Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Mere Christianity Not So Mere
Jollyblogger's quoting C.S. Lewis -- imagine that! David is borrowing whole hog from Lewis and Pyromanic, Lewis' piece on the value of old books. I want to look at the money quote from Lewis.
What else could it be that Lewis encountered in all those places and in all those ways. What else could so have convincingly convinced him of the truth?
You see, God simply cannot be contained by our thoughts, ideas, policies, institutions, practices and styles. Reading all that stuff matters, less about the ideas, but because in so doing we find just a little more of God.
That, frankly, is what I took from GodBlogCon. I saw little bit more and a little bit different piece of God in so many of the people I encountered there. People I disagreed with, people that insulted me, people that praised me, God resided in all of them, and from each of them I got new insight into the Lord of the universe.
This does not mean I believe everything, to the contrary, I remain the old-fahsioned, politically conservative calvinist I have always been, but those things are not God. I know God just a little bit better than I did, and that is the best possible thing I can think of.
I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were "influences." George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think?as one might be tempted who read only con- temporaries?that "Christianity" is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages "mere Christianity" turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe?Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet?after all?so unmistakably the same; recognisable,....Reading this (this time) I have a new definition for "Mere Christianity." "Mere Christianity" is, I think, the Holy Spirit. We are divided by our thoughts and ideas, by our politics and institutions, by our practices and styles, but we are united by the presence of God Almighty.
What else could it be that Lewis encountered in all those places and in all those ways. What else could so have convincingly convinced him of the truth?
You see, God simply cannot be contained by our thoughts, ideas, policies, institutions, practices and styles. Reading all that stuff matters, less about the ideas, but because in so doing we find just a little more of God.
That, frankly, is what I took from GodBlogCon. I saw little bit more and a little bit different piece of God in so many of the people I encountered there. People I disagreed with, people that insulted me, people that praised me, God resided in all of them, and from each of them I got new insight into the Lord of the universe.
This does not mean I believe everything, to the contrary, I remain the old-fahsioned, politically conservative calvinist I have always been, but those things are not God. I know God just a little bit better than I did, and that is the best possible thing I can think of.
