Spirituality Column #354

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #353
August 20, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

In my summer reading I encountered Oxford theology professor Alister McGrath’s assessment that the force and clarity of C.S. Lewis’s Christian apologetics were due in large part to Lewis’s sophisticated literary understanding of mythology.

That’s right, Christianity and mythology combined in a sensible and thought-provoking essay, “A Gleam of Divine Truth: The Concept of Myth in Lewis’s Thought”, in McGrath’s book,The Intellectual Life of C.S. Lewis.

Lewis (1898-1963) famously authored the descriptive Mere Christianity, the satirical Screwtape Letters, the classic children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, and several other works that shed broad, accessible and reasonable understanding of the Christian faith onto the 20^th Century intellectual scene.

Our culture has long understood “myth” and “mythology” to mean either “things that are not real” or “a primitive way of understanding things.”  Lewis, as an atheist in his mid-teens through late 20s, himself described faith in terms of untrue, non-rational, primitive “mythology.”  But in his early 30s, following a period that included intense discussion with close friend, fellow scholar, and later Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, Lewis reluctantly but irreversibly came to terms with a deep, personal faith that declared the reality of Christianity.

Lewis, from circa 1931 on, publicly presented a consistently logical and rational portrait of Christianity.  It wasn’t something imaginary and unreal but Truth requiring our greatest, spirit-driven human faculties of imagination, myth, and reality to comprehend the idea of an external, omniscient, omnipotent, creative God who through Jesus Christ is as intimately personal to each of us as our own psyches, souls and personalities.

McAlister writes, “Lewis came to see that myths possess an innate capacity to expand the consciousness and imaginations of their readers.  A myth awakens imaginatively a longing for something that lies beyond the grasp of reason.”

While I find Lewis’s journey to Christian faith and development as a world-renowned author fascinating, it is this idea of de-mythologizing our popular but errant cultural concept of Christian “myth” that I think most brightly shines persuasive, contemporary light into the unseen mysteries of God’s deepest truths.

Twice in Matthew 6 Jesus refers to God the Father as “unseen.”  In 2 Corinthians 4:18, the Apostle Paul is describing eternal glory and says, “so we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Many believing Christians, just like secular doubters, mistakenly insist on defining and “seeing” every bit of their faith rather than accepting the unseen, undefined and yet boundary-less, elegant, true mythology of God’s inexplicably infinite glory.

That acceptance, that trust, defines real faith.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), like Lewis, sees Jesus as imaginative, not imaginary.

Spirituality Column #352
August 13, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

These days it’s wise to pick one’s fights about truth carefully.

Tell me that my physical body inexplicably crawled out of the evolutionary ooze, and I’ll know I’m sitting in a public school or university science class that insists the Bible must be ignored while the class still can’t tell me how life actually happens.

Fine.

Suggest that my mind is a collection of random neural firings and experientially acquired self-serving compromises, and I’ll recognize the soft-headed but tyrannical idiom of modern social science promoting the pompously politically-correct (if comical) conundrum that individually we hold no intrinsic divine personal worth whatsoever (i.e., “we are just a collection of atoms”) but concurrently possess undisputed personal mastery over morality (i.e., “You can’t judge me!”).

Whatever.

But beware: It’s a mistake to scoff at God.  The Bible is especially and specifically hard on scoffers (2 Peter 3:3, Jude 1:18), noting that they are among God’s signs of the end of times.  Also, know that God scoffs right back (Psalms 2:4, 59:8).  It makes rational and reasonable sense to me that God will have the last laugh.

And know also: Our identity in Christ is no laughing matter.

Popular “truths” dismiss Christ and promote man.  And often we can do little with this secular hue and cry other than simply to sigh and bear it, resolved to abide in Jesus Christ, the Bible, the Church and the fellowship of believers, and to Witness the Word wherever possible.  It’ll take mankind-at-large some time to recalibrate and prioritize its unique, person-by-person identity in Christ balanced against man’s frenzied excitement of scientific discovery, technical progress and intellectual free-for-all.

Excitement and discovery are terrific, but writing God out of the script is unwise.  It undercuts our ultimate, individual, human identity.  That identity, our Godly soul, is something that thin, inward-focused pop spirituality cannot explain.  As wide swaths of science, philosophy and culture frantically conspire to expunge God, reasonable mankind will ultimately and undoubtedly ask, seriously, “What is this mysterious thing inside me that makes me seek something bigger than my own being?”

“And, by the way, What is my own being?”

The only Person with good and final answers to our ultimate identity, the only identity worth knowing and sharing, is the unique, creative person/community of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus, we learn in John 14:6, is the only way to know our true identity.  That’s the identity, and the grace, larger than ourselves we find nowhere but in God’s love.

Any other way is a false and lesser path not worth fighting for.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that God’s ideals and grace do not change, and that’s the truth.

Spirituality Column #351
August 6, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Trials and Comfort and Peace
By Bob Walters

(NEWS - At 4:15 p.m. Saturday, July 27, 2013, less than a mile from completing its return from youth summer camp in Michigan, the fully-loaded Colonial Hill Baptist Church bus had an apparent break failure and crashed in north Indianapolis, killing the church's youth pastor, his pregnant wife, a 51-year-old mother of seven who went to camp with her special needs child, and injuring dozens of others.)

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,

who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
                                      – 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

Oh, how my heart aches and my soul mourns with the believing Christians at Colonial Hills Baptist Church.  And oh, how my spirit rejoices in their faith.

This scripture passage above titled “Praise to the God of All Comfort” is the apostle Paul encouraging the early church at Corinth from the standpoint of someone – himself – who constantly suffers yet steadfastly preaches the comfort and peace of Jesus Christ.

Paul knows belief in Christ isn’t about pain avoidance; it is about pain endurance.  In so many words Paul is saying the righteous will cling closely to God, praise Christ for salvation, rely on the truth of the Holy Spirit, share with each other in both suffering and joy, and especially within the Body of Christ – the church – love their believing brethren.

And they will pray, realizing that prayer doesn’t fix a fallen world; prayer fixes a believer’s eyes on Christ.  The main miracle of Christianity is the eternal, loving, glorifying relationship with God we can have through Christ.  Whatever else happens on this earth – good or bad or horrific – it is less important than our trust in God’s promise.

The commandments of Jesus are to love God and love others, and part of loving others is in sharing the love of God through witnessing – telling and showing others about Jesus Christ.  Even those who live entirely apart from God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, church and the Bible, are often nonetheless quick to thank God for a comfort or condemn God for hardship.  Those near a tragic situation but far from God watch closely the reaction of believers.

The telling and teachable points of life’s trials, be they trivial, troublesome or tragic, is in whether – and how – we blame, claim, or explain God’s presence amid the fallen world’s unavoidable turmoil.  An aching heart that is full of Christ will survive.

We see in our world an incredible array of God’s saving, divine beauty and Satan’s destructive, soul-killing wickedness.  For the Colonial Hills believers the trials of their suffering will be constant for a season, but their comfort and peace in Christ will last an eternity.

May our prayers strengthen them as their witness strengthens us.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates the media accurately quoting the bus accident victims, relatives and friends.  Christians actually talk that way.