C.S. Lewis Archives - Kuyperian Commentary

On March 28, 2019 By Joseph Bailey In Theology, Worship Like

Tune Our Hearts to Sing Thy Grace

The Scriptures have a deep simplicity to them. They feed and nourish us from the first reading to the 100th. I understood this more vividly once I began reading and teaching the Bible to children. Not only are their little hearts warmed and their little minds enlarged in child-like faith, but so often is my own heart and mind strengthened by familiar ground revisited time and time again. These are ancient paths that become sweeter and richer with time.

The Psalms especially display this characteristic because they are not only meant to be read and studied and meditated on, but they are meant to be sung. What an incredible reality that we can simultaneously plumb the depths and exalt to the heights its glorious truths and do so with one voice alongside my children, the aged saints, and the young in faith. These are ancient songs that resonate with old and young alike.

While I was working through Psalm 46 some time ago preparing a sermon, these thoughts were ruminating through my mind; and there were three “notes”, three observations that struck a chord with me and seemed to set the tune for this wonderful song of war and peace.

The first note we hear is the blessedness that comes from God’s immutability. This simply means that God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. ^a This Psalm appears to have been written with a particular historical event in mind in the life of Israel. There are a couple of different opinions as to what event that might have been, but there’s no doubt that it was at a time of great uncertainty and danger for the nation as a whole.
The Psalmist begins by saying, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” (v.1) The only way he could say that with confidence is to have fixed in his mind the firm belief that God Himself does not change; there is no shadow of turning with Him. The Psalmist looks back at what was and proclaims in the present what is. To serve an unchanging God is to elevate history beyond mere curiosity or cautionary tale or nostalgic recollection. History becomes one of the means by which God encourages and instructs His people. This is why a rejection of the worship of God eventually ends with a rejection of the importance and continuity of history.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. – Romans 15:4-5 ESV

The second note we hear is the blessedness that comes from God as creator. Like so many others, this Psalm makes use of nature imagery like earth, mountains, rivers, and seas. Unfortunately, we live in a time that makes it very hard to appreciate the significance of this. C.S. Lewis, in his book, Reflections on the Psalms, is insightful and helpful on this point.

He explains that acknowledging the One true God as the creator of all things brings a separation between the Creator and creation that releases Nature from being divine and frees her up to be a symbol of the Divine. Let me give you Lewis’ own words.

“To say that God created Nature, while it brings God and Nature into relation, also separates them. What makes and what is made must be two not one. Thus the doctrine of creation in one sense empties Nature of divinity…But in another sense the same doctrine which empties Nature of her divinity also makes her an index, a symbol, a manifestation, of the Divine.”

In other words, only when the “created” speaks for and points to the “Uncreated” can it find its fullest expression and meaning. So earth, mountains, and seas are both real created things and instruments through which God reveals a greater reality, a more lasting reality. Thus, the song of the Psalmist establishes us as in the world but not of it. It is a Christianity that is earthy but not earthly.

The third and final note is the blessedness that comes from God as covenantal. We not only have a God who is immutable, and a God who is eternal, but we also have a God who is relational. And this covenantal relationship between the eternal God and his chosen people is the very thing that enables the Psalmist to say “[Because] God is our refuge and strength…therefore, we will not fear…” (v.1,2) The LORD is most wonderfully our LORD and we are His people. It establishes the connection between how we live and who God is. Our hearts can then be tuned to fill in the blanks with absolute hope, “Because God is _________, therefore, we (as His people) will _________.”

Let these notes resonate in our hearts and minds as we study and sing the Psalms. We serve the Lord of history, the Lord of life, and the Lord of love, and He is bringing us in harmony with Himself and one another.

Hebrews 13:8; James 1:17; Malachi 3:6 (back)

On July 6, 2015 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Happiness is Eating God

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis proposes the Fall of Adam and Eve occurred when they tried to “invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God.” From this has flowed all the sinful acts and all their ill effects throughout the course of human history. Our history is “the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

However, as a motor designed to run on fuel cannot run without it, so the human being, designed to feed on God, cannot be happy without him. Lewis goes so far as to say, “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

Lewis wasn’t making this stuff up. Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” (John 6:53-55)

It is no small coincidence that the first temptation revolved around food, the consummation of all things happens around a meal, and in the interim we commune with God around His table. God is the source of all pleasure and all fulfillment, but not a source producing things which, once imparted, make us happy. He gives us himself. He is the fuel. He is the food. He, himself, is the fulfillment. “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

On June 27, 2015 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis Comments on SCOTUS Decision

“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.”
–C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

On December 1, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Planet Narnia: The Speechless Word

I am currently reading Planet Narnia by Michael Ward. I am only halfway through, so this is not a full review, only some thoughts. I just want to catch you before you appropriate all your Christmas money; this may be a book you want under your tree with your name affixed to it.

The primary reason to read this book is that Lewis was a genius and the Narnia movies are, to put it bluntly, not. If you are watching the movies but not reading the Narniad to your children, then your children are learning lies about Lewis. Although it may be formally true that the films were “based on books written by C. S. Lewis,” it can only be true in the meanest sense. The movies are “action/adventures” for children; the books are the subtlest of fairy tales. The movies are the epitome of unliterary, while the Narniad nears the apex of literary. The Chronicles of Narnia are sublime, and Michael Ward proves it.

Michael Ward is unflinching in his thesis that Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia were shaped by medieval cosmology, which happens also to be a distinctively Christian cosmology. But instead of Lewis using Narnia as a bare metaphor, he wrote the Chronicles “along the light” of medieval astrology instead of looking directly at the light or even at the object on which the light was shining. The seven heavens are the atmosphere in which the stories live, not the focal point of the stories themselves. You are not supposed to read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and always be thinking of the planet Jupiter, but without the medieval understanding of Jupiter which Lewis employed as his “atmosphere’ for the tale, the tale would not exist as it does. It is distinctively Jovial, and Ward proves it.

He does the same for the other six books, neatly aligning them with the other six “planets”: Mercury, Venus, Luna, Sol, Mars, and Saturn. The book is incredible—worthy to be read and reread.

I finished the Mercury chapter this morning. As we have just entered the Advent season, the following paragraph stood out to me:

In a sense, ‘the night was over at last’ is a pun, but a pun with a Christological significance, pointing, as it does, not just to the approaach of daylight but also to the effect of Aslan upon Shasta. For that matter, all good puns have Christological significance: first, because Christ himself was a punster; second because there was a divine wit at work (as Augustine recognized) when the Word became speechless (infans) in the infant Jesus; and third because of the essentially polemic import of the God-man. The incarnation of Christ, the enfleshment of the spiritual, is the tap-root of Lewis’s belief in meanings beyond the literal. It is the incarnation which sanctions and underwrites both his use of word-play, one of the lowest forms of wit, and his faith in the highest double meanings of all, which he calls symbols or sacraments. The highest does not stand without the lowest, and Lewis’s understanding of God is that he is both ‘unspeakably immanent’ and ‘unspeakably transcendent.’ To attempt to combine these theological perspectives without cancelling out their polarity was a bold endeavor and full of risk. The Horse and His Boy succeeds as well as it does because a river of Mercury runs through it.

Check out more about Planet Narnia at the website here.<>

On November 26, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis: No Ordinary People, No Mere Mortals

“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deep about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my nieghbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long, we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealing with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And out charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.” (emphasis mine)

–C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” p. 45

Order your own copy here.

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On October 15, 2014 By Kuyperian In Books 2

Morning Devotions: The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 6

In Chapter 6 of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to “direct the malice of his patient to his immediate neighbor whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” Screwtape references the English people as “creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.”

Recalling that this book was written in 1942, the English people would certainly have been loving their enemies by caring for wounded German pilots. These Luftwaffe pilots had fallen from the sky, just two years earlier, while attempting to destroy London during their Blitz—37 consecutive weeks of bombing raids, resulting in the destruction of over one million English homes and deaths of over 40,000 civilians. Screwtape’s Enemy (God) told His people to love their enemies, and the English people were actually doing it.

What are we to learn from this? We have enemies that we need to love, and these enemies will probably fall into at least two distinct categories: the ideological sort—liberal judges, corrupt politicians, misguided mega-church pastors, etc., or of the personal sort –failed friendships, obnoxious neighbors and coworkers, or strained family relationships. Relationships so strained that particular people have become our real enemies, but not the type of enemies sneaking in at night to murder us while we sleep. Our enemies are of a different sort than England’s enemies of the 1940’s.

Lewis’ call to love our enemies, however, is of the same sort. While our hatred of the judges and politicians may be real enough, causing much angst and even the occasional expletive, those people are not in close enough proximity to feel either our hatred or our love. They cannot feel our steely glares through their teleprompter. While they are vying for our vote, not our affection, we are called to love them as we love ourselves. We would want someone to pray for us, not gripe about us behind our backs. We would want someone to think the best of us and our intentions, not demonize every word we say. Thinking the worst of our enemies does nothing but bring us down. Lewis elaborates on this point in Mere Christianity:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, `Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

Concerning the personal enemies that we see every day, the Samaritan is always in the ditch. These are the ones that Lewis is calling us to love through our actions, for they are ever present. Screwtape would want us to feel good enough about loving our faraway enemies that we would consider our job well done and thereby cease loving the enemies next door. If we view loving our neighbor as a checklist—something we could quantify and complete in a given time period—then we are more susceptible to fall into Screwtape’s trap.

Lewis’ idea of loving those who are far away to the neglect of loving those who are near applies to more than just our enemies. We can send money to help Compassion International kids around the globe to the neglect of loving the poor around us. (I say this as a financial supporter of Compassion, not a foe.) We can love the missionaries who have travelled far to the neglect of supporting local charities or even neglecting to personally testify of the mercy of God to our neighbors.

One final thought is that we can fall prey to loving our virtual neighbors while neglecting to love those neighbors that God has placed within our own household. “Just one more email, darling, and I’ll be done for the evening.” “Hold on, honey, I’ve just got to post this to Facebook and I’ll read to you.” “Junior, play my iPad while I finish this article.” None of this should be taken as some sort of guilt trip about using global technology for the benefit of those that afar off, but are we loving God’s people around the globe to the neglect of those flesh-and-blood heirs of Christ’s Kingdom placed under our direct care? If we are, then both Screwtape and Wormwood are about to get a promotion.<>

On September 6, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings 1

C. S. Lewis: Heaven Understands Hell

The following is a quote from C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost:

“In all but a few writers the ‘good’ characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books the holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder. It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations. Heaven understands Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven, and all of us, in our measure, share the Satanic, or at least Napoleonic, blindness. To project ourselves into a wicked character we have only to stop doing something, and something that we are already tired of doing; to project ourselves into a good one we have to do what we cannot and become what we are not.” (p. 101)<>google adwords цены анализ ов pr

On July 21, 2014 By Steve Macias In Scribblings Like

The Inklings: New Peter Kreeft Lectures

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Dr. Peter Kreeft keynoted the Anglican Way Institute this past weekend for a conference on The Inklings. I know that many of us here at Kuyperian Commentary have been profoundly shaped by the work of the Inklings: C.S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers.

His first few lectures are already available at the Church of the Holy Communion website including a talk on Tolkien’s Silmarillion, a two parter on Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” and “Creed or Chaos” based on the work of the same title by Dorothy Sayers.

Click here to listen to the recordings at the Church of the Holy Communion Website.

UPDATE: Kevin Kallsen from AnglicanTV has also posted the videos from the conference. Click here to watch them.

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and at the King’s College (Empire State Building), in New York City. He is a regular contributor to several Christian publications, is in wide demand as a speaker at conferences, and is the author of over 67 books including Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Christianity for Modern Pagans and Fundamentals of the Faith.<>

On June 30, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis: The Poison of Subjectivism

“Shortly after his conversion in 1929, C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend: ‘When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground.’ From that time on Lewis thought that the best service he could do for his unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times–that ‘enormous common ground’ which he usually referred to as ‘mere’ Christianity.” Thus begins Walter Hooper’s preface to his collection of C. S. Lewis’ essays entitled Christian Reflections, published in 1966, just three years after Lewis’ death.

The essays concern sundry topics, but are united under the banner of Lewis’ pristine logic and unswerving commitment to the Christian faith. Here’s an excerpt from the essay, “The Poison of Subjectivism.”

If “good” and “better” are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring. For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age with those of another: progress and decadence are alike meaningless words.

All this is so obvious that it amounts to an identical proposition. But how little it is now understood can be gauged from the procedure of the moral reformer who, after saying that “good” means “what we are conditioned to like” goes on cheerfully to consider whether it might be “better” that we should be conditioned to like something else. What in Heaven’s name does he mean by “better”?

He usually has at the back of his mind the notion that if he throws over traditional judgement of value, he will find something else, something more “real” or “solid” on which to base a new scheme of values. He will say, for example, “We must abandon irrational taboos and base our values on the good of the community” – as if the maxim “Thou shalt promote the good of the community’ were anything more than a polysyllabic variant of ‘Do as you would be done by’ which has itself no other basis than the old universal value judgement that he claims to be rejecting. Or he will endeavor to base his values on biology and tell us that we must act thus and thus for the preservation of our species. Apparently he does not anticipate the question, ‘Why should the species be preserved?’ He takes it for granted that it should, because he is really relying on traditional judgements of value. If he were starting, as he pretends, with a clean slate, he could never reach this principle. Sometimes he tries to do so by falling back on “instinct.” “We have an instinct to preserve our species”, he may say. But have we? And if we have, who told us that we must obey our instincts? And why should we obey this instinct in the teeth of many others which conflict with the preservation of the species? The reformer knows that some instincts are to be obeyed more than others only because he is judging instincts by a standard, and the standard is, once more, the traditional morality which he claims to be superseding. The instincts themselves obviously cannot furnish us with grounds for grading the instincts in a hierarchy. If you do not bring a knowledge of their comparative respectability to your study of them, you can never derive it from them.

The essay is only 10 pages long but ought not be despised for its brevity. Its main thesis revolves around an assertion of Natural Law that is common to all men everywhere in every time. He even discusses what Reformed theologians coin the ‘noetic effects of the Fall,’ though he does not use that phrase. Near the end, Lewis discusses the fact that Christianity is trinitarian and how this correct understanding of the God who is helps us reconcile the relationship between ‘God’ and ‘good.’ He surmises “that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law. The good is uncreated; it never could have been otherwise; it has no shadow of contingency..”

Lewis concludes with some examples of the practical fallout of subjectivism:

God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.

These may seem fine-spun speculations: yet I believe that nothing short of this can save us. A Christianity which does not see moral and religious experience converging to meet at infinity, not at a negative infinity, but in the positive infinity of the living yet superpersonal God, has nothing, in the long run, to divide it from devil worship; and a philosophy which does not accept value as eternal and objective can lead us only to ruin. Nor is the matter of merely speculative importance. Many a popular “planner” on a democratic platform, many a mild-eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes that “good” means whatever men are conditioned to approve. He believes that it is the function of him and his kind to condition men; to create consciences by eugenics, psychological manipulation of infants, state education and mass propaganda. Because he is confused, he does not yet fully realize that those who create conscience cannot be subject to conscience themselves. But he must awake to the logic of his position sooner or later; and when he does, what barrier remains between us and the final division of the race into a few conditioners who stand themselves outside morality and the many conditioned in whom such morality as the experts choose is produced at the experts’ pleasure? If “good” means only the local ideology, how can those who invent the local ideology be guided by any idea of good themselves? The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his creation.

Follow this link to Amazon to buy Christian Reflections by C. S. Lewis.<>

On May 28, 2014 By Kuyperian In Books, Scribblings 1

C. S. Lewis: Gender and Sex in Perelandra

by Marc Hays

C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy should be required reading, at least twice through, before graduating high school. While Lewis had many distinguishing characteristics that were and remain outstanding from his and our contemporaries, one that always brings me back to reading more and more of his work is simply his ability to think. That depth of thought allows him to see larger forests and additional trees that most folks miss; at least I know I often miss them. A festschrift for him could be entitled, Through New Eyes. I always see the world anew and afresh, larger and more glorious whenever I read Lewis. Here’s an example from near the end of Perelandra, the second book of the Space Trilogy:

Both the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try–Ransom has tried a hundred times–to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, party exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).

If you’ve been reading Narnia since you were a kid, you’re doing well. If you continue reading Narnia without moving forward into the Space Trilogy, you could be doing better. Here are some links to get you started: