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 recovering Christian realism: C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He devotes about forty pages to each of these men. I aim 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 to evaluate life.

Lewis believed that the 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:

Four reasons why culture can be an appropriate 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 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 where things become more firm, thick, and more 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.”

This observation by Stackhouse was particularly insightful:

Later in the chapter, Stackhouse concludes:

For Lewis, culture consistently 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 is Lewis’ distaste for the city. In the Narnia Chronicles, London is a place to escape. 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 needs to reflect more on Heaven as the New Jerusalem.

What do you think?

This chapter has so much more, but I’ll leave it here. What are your thoughts about Lewis’ “Christian individual?”

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