Nonetheless; beyond the basic fact of that conversion (which is, after all, the main thing), I also absorbed from CSL several elements of what I now regard as serious error, especially in terms of the ultimate question of "what Christianity is".
Even before I became a Christian, and for a good while afterwards (many months, and indeed residually for some years) I would have subscribed to this statement by CS Lewis's in Surprised by Joy. The bolded sections I have added for emphasis:
My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even raising that question [i.e. the question of whether - and how - there was a connection between God and Joy].
My training was like that of the Jews, to whom He revealed Himself centuries before there was a whisper of anything better (or worse) beyond the grave than shadowy and featureless Sheol. And I did not dream even of that.
There are men, far better men than I, who have made immortality almost the central doctrine of their religion; but for my own part I have never seen how a preoccupation with that subject at the outset could fail to corrupt the whole thing.
I had been brought up to believe that goodness was goodness only if it were disinterested, and that any hope of reward or fear of punishment contaminated the will. If I was wrong in this (the question is really much more complicated than I then perceived) my error was most tenderly allowed for. I was afraid that threats or promises would demoralise me; no threats or promises were made. The commands were inexorable, but they were backed by no "sanctions".
God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Long since, through the gods of Asgard, and later through the notion of the Absolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what it can do to us but for what it is in itself. That is why, though it was a terror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because of what He is in Himself.
If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, "I am." To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. In His nature His sovereignty de jure is revealed.
**
Lewis explains that it was a good thing for him - implicitly in a psychological sense:
1. That he was unconcerned by the question of immortality: of life beyond mortal life.
2. That he regarded his faith essentially as obedience; and obedience to a God to whom obedience was due impersonally - because he was God - (which I take to mean, the creator of everything from nothing, omnipotent, omniscient etc.) - and without consideration of any personal values.
And it seems clear, and Lewis himself confirms, that this attitude to God is closely analogous to that of Judaism - and, he might have added, to Islam.
Lewis even goes so far as to say that it is corrupting to religion for "personal immortality" to be the central doctrine.
Unfortunately (as it now seem to me) I imbibed this personal prejudice of Lewis's along with my conversion. Consequently, I found that reading the Fourth Gospel was extremely confusing - since it seemed obvious that "immortality" (of a particular kind - resurrected) was the focus of Jesus's teaching.
(There are also accounts, which impress me, that suggest immortality was a primary means of conversion.)
I am forced to conclude that Lewis's personal history and psychology led him into a very serious misunderstanding of Christianity - but I would add that it is not at all uncommon and I had exactly the same misconception.
And for much the same reason - in that I became a Christian via monotheism. That is, through intermediate stages of recognizing that we inhabited "a creation", and recognizing the reality of transcendental values (truth, beauty, virtue, cohesion)...
In other words, again much like Lewis, I regarded the history of Christianity as essentially cumulative, and the nature of Christianity as added-on to pre-existent Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology.
I now regard this as deeply wrong, in its essentially reality. Of course Jesus lived at a point in time, in which there were pre-existent cultural and religious realities.
But I now see Jesus as offering something fundamentally simple (eternal, Heavenly, resurrected life), and qualitatively new - a second creation.
I see the intellectual structures of pre-existent Hebrew monotheism and Greek philosophy as not just irrelevant but distorting to the real nature of the religion of Jesus Christ.
In particular; it seems like bad advice to suggest that people ought not to be concerned with the question of immortality; and that we ought not to try and understand the relationship between their own values and the nature of God. Such ideas point away-from (not towards) Christianity as it ought to be understood - the teaching of Jesus Christ revealed in the Fourth Gospel; and (much more importantly) an understanding which is simple and clear enough to be knowable by direct personal revelation.
6 comments:
I agree. The whole point of Christianity is that this life is a shadow of reality and that the future life is the real life. That does not demean this current earthly life but puts it in its proper perspective and shows us how best to live it. As for "God was to be obeyed simply because he was God," God does not want obedience. He wants understanding and love.
@William - I'm glad you agree! However, I would not go so far as to say that this life is a "shadow" of reality. The word makes it seem entirely derivative. But I think mortal life is just as real, but temporary and "mixed" - but it is the reality of mortal life that makes it so valuable for learning.
I was thinking along similar lines the other day and came to the realization that my individual path as a Christian has led me to increasingly focus on the essence of Jesus' work, primarily via the Fourth Gospel.
In many ways, this focus is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I am struck by the simplicity and clarity of Jesus' work. On the other hand, the various "corrections" to Jesus work--many of which I myself inculcated over the course of my life--become more conspicuous, incompatible, and irreconcilable.
Discerning the corrections is not negative, but it is sometimes disquieting, particularly when you begin to wonder why so many corrections were added or considered necessary. At best, I chalk it up to the boundaries of past consciousness, but it seems our task now involves moving beyond those boundaries and rediscovering to the work, minus all the corrections.
Yes, shadow is the wrong word. I actually thought that after I'd pressed 'publish'. Perhaps a more constricted, compressed version of reality.
Many moderns don't want eternal life. Only a life with God seems worth holding on to forever. That may be why people have to come come to God before the promises of eternal life is attractive. At the time of the fourth gospel, of course, most people already believed in God so Jesus's offer was immediately appealing.
@Crosbie: I think CS Lewis put it very well in another passage of Surprised by Joy:
"...there was one way in which the world, as Kirk's rationalism taught me to see it, gratified my wishes. It might be grim and deadly but at least it was free from the Christian God. Some people (not all) will find it hard to understand why this seemed to me such an overwhelming advantage. But you must take into account both my history and my temperament. The period of faith which I had lived through at Oldie's had contained a good deal of fear. And by now, looking back on that fear, and egged on by Shaw and Voltaire and Lucretius With his Tantum religio, I greatly exaggerated that element in my memory and forgot the many other elements which had been combined with it. At all costs I was anxious that those full-moon-lit nights in the dormitory should never come again. I was also, as you may remember, one whose negative demands were more violent than his positive, far more eager to escape pain than to achieve happiness, and feeling it something of an outrage that I had been created without my own permission. To such a craven the materialist's universe had the enormous attraction that it offered you limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster could overtake you in it. Death ended all. And if ever finite disasters proved greater than one wished to bear, suicide would always be possible. The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit."
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