Monday, July 29, 2013
350 - What We See vs. What We Get
Spirituality Column #350
July 30, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
July 30, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
What We See vs. What We Get
By Bob Walters
"I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but
because by it I see everything else.” – C.S. Lewis
I
like C.S. Lewis because his writings help me see things about God that no one
could ever explain.
Theologians parse
doctrines, dogmas, creeds, liturgies, scripture, traditions and church history. Priests, preachers, pastors and ministers tend
the flock, seek the lost, lead worship and share the Good News of eternal salvation
through Jesus Christ crucified, dead, buried and risen, our sins forgiven,
Amen.
But Lewis
(1898-1963), arguably the most influential Christian writer of the 20th
century (Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.), formally was
neither theologian nor clergy. He was a first-rate
scholar – of English literature – at Oxford and Cambridge universities in
England. His life’s ambition was to be a
poet, but he found his voice writing prose. He grew up near Belfast, Ireland, the son of a
pious Protestant solicitor (attorney) in a house full of books Lewis read
voraciously.
Upon Lewis’s
mother’s death in 1908, his father sent him off to boarding schools which Lewis
later considered to be the most dismal period of his life, worse even than the
trench warfare of World War I in France where he sustained a deployment-ending
shrapnel injury. By his mid-teens Lewis was
a serious, thoughtful atheist, even – per his unsuspecting father’s wishes – as
he was “confirmed” in the Church of Ireland at 16.
It would be 1931
before he became “the most reluctant convert in all England” intellectually rejecting
“the glib and shallow rationalism” of the Enlightenment and its tyranny against
the emotions and imagination that animate faith.
So explains Oxford
professor, theologian, author and biographer Alister McGrath in two outstanding
new books, C.S. Lewis, A Life (biography), and The Intellectual World of C.S.
Lewis (eight essays by McGrath). The
books commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lewis’s death in England
on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day America was shocked by the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
Lewis, a practicing
member of the Anglican fellowship, didn’t preach the Gospel, promote a church,
or invoke his beliefs on others. His genius
and enduring impact was in his ability to convey and elicit the importance,
bigness, and rationality of the Christian story. Lewis provided broad description rather than limiting
definition, and imaginative vision rather than a finite manifesto to transmit “what
it feels like to believe in the God of the Christian revelation.” Millions relate to his work.
McGrath helps
thoughtful Christians understand Lewis’s sublime gift of helping others “get”
God by seeing beyond the explainable.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was surprised to learn how severely Lewis’s academic contemporaries criticized
him for writing “popular books.”
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