Reflections on God … Man … Life
While I was in New Zealand, I happened across a book sale at one site. I’m naturally drawn to such things, so I spent a few minutes perusing the offerings. To my delight, I saw Margaret Thatcher’s The Path to Power on the table. It’s the second volume of her autobiography, following after The Downing Street Years. In The Path to Power, she explains her early years and how she eventually worked her way to the prime ministership. I’ve been… Read more »
Yesterday’s post offered some insightful analysis by C. S. Lewis on the dangers of putting the government in charge of everything in our lives. That same essay, which he wrote in 1958, goes on to issue further warnings. I couldn’t contain them all in one post, so I decided to carry his thoughts over to today also. He writes of freedom and its necessary corollary—an education free from government control: I believe a man is happier, and happy in a… Read more »
C. S. Lewis didn’t write a lot specifically about civil government because that wasn’t his priority. Yet when he did write on the subject, he was lucid and devastating with respect to how government can become a terror to individuals. One of his essays in God in the Dock is entitled “Is Progress Possible?” but the subtitle really gets to the point of the essay: “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.” He knew whereof he spoke, writing this in 1958… Read more »
I love how C. S. Lewis compares Jesus to other religious leaders in history. In an essay called “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” Lewis lays out the claim Jesus made that He was indeed God, as opposed to simply a great moral teacher: On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men. There… Read more »
Do you ever find yourself complaining to God about all those “things” that keep getting in the way of what you want your life to be? If only, we tell ourselves, all the distractions of life could be removed, we could really live. We even get quite spiritual about it and confidently assert we would be so much better Christians without all those distractions. In one of his letters to a friend, C. S. Lewis addressed this, calling out this… Read more »
In one of his letters, C. S. Lewis reflects on when God became man in the person of Jesus. Why did He not come as a type of superhero, impervious to physical harm and devoid of emotion? It’s because He sought to be like us and to reveal the heart of the Father: God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility… Read more »
There’s a world of difference between real humor and cocky snarkiness. I think C. S. Lewis caught that distinction well in The Screwtape Letters as senior devil Screwtape instructs junior devil Wormwood on how to twist the character of the human he is trying to drag into hell: Flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of… Read more »