Reflections on God … Man … Life
I’m now a member of a church that has a strong education program. On Wednesday evenings, for an hour and a half each week, I’ve had the joy of teaching C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity (along with my book, America Discovers C. S. Lewis). I’ve now been asked—and have readily agreed—to teach The Chronicles of Narnia. I won’t try to cram them all into one semester; instead, I’ll divide them into a two-semester format, covering the… Read more »
What is your image of God? What is mine? I think there are two false images (well, probably a lot more) that are opposites: the “good buddy” who is there to be my co-pilot (in which case He is only along for the ride—we still call the shots) or the far-away, unapproachable Being that is so very different from us that we can never understand Him. I’ll save that first false image for another time, perhaps, and focus today on… Read more »
C. S. Lewis had a way of taking a concept and giving it new life, sometimes simply by illustration, other times by making sure we have the correct definition of that concept. Take humility, for instance. To the world at large, the word conjures up an image of weakness or some kind of constant self-belittling. Yet humility is actually a source of spiritual strength; neither does it mean one has no value. That’s never true in God’s eyes. Here’s how… Read more »
The ongoing problem with humanity is not that we are so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good; rather, it’s the opposite: we’re so earthbound that we’re no good to heaven. We keep thinking that this world that we see around us, and those who populate it, will fulfill all our hopes. If we think that, we are terribly off-base. “The settled happiness and security which we all desire,” remarked C. S. Lewis, “God withholds from us by the very… Read more »
“The place for which He designs them [human beings] in His scheme of things is the place they are made for.” That’s C. S. Lewis commenting in The Problem of Pain regarding human desires. “When they [humans] reach it [the place God has made for them] their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the anguish is over.” Yet human beings universally set their desires on the wrong things. We want… Read more »
I’m sure everyone has heard the complaint against some Christians who, we’re told, are “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.” While that may sound rather clever, and it may be easy to pick up on the refrain because, after all, this is the world we live in, it nevertheless doesn’t hold up under close examination. History itself denies this cliché. C. S. Lewis can always be relied upon to make us rethink popular slogans. He tackles this one… Read more »
We love to talk about heaven. Hell, not so much. We get glimpses of both eternal destinations in Scripture, but not the full picture of either. C. S. Lewis is well known for perceiving both in imaginative ways. On the subject of hell, we naturally think of The Screwtape Letters, where in his preface he tells us, “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance,… Read more »