Reflections on God … Man … Life
Christians live in this world, but have a hope that transcends it. How do the two combine? Here’s C. S. Lewis’s answer in Mere Christianity: Hope . . . means . . . a continual looking forward to the eternal world. . . . It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who… Read more »
Why is it important to study history? In an essay entitled “Learning in War-Time,” C. S. Lewis provides this insight: We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. People… Read more »
I teach a historiography course each year. In it, I cover not only the basics of the history of history writing and how to research and document sources, but also the philosophy of history. As a Christian, I see history as an ongoing story of the relationship of man to God and man to man. There was a beginning, there was a key moment in the “plot,” so to speak, when God came to earth in the form of man,… Read more »
C. S. Lewis was a professor of literature, not a historian. That doesn’t mean, though, that he didn’t have some sage advice for those in my line of study. For instance, here’s a bit of solid guidance for historians in an essay called “Horrid Red Things,” found in a volume called God in the Dock: A historian who has based his work on the misreading of a document may afterwards (when his mistake has been exposed) exercise great ingenuity in… Read more »
For many, their first encounter with C. S. Lewis’s marvelous works is The Screwtape Letters. This witty little book, which consists of letters from a superior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, Wormwood, continues to be a bestseller. Why? I think it’s because it captures so well the essence of the sinful heart as it displays not only Screwtape’s advice on how to lead a person into hell, but also the manner in which the inhabitants of hell treat one… Read more »
Modern man doesn’t like to talk much about hell, unless it’s in some fanciful movie creation where one doesn’t have to worry about its reality. The reason we avoid thinking about the possibility of hell can be traced back to our similar reluctance to consider seriously our sinfulness. And what bothers us the most, I believe, about the idea of sin is that we know the root of it is our self-centeredness. We like being self-focused; we feel justified in… Read more »
One of my favorite C. S. Lewis books is The Great Divorce. This fanciful account of a busload of occupants of hell getting an opportunity to visit heaven allows Lewis, through conversations between the passengers from hell and heavenly denizens, to discuss all the objections to the faith raised by those who reject it. In one such discussion, Lewis deals with those who say it’s unfair that those who enter into eternal bliss should be so happy when the rest… Read more »