Opus 2025-187: Witch Reality

Was the witch of Endor really a witch or was she just a reporter for the New York Times?  Or let me put it another way, was the witch of Endor really capable of raising the dead and thus demonstrating great power or was she just a charlatan living off the foolishness and gullibility of other people?

Take a look at the account in I Samuel. It begins,

1 Samuel 28:7 (KJV) Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, [there is] a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.

At this point we can assume that Saul and his servants believe there is something to being a witch.  One thing follows another, Saul meets the witch and she agrees to raise Samuel.  Here is where it gets really interesting.  It works.

(1Sa 28:12 KJV)  And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice: and the woman spake to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art Saul.

I could be totally wrong but every time I read this I get the feeling that she is really surprised to see a genuine specter.  My opinion is that she usually had time to prepare her stage and her mark so that they saw what she wanted them to see.  

C.S. Lewis had a comment on how our culture deals with the demonic powers,

p. ix, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.  One is to disbelieve in their existence.  The other is to believe, and feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.  They themselves are equally pleased by both errors,...”  

Ever since the Garden of Eden mankind has been involved in a war between Almighty God and Satan.  Everyone picks sides whether they know it or not.  The battle is coming out in the open in our modern era.  Satan feels like the citizens of the world are ready to join his team.

Don’t be one of those foolish enough to go in that direction.

Lewis, C.S.  The Screwtape Letters.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-219: Off the Dime

I went to Sunday School last Sunday.

Big deal, you say.  It is.  I can’t count the years since I attended a Sunday School class.  I am not going because I think I am going to be amazed at the learning.  To be honest, I have heard more than I put into action.  I have also taught it.  The reason I am going is to force myself to get out of my shell and get to know the people of the church.  I don’t look at it as socializing as much as building the body of Christ by getting involved.  I have been telling myself I would do it.  Now I have.

On the desk in front of me, at eye level, written in clear English is little card that says, “Do it now.”  It is there to combat my procrastination.  Sometimes it works.  What also got me moving was a re-reading of the Screwtape Letters.  In it I found Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood on how to deaden the spirit of revival in the new convert,

“The great thing is to prevent his doing anything.  as long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance....  Let him do anything but act  No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.”  p 66

I do not confuse C.S. Lewis with the Apostle Paul but that does not mean that he can’t say things that need to be said.

So I got active.  Now to make it through all the excuses I will have for next week.

Lewis, C.S.  The Screwtape Letters.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

homo unius libri

Opus 2022-081: On the Issue of Wealth

What is the moral high ground in economics?  We are constantly bombarded by the Marxist rhetoric of redistribution of income.  It is watered down and disguised but all this talk about how rich people are evil is part of the Communist desire to put all wealth in the hands of the state and their elite cronies and make it impossible for the average citizen to accumulate wealth.

Some wolves wearing the sheep’s mantle of being Christian thinkers will go along with this idea.  As someone said, “You can prove anything you want out of the Bible.”  It cannot be done honestly but it can be done.  One of their favorites pushing Communism is,

(Act 2:44 KJV)  And all that believed were together, and had all things common;

They totally ignore such things as,

(Gen 25:10 KJV)  The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

There are many references to owning property and doing business in the Bible.  When there is a problem it is not with the concept of making a profit but cheating or defrauding in order to benefit.

C.S. Lewis makes this observation in a chapter called “Social Morality”,

“There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews of the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages.  All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system.”  p. 85

He goes on and discusses that this might be just the private money lenders that would squeeze the poor.  I think he is right is that because of Jesus and His parable of the talents.  Toward the end he says this,

(Mat 25:27 KJV)  Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

I would not build a doctrinal statement on this but it does have something to say about investing at interest.

Our current version of capitalism may conflict with Christianity but like the Bible comments on wealth it isn’t the system of joint-stock investments but the willingness of people who use the system to enrich themselves while adding nothing.  I think of terms I have heard such as “corporate raiders” and “hostile takeovers” and such.  What they do may be legal but it is not moral.

As always, don’t just take the word of gurus.  Do your own reading and thinking.  Everything cannot be explained in a twenty second sound bite.  

Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.  

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 Opus 2022-048:  The Church Needs to Be the Church

One of my daily prayers is for the church to wake up and become salt and light again.  At the root of all the problems in our country is a failure of the church.  One of the calls that will often go out is for the pulpits to stand up and declare truth.  The problem we get into is not wanting to get political.  The weakness of the church is that they refuse to address moral issues such as homosexuality because the secular culture says they are political.

How can the church change society?  I came across this statement as I was re-reading Mere Christianity.  I think Lewis gives the pastors too much of an escape clause but I totally agree with what he is really trying to say.

“People say, ‘The Church ought to give us a lead.’  That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way.  By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians.  And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians - those who happen to have the right talents - should be economists an statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be direct to putting ‘Do as you would be done by’ into action.  If that happened and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly.  But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme (sic).  That is silly.  The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever:  and we are asking them to do a different job for which they have not been trained.  The job is really on us, on the laymen.”  p. 83

The times when the Christian church has been most influential was not when the pulpits were the most political or even when the laymen were most political.  It has been when the average Christian has been serious about applying their faith to their daily walk.  It means speaking the truth.  It is to be spoken in love but that does not mean watering it down to the point of vacuity.  

If we want the United States to once again be blessed by God then each of us who claims to be a follower of Jesus needs to become salt and light in our daily activities.  It may not be sexy but it is righteous.

Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

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Opus 2014-193: Monday Pulpit: The Love of a Godly Husband

The pastor was preaching from Ephesians 5 on marriage.  He was talking about the command for  husbands to love their wives.

(Ephesians 5:25 KJV)  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

This love is agape love.  Next the pastor threw in a quote from C.S. Lewis.  He did not cite a source so I am guessing it is a paraphrase.  It went like this.

“This love is intended for the man whose wife does not return his love.”

I do have some notes from C.S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves.  In it he said,

“This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion;...”, p. 105

I think that is along the same theme.  The time for agape love is when it is the most counter intuitive.  When we want to walk away, we stand firm.  When we want to lash out, we embrace.  Keep in mind the parallel between marriage and the church.  Remember that Jesus died for us when we were the hardest to love.

(Romans 5:8 KJV)  But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

This is not the standard of our civil culture but is a foundation of the Christian life.  We are different.

Lewis, C.S.  The Four Loves.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

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Opus 2013-111: Good but Not Safe

Several seeds came together to make me consider the one of the Big Questions.  The most recent was Alistair Begg mentioning a book by C.S. Lewis.  He referred to a conversation in The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe between Lucy and Mr. Beaver.  This brings up a second seed.  Lucy asks if Aslan is safe and the answer is, “No, he is not safe, but he is good.”   That made me think of the book I recently reviewed, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  In that book Kushner rejects the power of God because he wants to hold on to his version of what it means for God to be good.  To him the two don’t go together.

Here is the difference.  Lewis assumes that God is good no matter what the results, Kushner assumes that God must do things our way in order to be good.  It is a totally different approach to the view of man, God and the purpose of life.  Lewis has a view that is Biblical.  Kushner has a view that fits in very well with the post-modern philosophy of today. 

The eternal God of the Bible is not safe.  He is holy.  That has consequences.  We cannot play like we are Lucy (as in I Love Lucy) and He is Ricky.  Yes, He forgives.  Yes, He sent His Son to die for our sins.  Yes, He is compassionate and merciful.  He is also holy and He doesn’t play games.

(Hebrews 9:22 NAS77)  And according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

God did not cut himself any slack.  Without the cleansing of the blood He won’t cut us any either.

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Opus 2011-252, The Need for Change

If you have the time go dig out your copy of The Screwtape Letters and read letter number 25.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  If you don’t have a copy get one.  If you won’t get one then you will need t take my word for what it says.  If you have only time to read C.S. Lewis or me, go with Lewis.

This is a part of the book where I found myself copying entire paragraphs.  I will try to respond to what Lewis says, not just copy him.

I think a good Bible quotation Lewis might have used was:

(Proverbs 24:21 KJV)  My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change:

First Lewis points out that God made us to enjoy change.

“To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.”  p. 136

Then Lewis balances it with our need for stability:

“But since He does not wish them to make change, an more than eating, an end in itself, he has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.” p. 136

The balance is presented as rhythm and gives an example.

“He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the season, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.”    

We are built so that each year Spring is new to us.  I have been through it over 60 times and yet the smells and weather are always refreshing and renewing.  Have you ever had one of those days where there is something about the day, you just can’t put your finger on it.  Then you realize that in the middle of winter you found a hint of spring.  Picture how boring it would be if every day were spring. 

Why can’t we learn that lesson in our music?  We just finished VBS.  (That is Vacation Bible School for those of you who have no cultural background.)  As we were waiting for the closing program to begin the piano was playing all of the songs I had sung as a kid.  When my children came along we continued with many of the same choruses and added a few to enrich the mix.  I looked around and every adult in the sanctuary had that silly smile on their face of fond memory.  When the program began that was the end of memory lane.  All of the songs the kids sang were new.  Nothing existed from the past.

That would not necessarily be bad but I asked myself, “Will these kids be smiling in thirty years when someone plays one of these songs?  Will they remember the impact they had on their lives?”  I doubt it because they couldn’t even remember the songs that Sunday morning.  You may not have noticed but the music now comes with a taped accompaniment.  That you might have noticed but what you may not have been aware of was that the voices you heard coming over the PA were mostly from the tape, not the kids you were watching.  The price we pay for novelty is that the performers become spectators as well as the audience.  What they have not learned they will not remember.

When my kids were at the VBS age Maranatha Music put out a series of tapes featuring Psalty the singing Psalm book.  They worked the Maranatha magic.  They took old, established choruses and spiced them up.  They were new and old at the same time.  They mixed in some selected new songs and built them around a lesson in Christian character.  We would pop those in the tape deck as we drove and the entire family would enthusiastically join in the singing.  To this day, all you have to do is start singing one and the adult children will remember.

Change can be good.  Permanence can be good.  Lets learn to embrace them both. 

Lewis, C.S.  The Screwtape Letters.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

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Opus 2011-244, Christian Cliches: Are We Having Fun Yet? Then Stop.

Every once in awhile I meet someone who criticizes Christians because we are so dull.  We can’t have any fun, according to them.  I ran across a quote by C.S. Lewis that responds very well.  If you are unfamiliar with The Screwtape Letters, keep in mind that it is a senior demon writing to a junior demon.

“He has filled His world with pleasures.  There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least - sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working.  Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.  We fight under cruel disadvantages.  Nothing is naturally on our side.”  (Emphasis in original)  p. 118

The list Lewis gives us is surprising and short. 

It surprises because it includes things that we might not include as fun.  Washing is fun?  Think about it.  After a long, hard, sweaty day doesn’t a hot shower bring great pleasure?  Think of the joy of making love without having to worry about STD or guilt.  Are you one of those few people who can’t enjoy a Sunday afternoon nap?  Really?

It is short because of all the things that are not listed.  Take any activity that does not involve excess in alcohol, drugs or violence and it is probably something that Christians can do.  And since they won’t be influenced by alcohol or drugs they will actually remember they did it.  Such things as sky diving, skiing, hunting, and hang-gliding come to mind.  I have never done any of them, but they are on that long list of options that are open.

What happens is Satan takes the good things God has given them and twists them.  In Proverbs one of the words used for people who follow evil is crooked.  In fact that is the meaning of perverted. 

So take your choice.  Do you want to have fun and live eternally to talk about it or do you want to spend your time in Hell knowing that all of the stories you hear are lies because you have been there.

Lewis, C.S.  The Screwtape Letters.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

homo unius libri

Opus 2011-171, Einstein vs Lewis

I came across an interesting disagreement between the writings of C.S. Lewis and Albert Einstein.  It has to do with the nature of truth.  Lewis seems to think that great truths are not simple.  Einstein believes that natural truth should be simple.

Lewis was dealing with people who say that spiritual truths are too complicated.  Take the trinity for instance.  Lewis commented,

“It is not good asking for a simple religion.  After all, real things are not simple.  They look simple, but they are not.”  (Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002, p. 40)

Lewis feels that life is complex and we are barking up the wrong tree to try to demand it be made simple. 

Einstein, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the truths of nature should fit together simply and should really be able to be understood.  I can’t find the quote but I think that summarizes his idea.

What is interesting to me is that Lewis, who claims that great truth is not simple, is easy to understand whereas Einstein who claimed nature is simple was totally confusing.  If you have read Lewis you understand my point there.  Most of us have not read Einstein.  A man who spent a lot of time with him on a ship crossing the Atlantic and listened very carefully, Chaim Weizman is quoted as saying,

“During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.” (Isaacson, Walter.  Einstein.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 2007, p. 292.)

Which one is right?

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Opus 2011-169, Discernment Watch: Nuance and Neutrality

Western post-modern culture is rebelling against the traditional English language.  For centuries when generic gender was required English used “he.”  We talked about “man” as a term for all people.  Everyone understood.  Life was simple. 

With the rise of feminism and the advance of the anti-God and anti-Christians elites this has become unacceptable.  Now everything must be gender neutral.  It must be that way even if it goes against the original language of the scripture.  These are cultural modifications, not what God actually meant to say.

These people totally miss the nuances that are necessary in the covenant between a living, eternal God and people He created in His image.  Eternal truths are not always simple.  To quote C.S. Lewis,

“It is not good asking for a simple religion.  After all, real things are not simple.  They look simple, but they are not.”  Mere Christianity, p. 40

So in the Christian faith we have this balancing act between being one before God but having different roles in our relationships with others.  We have people with the gift of leadership.  They have greater responsibility, that does not make them superior.  That is part of the miracle of the American system.  We have adopted the acceptance of success and status without accepting the European idea that certain classes are innately superior. 

Compare this view of the roles of men and women with what you see in Muslim cultures.  In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive cars.  The Koran says that a man’s witness is worth four women.  Women are definitely second class citizens in every way.  And yet you still have Muslim women speaking out in favor of this system.   There is no nuance.  Women are inferior.  If you ever see a gender neutral Koran, Islam will be dead.

I am not sure that a gender neutral Bible doesn’t say the same thing about the religion of the translators.  If your choice of words is made to satisfy people who hate the God of the Bible, then you have rejected that God because you have rejected what He, yes I said “He,” said.

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Opus 2011-168, Focus, Focus, Focus

I am in the process of re-reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  One of the reasons I don’t have time to read the newest, hot off the press, cutting edge books is that there are so many great books that deserve being read again.  The Screwtape Letters is one of those.  I am reading only one “letter” at a time and savoring it as I go.

Today the topic was the fear and suffering that is brought on by war.  Of course Lewis is talking about World War II but with our concerns about a nuclear Iran and international terrorism we are in a time with similar fears.

Screwtapes nephew, Wormword, is a junior demon.  He is tasked with destroying a certain human for eternity.  The advice given to him is “So do not allow any temporary excitement to distract you from the real business of undermining faith and preventing the development of virtues.” (page 22)  This is reminder to us.

In uncertain times we are not to be distracted by the enemy.  We are to continue to seek to grow as believers and followers of the living Christ.  We are to be upright and blameless. 

That does not mean we stop voting or writing letters.  It means that we are to do it all in the thoughtful loving style that is typical of people who follow a righteous, holy God who is also love.

Lewis, C.S.  The Screwtape Letters.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

homo unius libri

Opus 2011-158, Immortal Quotes: Two Mistakes about Devils

I am beginning to work through The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis so you may hear a lot of Lewis quotes for awhile.  This one is fairly well know and comes from the Introduction of the book,

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.  One is to disbelieve in their existence.  The other is to believe, and feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.  They themselves are equally pleased by both errors,...”  p. ix

It seems to me that I read this somewhere else in his writings also, but this book starts out with it.  For a long time I tended to be in the first group.  Not because I don’t believe the devil exists, because I do.  I just put him in a category with eschatology and such.  Give me meat and potatoes.  Let me study Isaiah and Paul. 

Find a balance.  Also admit that the devil gets a lot of credit for things that people in the control of their sinful nature execute on their own steam.  Either way the antidote is Jesus.

homo unius libri

Opus 45, IQ: "Those who would sacrifice liberty..."

In this day of airport security, or lack thereof, and government invasion of our basic liberties there is a quote that keeps coming to my mind:

"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

I thought it would be easy to track it down but there seems to be some disagreement about it.  The best I could come up with was Benjamin Franklin in the Pennsylvania Assembly, November 11, 1755.

What made me think of it was a statement by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, p. 32.

“Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:  if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth...”

Franklin was of course talking about how some people want the government to take care of them.  One of the benefits of civilization is that the safety that comes in numbers means we do not need to be as alert as a frontier farmer or explorer would need to be.  There is safely in numbers.  Like any drug, it can become an overdose.  There are many readily available drugs today that become addictive and destructive because they become substitutes for healthy living. 

We live in a world where the masses want perfect security.  They want someone to filter their water, inspect their food, approve their medications, eliminate air pollution, guarantee their health, remove weeds from their lawn....  Remember the acronym:  TANSTASFL.  Everything costs. 

When you give someone else the responsibility to care for you, they also receive the power to control you.  It is a necessary trade off.  If you want to enter into that exchange, enjoy your slavery.  It may be comfortable and secure.  It is still slavery.  The problem I have is when you force it on me.

Opus 37, Book Notes: Mere Christianity

Notes from
Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis

Book 1, Chapter 2

p. 13, “Progress means not just changing but changing for the better.  If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised (sic) morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.”

Book 1, Chapter 5

pp. 28-9, “We all want progress.  But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be.  And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer....There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.”

p. 32, “Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:  if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth...”

Book 2, Chapter 1

p. 35, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.  If you are an atheist you have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake.  If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.  When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.  But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.  As in arithmetic - there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer right than others.”

Book 2, Chapter 2

p. 40, “It is not good asking for a simple religion.  After all, real things are not simple.  They look simple, but they are not.”

p. 41, “Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack.”

p. 41, “Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.”

p. 41, “Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed.  That is one reason I believe Christianity.  It is a religion you could not have guessed.”  Hugh Ross said much the same in The Fingerprint of God.

Book 2, Chapter 3

p. 48, “Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but has no possibility of doing wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

p. 52, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God:  or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising (sic)  nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”

Book 2, Chapter 5

p. 61, “We have to take reality as it comes to us:  there is not good jabbering about what it ought to be lie or what we should have expected it to be like.”

pp. 62-63, Discussion of free will in the context of physical life

Book 3, Chapter 1

p. 69, “Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or friction, in the running of that machine.”

p. 72, “Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things.  Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals.  Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual.  Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole:  what man was made for:  what course the whole fleet ought to be on:  what tune the conductor of the band wants to play.”

p. 74, “Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about seriously if I am going to live forever.”

Book 3, Chapter 3

p. 87, “Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says:  we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.”

Book 3, Chapter 4

p. 91, “Human beings judge one another by their external actions.  God judges them on their moral choices.”

p. 93, “Good people know about both good and evil:  bad people do not know either.”

Book 3, Chapter 5

p. 94, “Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.”

Book 3, Chapter 6

p. 109, “But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love.”

p. 110, “Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.”

p. 112, statement about marriage

Book 3, Chapter 7

p. 119, “All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.”

Book 3, Chapter 9

p. 129, “But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion.”

Book 3, Chapter 10

p. 134, “Hope is one of the theological virtues.  This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not...a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do....  If you read history you will find that Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

pp. 136-7, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

p. 137, “The answer for such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.”

p. 137, “People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

Book 3, Chapter 11

p. 139, “The batle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”

Book 3, Chapter 12

p. 148, On the tension between faith and obedience:  “...but it does seem like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.”

Book 4, Chapter 1

p. 155, “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.”

Book 4, Chapter 3

pp.  166-71, Explains the paradox of free will and foreknowledge in terms of God being outside time.

Book 4, Chapter 5

p. 178, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

p. 178, “But that is guesswork.  You and I are concerned with the way things work now.”

Book 4, Chapter 6

p. 183, “Have the words ‘could have been’ any sense at all when applied to God?”

p. 186, The Devil:  “He always sends errors into the world in pairs - pairs of opposites.”

Book 4, Chapter 8

p. 198, Wheat vs. grass

p. 198, “It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.”  - take this to why salt added in cooking is better than at the table or why marinades give more flavor than a shaker

pp. 198-199, “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird:  it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.  We are like eggs at present.  And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.  We must be hatched or go bad.”

Book 4, Chapter 9

p. 201-6, A chapter on Christian Perfection

p. 203, Quoting George MacDonald, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

p. 205, “The command “Be ye perfect” is not idealistic gas.  Nor is it a command to do the impossible.”

Book 4, Chapter 10

p. 208-9, Controversial comments on salvation

p. 209, “But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only the two vague ideas which we got from novels and newspapers.”

p. 210, “To judge the management of a factory, you must consider not only the output but the plant.”  I would add raw materials also.

Lewis, C.S.  Mere Christianity.  Norwalk, Connecticut:  The Easton Press, 2002.

Opus 36, Book Review: Mere Christianity

I have just reread a book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.  I have read it at least three times and plan to read it again in a few years.  I think it is that good.  Every time I read it my thinking is stimulated and my walk with the Lord is strengthened.  This book was originally put together as a series of radio talks about what Christianity was all about during World War II.  It was sponsored by the BBC.

One of the values of this book at this point in my life is that the chapters are short enough to read as stand alone studies.  You can easily read a chapter before someone interrupts you or a duty calls. 

Lewis writes from the perspective of a fully committed, orthodox, Anglican of the early 20th century.  There are places where he might have differences from you or I but the differences are usually what I would call cultural or semantic.  There are places where you realize that Lewis is not a theologian, at least not one aware of some of the modern heresies.  One place is toward the end where he talks about us becoming like gods.  He does not mean what the modern cults mean.  You understand that if you are reading for understanding.

If you have never read this book, do so.  If you have, read it again.  It is worth it.

My next post will be the notes that I took as I read.  They are not intended as an outline or exhaustive study, just the things that got me to thinking or made me want to think more.  The page numbers are from the Easton edition, they might not work in your copy so I have tried to indicate the location by also putting in the book and chapter designations.