Tag: Lewis

Aim at Heaven & You Will Get Earth Thrown In

  

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 »

Only Two Kinds of People in the End

  

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 »

Heavenly Reality

  

We imagine images such as the one above: ethereal, somewhat fanciful, perhaps. We really don’t know. We’re so tied to this world; our imaginations are so limited. C. S. Lewis described it this way in his Mere Christianity: Most of us find it very difficult to want “Heaven” at all—except in so far as “Heaven” means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to… Read more »

A New Name, Known Only to the One Who Receives It

  

“Your soul has a curious shape,” comments C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. What does he mean? “It is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance,” he explains. And if that explanation leaves you scratching your head, he tries another analogy: “Or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.” Lewis is pointing to the uniqueness of God’s creation of each one of… Read more »

No Evil without Good?

  

Very few friendships last a lifetime. But when a young C. S. Lewis got to know a young Arthur Greeves, their friendship was one of those rarities. They corresponded almost until the day of Lewis’s death. We have all of that correspondence, and it’s filled with treasures. In 1933, not too long after Lewis’s conversion, Greeves had written in one of his letters that there can be “no good without evil.” The recently converted Lewis, rethinking all of his former… Read more »

My Journey–And C. S. Lewis’s Role in It

  

My walk with the Lord has led me to an unexpected place, and God has used C. S. Lewis to play a significant role. I began as a Lutheran, although not until second grade when neighborhood friends invited me to their church. I loved it from the start. One feature that has stayed with me throughout my life, no matter what type of church I attended, was the effect of the Lutheran church’s stained-glass windows. They told stories to a… Read more »

Correcting Our Blurred Vision

  

“There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” That’s a rather stark statement by C. S. Lewis in his essay “Christianity and Culture.” Yet it is starkly true. And since it is so starkly true, we need to be sure we have a very clear image of who God is and what He expects of us as we live in a universe where the cosmic battle… Read more »