Tag: Lewis

Lewis: The Reality of the Spiritual

  

C. S. Lewis was an atheist in his younger days, but eventually had to abandon his materialism and come face-to-face with the reality of the spiritual. Ten years after his conversion, in an essay called “Religion: Reality or Substitute,” he explained why the spiritual world is not just a figment of men’s imagination: Authority, reason, experience; on these three, mixed in varying proportions, all our knowledge depends. The authority of many wise men in many different times and places forbids… Read more »

Lewis: Joy Fulfilled

  

C. S. Lewis wrote often of his search for Joy (which he always capitalized). As a non-Christian, it was an inconsolable longing for something always beyond reach. As a Christian, it took on an entirely new quality. In his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, he goes into some detail about what it meant to him. I’ll let him share now: In a sense, the central story of my life is about nothing else. . . . It is that of an… Read more »

Lewis: Summoned Inside the Eternal Door

  

I’ve been on this Christian journey for most of my life, seeking to grow in relationship with the Lord. Now that I’m older—not old, mind you—the longing for eternity, which will far eclipse what we currently consider “life,” has become more real. C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory sermon has, for many years, captured for me the sense of expectation that I sometimes feel as I look forward to the end of this temporal existence and the entrance into… Read more »

Researching C. S. Lewis

  

Now that I’m on sabbatical, projects have seemingly sprung up out of nowhere to keep me busy. One that has been in the back of my mind for a while has now taken a prominent place in my active imagination. I’ve always wanted to write something about C. S. Lewis. While reading a recent biography of him, I grabbed hold of an idea that I hope will come to fruition. I would like to assess, as much as possible, the… Read more »

Lewis: Stop Making Mud Pies

  

“The Weight of Glory,” a sermon delivered by C. S. Lewis at Oxford in 1941, has to rank in the upper echelons of all his thinking/writing. It is filled with memorable images. One of the best is this one: If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics… Read more »

Lewis: How to View the Second Coming

  

For the second Saturday in a row, I want to share some of C. S. Lewis’s thoughts about the Second Coming of Christ. Last week, his comments made it clear that this is a central doctrine of the faith. Yet he also wants us to be wary of trying to pin a date on it. In his essay “The World’s Last Night,” he offers this caution: We must never speak to simple, excitable people about “the Day” without emphasizing again… Read more »

C. S. Lewis on the Second Coming of Christ

  

As a college student back in the 1970s, and caught up in the Jesus Movement of the era, I anticipated the Second Coming to be very near, probably sometime in the 1970s, of course. Even though I was spiritually immature at the time, that doesn’t mean the Second Coming is some kind of fantasy. As C. S. Lewis explains, it is essential to a proper understanding of the Christian faith. In an essay entitled “The World’s Last Night,” he had… Read more »