it's a good thing I like to dance
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up.
That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.
—C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, pp. 78-79.
From an article in Touchstone Journal. Read the whole thing here.
“I owe Lewis a great debt. In my late teens and early twenties I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and read some of his paperbacks and essays several times over. There are sentences, and some whole passages, I know pretty much by heart.”
I owe a great debt to Lewis as well. Someone recently asked me to recommend some good fiction books for their 14-year-old son to read. I tried to think of some but realized that at 14 I was reading theology (an odd child, I know) and a prominent landmark in my reading was Mere Christianity. I still have the copy I read at 14 somewhere, a cheap paperback that blew my mind. I think there is more underlined than not underlined, and there are comments in the margins and dogeared pages - all the marks of a well-loved book.
“One of the puzzles, indeed, is the way in which Lewis has been lionized by Evangelicals when he clearly didn’t believe in several classic Evangelical shibboleths. He was wary of penal substitution, not bothered by infallibility or inerrancy, and decidedly dodgy on justification by faith.”
This has been a great puzzle to me through the years as well as I explored the entrance gates of both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Many of my Evangelical brethren are so wary of Roman Catholicism and yet they quote both Lewis and Chesterton without hesitation. Why? If these men were mired in error and heresy – as they accuse rank and file Catholics to be – then why should their words be any more quotable than Ghandi’s or Mother Teresa’s?
A couple more good quotes:
“There’s a good reason why we allow Lewis to lead us on. There is a real, not a pretend, humility about his “only-a-simple-layman” stance. For some of the time, as I shall suggest, he is a professional pretending to be an amateur; for much of the time, he’s a gifted amateur putting some of the professionals to shame; sometimes he’s an amateur straightforwardly getting things wrong.”
“If you don’t put Jesus in his proper context, you will inevitably put him in a different one, where he, his message, and his achievement will be considerably distorted.”
Read the whole thing here.
Thank you TheResurgence.com for publishing this list of books by C. S. Lewis. Lewis has long been a cornerstone author for me. :
Theology
Scholarly
Personal
Anthologies
***This is a series of posts based on writing I did on personal retreat in October 2009. Read earlier posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |Part 5|Part 6|Part 7***
The most famous work on spiritual disciplines among Evangelicals is Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard J. Foster, but the origins of my interest and practice go back a bit further. Around 1993, as an 18-year-old I began to read my first Thomas Merton book, Thoughts In Solitude. I had just begun my adult life in a way as I was beginning my first full-time job after graduating high school.
I decided to start daily morning devotions and Merton’s book was the one I decided to start with. And these two days at Medaille are an attempt to re-experience those days when I first discovered the nourishment I found in the works of Thomas Merton.
The book (Thoughts In Solitude) is now in very rough shape, having been read more than once, and referenced countless times. The cover has come apart from the pages; the pages themselves are coming apart from one another.
It was written in 1953 and 1954 during an intense time of solitude and meditation afforded to Merton, as he puts it, “by the grace of God and the favor of his Superiors.” There was no intention on his part for the book to address advanced or sensational adventures in these disciplines, but rather to state their basic function and importance in the life of a contemplative.
John Calvin said, “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” Merton echoes this thought in saying that, “Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”
More precisely – we have to have enough mastery of ourselves to renounce our own will into the hands of Christ – so that he may conquer what we cannot reach by our own efforts.
The driving force of Merton’s thinking and subsequent writing was the nature and conquest of “true self.” However, this was no self-absorbed, pop-psychology, self-fulfillment endeavor. Merton believed that the “true self” could only be found in God, that seeking God and seeking self were one and the same pursuit. To seek and then know God’s will is to know one’s own purpose; to know what God has planned is to know how to proceed; to know what God is doing is to glory in the trials we face.
The search for self begins and ends in the search for God. By seeking the One who created us, knows us, and has a plan for us, we will know both Him and ourselves. 
For we are only truly ourselves as we are in His will and nothing short of that self is the true self.
Two references – both positive – can be found, not in the works of CS Lewis but in his letters. In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths on December 20th, 1961 Lewis asks, “Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I’m at present on his No Man Is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.” Lewis mentions Merton again three days later in a letter to an American friend. “I’ve been greatly impressed,” Lewis writes, “by the work of an American Trappist called Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island. You probably know it?”
Lewis in league with Merton. Who would have guessed? Could this be a doorway for others also to take interest in the works of Thomas Merton?
I was given a book recently called “Faith Undone: The emerging church – a new reformation or an end-time deception” by Roger Oakland. This is an “anti” book. By that I mean its sole purpose is to tell you, with a good amount of hyperbole, about the many, many things the author is against. In this case, all of those things are related to what the author sees as the “Emerging Church” (EC).
I have actually seen this book before, and I did a deep skimming of it and saw it for what it is: a tabloid-style, pick-and-choose hatchet job on people who, while not executing perfectly, are valuable leaders in today’s North American church.
Books like this are basically supermarket tabloid gossip rags without the pictures. To put it more bluntly:
This is a strange sort of theological pornography for people who see their calling as hunting heresy by identifying leaders with theological weaknesses (some perceived, some real) and telling others about what they’ve found.
That itself is not an unbiblical pursuit, but taken to the level of out-of-context tabloid journalism it becomes sin.
This is not to say there is no truth in Oakland’s book. I can agree with and affirm many of the things in the book; the problem is that there is page after page after page of short quotes followed by commentary. There are even quotes of reporters who say something about somebody and these are taken as damning evidence against the person who is the target.
Rick Warren in particular (not surprisingly) takes a beating throughout the book. As a side note, in the way that Oakland perceives the EC, grouping Rick Warren in with the EC is a bit ridiculous, kind of like claiming that John Piper and Joel Osteen are kindred spirits and are going to be sharing a pulpit at some point in the near future. Rick Warren does big; the EC is mostly about regionalized, contextualized solutions. Rick Warren works on a global scale; the EC is about incarnational witness. The EC is (mostly) anti-megachurch; Rick Warren IS the megachurch.
But I’m with Ed Stetzer on this; we need both. We need big solutions and big churches and small solutions and small churches. Which is why in one sense the EC can be very broadly defined as every church that is not dying due to lack of activity.
Even Dan Kimball, who apparently committed the sin of asking non-believers what their perception of “church” is is mocked for daring to suggest that the American church might be able to have a more authentic testimony. Gasp. How can he say this?!?! I can’t think of any examples of American Christian leaders who have disgraced the name of Christ in very visible ways. This is the type of behavior, mostly on a smaller scale, that Kimball explores.
I’ll close with a quote from C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity (p. 118):
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 are 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.
I think that a book like this is exactly what the Lewis quote above is about.
I changed the title from “A Mind Awake” (after a book about C.S. Lewis) to “The Ascent to Truth” (after a book by Thomas Merton). I like books, in case you haven’t noticed.
I chose the new title for several reasons:
1. It’s the title of one of my favorite Thomas Merton books
2. I hope everyone believes that truth is a noble goal and that they’re traveling and rising toward it
3. In another sense the word means “a movement or return toward a source or beginning” or in some ways “a surrender to what IS”, a surrender to truth, and we must seek to surrender to truth, and to the ultimate Truth – Jesus Christ.
What do you think? Do you like the new title or the old title better?
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