though we do not fully experience heaven on earth, we do have a taste of the heavenly joy while living in this life.  We begin to become what God created us to be.   And in death we become even more alive in God.  Paul writes about this letter of joy, Philippians 2:21. “To live is Christ, and to die is to gain” or as Eugene Peterson translates it in the Message “Alive, I’m Christ’s messenger; dead, I’m his bounty. Life versus even more life! I can’t lose.”  

In what ways have you tasted heaven here on earth?

Intersecting Hell

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Where do you dwell?

My recent readings have intersected.  I have been reading a series of lectures on C. S. Lewis by a Dr. Louis Markos as well as reading Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.   Bell starts with Jesus’s word for hell, Gehenna.  Gehenna was an actual valley outside of Jerusalem that was used as the city dump, where fires burned constantly and animals gnashed teeth as they fought for scrapes.   Gehenna was not desirable real estate. 

Lewis wrote about hell in The Great Divorce.   His image of hell: dirty, grey mean streets of a city slum where it is always dusk and always raining.  Scholars think Lewis was using London during a smog alert.  (I might be tempted to use a picture of Minnesota in March, when snirt (snow/dirt) never leaves and spring never comes. )   Lewis’ basic definition of hell is the absence of God: where God says to those who reject Him, “your will be done.” 

 Both Bell and Lewis agree that hell is not only a destination to be avoided after death.  It can be our reality right now.  Hell emerges when we allow our sinful nature to dominate our lives.  It can be drugs, alcohol, ambition or greed.  Or it can be something simple like grumbling.   C. S. Lewis wrote,

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

The Good News is that God has come to rescue us from hell.  Jesus’ life, death and resurrection carries all who believe into his kingdom of heaven.  Tomorrow I will post on their intersection in heaven.

Do images of hell help or hinder your faith in God?

St. Patrick’s Day and the Vibrant Life

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Vibrant Life is at the heart of Resurrection Lutheran’s mission.  We are called to live in Christ, to vibrate on Christ’s frequency.  St. Patrick is someone who vibrated to Christ within him.  Born in Roman Britain ca 389, he became a slave in Ireland as a child when  captured by Irish raiders.  After escaping back to Britain, he felt God’s call to preach the faith to the Irish people.   He became an evangelist to his captors.

Are you ready for the True Parade?

Now his Saint Day is celebrated with parades, parties and green beer, and the Protestant pietist in me grates at the excess of desire and appetite.   But I recently read a short section by another Irishman, C. S. Lewis, in his sermon, The Weight of Glory, that gives a different perspective on such desires,

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, 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 around with drink and sex and ambition when inifinite 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 too easily pleased.

The phrase, We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when inifinite joy is offered us, strikes me hard today.   St. Patrick Day celebrations are not a bad thing, but even at their best they are pale imitation of what God has prepared for God’s children.  God created us with a “God-shaped vacuum” that we long to fill.  Alcohol, sex, wealth, and ambition can not fill the vacuum.  We have a thirst, a desire, for God’s joy that we only partially fill in this life.   Heaven is where we will be fully what God created us to be and our celebration will have no end.  In heaven all life will be vibrant.

How have you experienced Vibrant Life?