The Place Where It All Started
My daughter Katie is on an extended jaunt through the British Isles, culminating in a short term course of study at Caperwray Bible School in Northern England. She sent me this picture of her in front of The Eagle and Child, one of the legendary haunts of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Barfield and others. Pretty cool.

"What Should They Regard as Too Obscene...?"

This, from the Yale Daily News, pointed out by Gary Miller over at TVM and others (filed under "Western Culture—It was one heck of a run") apparently is not.

A Bible perspective on the nature of this "art":
"And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done." Romans 1:28 ESV
on the tragedy of the lost soul of an "artist:"
"...having no hope and without God in the world." Ephesians 2:12
on the complicity of others at Jonathan Edwards' Yale:
"...they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." Romans 1:32

From C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, describing a fictitious regime whose aim in the absence of God, is to reinvent Man as his own God:

What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of the earth had led up to this moment.

Tabletalk on C.S. Lewis
Ligonier Ministries (R.C. Sproul & Co.) has dedicated an issue to the life and work of CSL. A rather handsome and readable page-turning version of it is online here. Tabletalk is a monthly(?) devotional magazine I used to get. I always enjoyed it, though I don't find myself quite in it's theological camp always. Growing up Arminian you sometimes need a shot of Calvin & Co. to keep you healthy! A.W. Tozer has a line about that somewhere. (Anybody know where/what that is?) In any case, this is a nice issue.

Mere Christianity

My son Tim and I are nearly finished with a chapter-by-chapter book study of this Lewis classic, and I'm reminded once again why it's a classic. His manner is modest and unassuming. He never leverages his mastery of the language in order to remind you of his own brilliance, but uses it to make complex ideas about God, philosophy and apologetics simple, accessible and clear.

His friendly style doesn't prevent him from cutting to the heart of, for example, "contemporary" Theology. The double irony of the following comment on the importance of studying Theology and on Theological "novelties" (from his intro to Beyond Personality, the final section of the book) is that it was written in 1943.

In other words, Theology is practical; especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones which real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.

The new approaches of 18th and 19th century skepticism (on the authority of the Bible and the meaning of the Cross) had only recently been embraced as new thoughts by mainline denominations when Lewis wrote this. Sadly, they are being "trotted out" as novelties again in 2007 by New Evangelicals, Post-Evangelicals and others.

These and other equally muddled notions are easily absorbed by groups and individuals who don't place a high value on Theology (or history, for that matter) generally and learn only from each other and their own experiences.

Counter-Culturally Relevant

The C.S. Lewis Institute publishes a newsletter/magazine called Knowing and Doing...quarterly, perhaps? Not sure. The current issue features a short but excellent biography of William Wilberforce. You can download the pdf here.

Wilberforce seems to have been able to balance "knowing and doing," the subjective and objective, a substantial evangelical faith within himself and the application of deep convictions to issues in the public square. His witness was powerfully relevant to his culture but never lost it's footing. He suffered the scorn and contempt of popular culture, but doggedly continued his cause against the slave trade (and against the decline of public morals) all of his adult life. So much of what current evangelicalism tells us we need to do in order to be relevant seems to be little more than concession and accommodation to popular culture, not confrontation of it. We want to be liked, and when we're liked—we're relevant.

The Abolition of Man (Continues)

In my previous post and one earlier still, I have been attempting to digest C. S. Lewis's classic, The Abolition of Man. It strikes me thus far that my review of a Lewis chapter tends to get as long as the chapter being reviewed, speaking to that quality of verbal economy present in great writers and often missing in reviewers.

But there are questions worth asking again before going on to the last section of Abolition. What does Lewis, in addressing his generation, have to say to ours? What is the current value of his 60-plus-year-old analysis? What can he possibly offer us?

Maybe the answer is this: Lewis, in his age, was intellectually present at the birth of something important, something very much like the Spirit of Our Age. From a literary and a Christian perspective, he fought against the emptiness of modernism but even more importantly (for us), witnessed the unholy nativity of modernism's child—that which reaches its full stature of immaturity in what some call post-modernism. He predicted the age of self-definition, subjectivism, and relativism that now envelops us, and at the end with its abolition of transcendent values, the abolition of man himself. What he saw so clearly in its infancy now permeates nearly every one of our institutions and threatens to drain our culture of it's remaining moral capital. That's why this old book deserves a new reading.

We live in the adolescence of the values-altered world Lewis envisioned. A culture where unspeakable brutality and inhumanity are routinely justified for the "good of society," where the dominant ethic is that there are no dominant ethics, where rights are arbitrarily given and taken away. The consequences are manifest from Roe v. Wade to Virginia Tech.

But for Christians, there's more. The church, too, has been infected. As modernism eviscerated the witness of mainline American and English churches two generations ago, it is modernism's child that threatens the evangelical church today. Postmodernism has met with theology and produced the Emergent conversation. Subjectivism rules, dogma has disappeared, and what the Bible means can only be imagined in the mind (or heart) of each reader. There are no wrong interpretations.

To ask "Is there truth that applies to all people in all places?" is to ask the wrong question. Rigorous doctrinal debate has been replaced by a conversation that needs no conclusion and is even preferable without one. It's the journey, not the destination that matters, and the optimism we're supposed to feel rings with tragic absurdity; "I have no idea if we're on the right road, but we're making great time!?!"

That's a pretty hasty summary of the Emergent influence and while I'm not denying the legitimacy of some of what Emergent initially reacted against, the spiritual consequences are becoming evident as the post-modern subjectivism that now characterizes the movement sweeps across the evangelical church.

Chesterton said, "There really is only one dangerous thought—the thought that puts a stop to thinking"—the thought (expressed as a proposition!) that abolishes propositions. We are dangerously close to the stoppage of thought. Philosophical absurdity (there is nothing absolutely true...I'm absolutely sure, the only overarching value is that there are no overarching values) first drains man's rationality, then his ethics and finally the soul from his chest.

We should fear something similar in the evangelical church. We're well on our way to draining our ability to teach Christianity, to clearly define godly behavior and what it means to be a Christian. It is increasingly unacceptable to be either precise or dogmatic as to what Christianity includes or excludes—except in the case of doctrinal precision or theological dogmatism. These are always dogmatically and precisely excluded—in the tradition of Lewis's "moral innovators" who exercise prerogatives they deny others. It is unnecessary and humanly impossible to get theology right, and it is wrong to try.

The historic truths of Christianity, the meaning of the Cross itself, is open to individual interpretation as a "generous orthodoxy" becomes extravagant syncretism. How can it be otherwise?

Finally, we in the Church like the larger culture will inevitably face an authority crisis. A vacuum is created when the meanings of clearly written words are privatized, made subjective and blurred into meaninglessness. When the rule of absolute truth is abandoned, the absolute rule of men always takes its place as some sort of totalitarianism fills the void. Chapter 3 of Abolition imagines just such a scenario in society at large. Power will replace principle.

It makes me wonder, as scriptural authority effectively fades within the Church, whether we will soon see an even greater increase in cults of personality, charismatic salespeople offering syncretistic spiritualities and dynamic personal experience, only remotely tethered to biblical texts; or even a new rise of authoritarian cults, where the Word of God is effectively replaced by the "man of God," as desperate people search for something solid to anchor disintegrating lives.

So Lewis helps us here. He certainly makes me think, and he scares me a little.

Developing.

More on the Abolition of Man

A few weeks ago in the wake of the hellish events at Virginia Tech I was drawn back to another old book, The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. It's tiny, only three chapters and an appendix.

The first chapter, Men Without Chests, identified a trend already present in the 1940's toward the privatization of values. Things are not "good" or "beautiful" in themselves, but only felt to be so as they stir corollary sentiments in the minds of individuals. This idea, as it finds its way through common education into the cultural mainstream, has consequences. If I get to define what is Valuable apart from any common standard, I also get to create my own set of ethics. Ethics are the standards of behavior based on some set of ultimate values. If life is universally and inherently valuable, then taking it arbitrarily is inherently unethical. If the value of life is personally determined, I might just assign it a lower importance in certain cases and then feel justified in taking it arbitrarily. Culturally speaking, personally defined values become no values at all.

The future of an essentially value-less culture, says Lewis, is ominous. That and more can be encountered in just the 1st chapter, but he goes on to develop his case, responding again to the authors of The Green Book, a literature study intended for the upper elementary grades. The last part of Lewis's argument (chapter 3, to be addressed later) will imagine in detail the contours of a future adrift from universal ethical moorings.

Chapter 2, The Way follows the trajectory of the Green Book authors' view from its apparent origins through its inconsistent and self-contradictory application. Lewis's provocative opening line:

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

A great part of Lewis's brilliance, as his fans know, is his ability to bring high philosophical debate down into the language of people like us. In the second chapter he explores the origin of values and the modern trend away from what theologians and philosophers might call foundationalism, the assertion that there are such things as self-evident truths: irreducible, non-debateable assumptions necessary to the process of arriving at our viewpoints.

His concern is not so much the abstract foundations of reason, but what for convenience he calls the "Tao," that set of moral assumptions providing a basis for judgments of value and right behavior; values employed, though not admitted to, even by the moral innovators. Those who deny ultimate values of one kind always end up making their appeal on the basis of assumed values of another kind. It's the usual roundabout. Use what you deny in order to deny it; establish as a fundamental value that there are no fundamental values. Those who tell us there are no ultimate ought-to's are ever insisting that we ought to be as broadminded as they are.

However subjective they may be about some traditional value, [the authors] have shown by the very real act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all.

And then:

Their skepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly skeptical enough.

Next comes Lewis's analysis of what motivates the modern debunker of the Tao, that foundation of values common to civilized man:

They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that 'real' or 'basic' values may emerge.

And from what ground might such real values emerge? Modernism's first answer has always been utilitarian, "good" is what is "good for the community." This of course only begs the question, for we still have to decide what good is for a community and who is obligated to participate in what action that might lead to it.

The second basis usually offered is "instinct." Pare away layers of imposed socialized belief and get down to a "natural" ethic. Man's impulse to preserve himself and his society is all that is needed. But this too is an inadequate and even disingenuous foundation. Inevitably it includes an "ought." We ought to reject certain instinctive impulses and embrace others, once again assuming some part of that higher set of values the debunker is trying so hard to pare away. And what to do when the desire for self-preservation comes into conflict with the obligation to preserve society? Instinctive impulses frequently contradict one another and must be judged according to their comparative dignity—a process not instinctual but again pointing to the Tao, to an external measure of what is worthy of man and what is not. (Lewis develops this further in his more popular Mere Christianity.)

Therefore, lying behind every natural explanation of the development of man's ethics is a more ultimate, assumed set of standards by which ethical propositions and "ethical development" itself must be evaluated. Lewis summarizes:

I draw the following conclusion. This thing I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or The First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the source of all value judgment. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.

And then:

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing the Tao or anything else.

What Lewis sees as universal elements of the Tao, those fundamental values common to and assumed by people everywhere, he includes in a wonderful appendix, a shorthand anthropological summary worth the price of the book.

Modern reasoning moves inexorably to a new and more precarious level. Maybe our task is this: even as modern science has swept away superstition and supernatural explanations for natural events, so too modern psychology will address outmoded assumptions about sexual morality (always the first on modern and post-modern lists to be jettisoned!) and other creaky, constrictive ideas about value and virtue. Most will demand modernization and even replacement. In fact—maybe we should just start over!

Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

This is a very possible position: and those who hold it cannot be accused of self-contradiction like the half-hearted skeptics who still hope to find 'real' values when they have debunked the traditional ones. This is the rejection of the concept of value altogether. I shall need another lecture to consider it.

And he does. Chapter 3, The Abolition of Man imagines the darkness sure to accompany that rejection, some of which is already evident.

To be continued.

Men Without Chests

In the wake of the Virginia carnage, theories and cultural analyses abound. For me it's time to revisit a C.S. Lewis classic The Abolition of Man, 1947 McMillan.

A handful of Christian writers demonstrate that remarkable prescience which makes their decades-old identification of trends more useful than most contemporary analysis. Among them are A.W. Tozer on the church, Francis Schaeffer on culture, and C.S. Lewis on both.

Abolition is a small book beginning with a chapter entititled Men Without Chests. His premise: that in modern culture, a shift was taking place in the education and moral development of children. Rejected as outmoded sentimentality, shared values (common understandings of what is good and beautiful) give way to a subjectivism that leaves all definitions and judgments in the mind of the beholder. While seeming to inoculate students against emotional manipulation by others, the product of this new humanism is inhumanity, a kind of soul-lessness, the abolition of man.

People become merely intellectual and visceral, imagination and appetite, with no "chest," no heart in between to mediate between the two and train the impulses of either. The result in culture is cognitive dissonance. We want (desperately need) people to be good, restrained and controlled in their behavior, understanding and tolerant in their views of others, respectful—in a word, civilized—and yet deny any common, binding definition of what it means to be civilized. In one of his better-known quotes:

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible....We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

More later as I make my way through this one more time, but when shocking and horrific soul-lessness shows up again as it has in Virginia this week, this is one of the books worth re-reading.

C.S. Lewis: Dreamer of Narnia

At long last my daughters and I sat down with this 75 minute documentary feature included with the Chronicles of Narnia DVD. What a delight! It's the story of Lewis's life interwoven with themes and excerpts from all the Narnia books and punctuated with commentary from all sorts of people—literary names to former Oxford students to Douglas Gresham, Lewis's step-son. The visuals include clever animations of the Pauline Baynes original illustrations.

His conversion to Christianity is clearly presented, and much of the "first-person" narration seems to come from his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Included were a couple of my favorite quotes from that book:

[on Atheism]
I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.

[on Atheism and books]
A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

[on his conversion]
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not see then what is now the most shining and obvious thing: the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.

Highly recommended.

Lewis on Chronological Snobbery...

The tendency to assume that an idea or practice represents progress just because it's more recent, and a reading person's remedy:

It’s a good rule after reading a new book never to
allow yourself another new one till you have read an
old one in between. If that is too much for you, you
should at least read one old one to three new ones....
Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good
at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make
certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that
will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own
period.... None of us can fully escape this blindness,
but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our
guard against it, if we read only modern books....The
only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the
centuries blowing through our minds and this can
only be done by reading old books."

Check out the C.S. Lewis Institute, a new addition to Really Smart Guys, for lots of good stuff.

The Great Divorce

Reading again, this time as a project with my son Tim, one of my favorite of all C.S. Lewis books. It's also one of the shortest, 128 pp. in my edition. Very entertaining story of a bus trip from Hell to the very outskirts of Heaven. Every passenger has been given the opportunity to stay, on certain very simple conditions. Most elect to go back to Hell, though their heavenly greeters try desperately to convince them otherwise.

We get to hear several conversations including the one from which my favorite lines in the book are excerpted—it's between one particularly self-righteous passenger and his greeter, a man he knew and despised in life who now in heaven begs him to stay:

Bus Passenger: "What do you keep on arguing for? I'm only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity."

Heavenly Greeter: "Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought."

Edmund the Just

We watched Narnia: The Lion... again last Saturday. This time at home but on the "big screen" courtesy of Chris's projection system. The line that makes me tear up every time is, as Aslan introduces the new kings and queens of Narnia, "Edmund the Just." After all the selfishness and treachery, that's his permanent legacy.

On Love that is Christian
A wonderful Lewis quote from a recording of The Four Loves radio broadcast series, more or less the same as in his book with that title.

"Such, I conceive, is the world of agape. A world of unbounded giving and unchained receiving. Where all blessed creatures need, and know that they need, nothing but God, and are therefore set free to love one another disinterestedly. And so your love shall be like His; born neither of your need or of my deserving, but of plain bounty. I think those are drawing near to heaven, who, in this life, find that they need men less and love men more, and delight more in being loved without being needed. For where agape is, there is in some degree, heaven."

Having been a long time fan of C.S. Lewis, it occurred to me at some point that it would be interesting to try some authors that he read, and who influenced his way of thinking. In his autobiography SURPRISED BY JOY, I think, he mentions some of them: George MacDonald, GK Chesterton and others, and in other places he speaks highly of the novels by fellow Inkling Charles Williams.

I have yet to dive into MacDonald, whose PHANTASTES Lewis says changed his way of thinking in dramatic ways. Chesterton is wonderful, though challenging. ORTHODOXY is worth coming back to again and again...you'd think he's writing in the early part of the 21st century, not the 1910's and 20's. Where I really need help is with Charles Williams.

Reading and hearing so many good things about Williams novels, I've tried three: ALL HALLOW'S EVE, THE PLACE OF THE LION, AND DESCENT INTO HELL. I must admit I don't really get them. There are some intriguing ideas and plot lines that keep you going, but mostly I feel like I haven't broken the code, or maybe he's just over my head.

I just finished DESCENT INTO HELL and would love to hear what other readers think of it. Stanhope's taking on the suffering and anxiety of another character expands the idea of "bear one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ" and that theme I could follow, but little else, to be truthful. Somebody enlighten me!