Reflections on God … Man … Life
I’m constantly re-reading C. S. Lewis books. It had been a while since I read his Reflections on the Psalms, so I took it down from the shelf and gave it another go. This time, as is always the case, something stood out to me that didn’t, to the same extent, in my previous reading. The chapter title “Connivance” leaped off the pages into my world—at least, the world I constantly experience around me, particularly with respect to government and… Read more »
C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, for many years, was kind of a mystery to me. All of my Lewis reading prior to tackling this book was centered on his apologetics and fantasy. I loved the logic of Mere Christianity and Miracles and basked in the delights of the Ransom Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and of course, the Narnia tales. The first time I read Till We Have Faces, I came away from it disappointed. This… Read more »
Two simple words of Jesus from the cross—I thirst—confirm His human nature. The exact nature of Jesus was a source of debate in the early church. I don’t think there was any disagreement during the apostolic era about precisely who He was as both God and man, but when certain theologians came along and raised questions, the church leaders needed to get together and settle the matter once and for all. One question raised was whether Christ’s divine nature removed… Read more »
C. S. Lewis’s essay, “The Grand Miracle,” concludes with a comparison of Christianity with other religions. He notices what he calls “an odd point.” All other religions, he comments, are either “nature religions” or the very opposite—religions that are “anti-nature” in their beliefs. The nature religions are easily identified as all the old pagan types where “You actually got drunk in the temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in the temple of Aphrodite.” He then identifies the anti-nature religions… Read more »
C. S. Lewis, in 1945, gave a talk at St. Jude on the Hill church in London, a talk that was then published that year. The title given to this presentation was “The Grand Miracle.” Lewis based the talk on the passage in Philippians chapter two that expresses the great humility Christ displayed by leaving Heaven to become a man to suffer and die for fallen humanity. God becoming man is a grand miracle. Lewis states, One is very often… Read more »
As I prepared my course on C. S. Lewis’s many essays, one of my choices (because there are so many excellent possibilities and limited time) was an essay that I hadn’t recalled previously. I selected it because it goes to the very heart of Christian faith. While this might seem matter of fact to some, and certainly not a controversy among Christians, the world has many different views about Jesus. It’s also good to remind Christians of the uniqueness of… Read more »
C. S. Lewis did not live in an ivory tower separated from the world. He knew what people were going through and how they thought. During WWI, he was in the trenches with every social class in British society. When WWII erupted, he spoke to RAF pilots—those who might not come back from their next mission. As he interacted with all types of people, he came to some sobering conclusions about them and how to reach them for the Gospel…. Read more »