The Romantic Rationalist E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

"We are far too easily pleased." C. S. Lewis stands as one of the most influential Christians of the twentieth century. His commitment to the life of the mind and the life of the heart is evident in classics like the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity—books that illustrate the unbreakable connection between rigorous thought and deep affection. With contributions from Randy Alcorn, John Piper, Philip Ryken, Kevin Vanhoozer, David Mathis, and Douglas Wilson, this volume explores the man, his work, and his legacy—reveling in the truth at the heart of Lewis's spiritual genius: God alone is the answer to our deepest longings and the source of our unending joy.

Leseprobe

THE ROMANTIC RATIONALIST

God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C. S. Lewis

EDITED BY

JOHN PIPER & DAVID MATHIS

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROMRandy Alcorn, Philip Ryken, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Douglas Wilson

The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C. S. Lewis

Copyright © 2014 by Desiring God

Published by Crossway

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked NRSV are from The New Revised Standard Version. Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All references marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version. Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4498-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4501-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4498-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4500-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The romantic rationalist : God, life, and imagination in the work of C.S. Lewis / edited by David Mathis and John Piper ; with contributions from Randy Alcorn, Philip Ryken, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Douglas Wilson.

        1 online resource

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

   ISBN 978-1-4335-4498-9 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4500-9 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4501-6 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4498-9 (tp)

   1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963. I. Mathis, David, 1980– editor.

BX4827.L44

230.092—dc23            2014023476

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Campus Outreachand its partnering churches,students, staff, alumni, and supporters,building laborers on the college campusfor the lost worldto the glory of God

CONTENTS

Contributors

Introduction

Half a Century since C. S. Lewis

David Mathis

 1   C. S. Lewis, Romantic Rationalist

How His Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry

John Piper

 2   Inerrancy and the Patron Saint of Evangelicalism

C. S. Lewis on Holy Scripture

Philip Ryken

 3   Undragoned

C. S. Lewis on the Gift of Salvation

Douglas Wilson

 4   In Bright Shadow

C. S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship

Kevin Vanhoozer

 5   C. S. Lewis on Heaven and the New Earth

God’s Eternal Remedy to the Problem of Evil and Suffering

Randy Alcorn

 6   What God Made Is Good—and Must Be Sanctified

C. S. Lewis and St. Paul on the Use of Creation

John Piper

Appendix 1

C. S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Hell

Randy

Alcorn

Appendix 2

A Conversation with the Contributors

Acknowledgments

General Index

Scripture Index

A Note on Resources: desiringGod.org

CONTRIBUTORS

Randy Alcorn is author of more than forty books, including bestsellers Heaven; The Treasure Principle; and Safely Home. He served as a pastor for almost fifteen years and is founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries. Randy and his wife, Nanci, have two daughters and five grandsons.

David Mathis is executive editor at desiringGod.org, elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and adjunct professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary (Minneapolis). He writes regularly at desiringGod.org and is coauthor of How to Stay Christian in Seminary (2014), and coeditor of Acting the Miracle (2013); Finish the Mission (2012); Thinking. Loving. Doing. (2011); and With Calvin in the Theater of God (2010). David and his wife, Megan, have three children.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary. For thirty-three years, he was pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church. He is author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God; The Pleasures of God; Don’t Waste Your Life; and Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. John and his wife, Noël, have five children and twelve grandchildren.

Philip Ryken is eighth president of Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois). For fifteen years he served as senior minister at Tenth Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia). He studied at Wheaton (undergraduate); Westminter (MDiv); and Oxford (PhD) and is author of Loving the Way Jesus Loves (2012) and more than forty Bible commentaries and other books. He and his wife, Lisa, have five children.

Douglas Wilson is pastor of Christ Church (Moscow, Idaho). He is a founding board member of Logos School, instructor at Greyfriars Hall, and editor of Credenda Agenda. He is the author of many books, including Father Hunger: Why God Calls Men to Love and Lead Their Families (2013); Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life (2011); and What I Learned in Narnia (2010). He is married to Nancy and a father of three.

Kevin Vanhoozer is research professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, Illinois). He is author of Is There Meaning in This Text? (1998) and The Drama of Doctrine: ACanonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (2006), among other books. He studied at Westminster (MDiv) and Cambridge (PhD), and is also an amateur classical pianist. He is married to Sylvie, and they have two daughters.

INTRODUCTION

Half a Century since C. S. Lewis

DAVID MATHIS

He went quietly. It was very British.

While the Americans rocked and reeled, and the world’s attention turned to Dallas and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one Clive Staples Lewis breathed his last in Oxford just a week shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. Strangely enough, science-fictionist Aldous Huxley passed the same day, and in one calendar square, three of the twentieth century’s most influential figures were gone.

It was November 22, 1963—now more than fifty years ago.

C. S. Lewis is known best for his series of seven short fiction books, the Chronicles of Narnia, which have sold over 100 million copies in forty languages. With three of the stories already becoming major motion pictures, and the fourth in the making, Lewis is as popular today as he’s ever been. But even before he published Narnia in the early 1950s, he distinguished himself as a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, the world’s foremost expert in medieval and Renaissance English literature, and as one of the great lay thinkers and writers in two millennia of the Christian church.

Discovering Truth and Joy

Good Brit though he was, Lewis was Irish, born in Belfast in 1898. He became an atheist in his teens and stridently such in his twenties, before slowly warming to theism in his early thirties, and finally being fully converted to Christianity at age thirty-three. And he would prove to be for many, as he was for his friend Owen Barfield, the “most thoroughly converted man I ever met.”

What catches the eye about Lewis’s star in the constellation of Christian thinkers and writers is his utter commitment to both the life of the mind and the life of the heart. He thinks and feels with the best. Lewis insisted that rigorous thought and deep affection were not at odds but mutually supportive. And as impressive as he was in arguing for it, he was even more convincing in his demonstration.

What eventually led Lewis to theism, and finally to Christianity, was what he called “Longing”—an ache for Joy with a capital J. He had learned all too well that relentless rationality could not adequately explain the depth and complexity of human life or the textures and hues of the world in which we find ourselves. From early on, an angst gnawed at him, which one day he would express so memorably in his most well-known single book, Mere Christianity: “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.”1

This World and the Other

Such is the heart of his genius, his spiritual genius. So few treat the world in all its detail and contour like he does, and yet so few tirelessly point us beyond this world, with all its concreteness and color and taste, with the aggression and ardor of C. S. Lewis.

And so for many, his impact has been so personal. For me, it was a six-word sentence in Lewis—“We are far too easily pleased”—that popped the hood on a massive remodeling of my soul:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.2

Does Jesus really find our desires not too strong but too weak? I had long professed Christianity, but this tasted so different from what I knew. It tasted! This affirmation of happiness and pleasure and desire and delight was, to me, so new in the context of the Christian faith. And Lewis was the chef.

My notions about God and the Christian life were exposed as mere duty driven, and my soul was thrilling at the possibility that Christianity might not mean muting my desires but being encouraged (even commanded!) to turn them up—up to God.

The Language of Hedonism Everywhere

Lewis was conspiring with others to help open my mind and heart to a new angle on God and life—that new angle being joy and delight—but my upbringing determined that there must be a final and decisive test for this freshman discovery: Will this hold in the Scriptures? I thank God my parents and home church had so clearly taught me that the Bible is trustworthy and inerrant and the final authority on every seemingly true line of thinking.

And with Bible open, it didn’t take long. Equipped with this new lens—the spectacles of joy—the Scriptures began popping like never before. Lewis’s hedonism was confirmed on page after page.

In God’s presence, says Psalm 16:11,“there is fullness of joy; at [his] right hand are pleasures forevermore.” I had no category for that until then. Or for the heart cry of Psalm 63:1: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Or for the holy longing of Psalm 42:1–2: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” As John Piper says, after Lewis helped open his eyes, “I turned to the Psalms for myself and found the language of Hedonism everywhere.”3

At last I was ready to hear Paul say, “Rejoice in the Lord” (Phil. 3:1). And the reprise: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). And Jesus: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44). As well as the glimpse we’re given into his very heart at the heart of our faith: “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2). And on and on.

Lewis’s help, just at this one point, has been invaluable.

Feel the Weight of Glory

And there’s even a little bit more to squeeze from the six-word sentence. Lewis would say that not only are we “far too easily pleased” when we settle for fixing our soul’s inconsolable longing on anything other than God, but also that we’re too easily pleased if we see God only from a distance and not soon be drawn into him. This, says Lewis, is “the weight of glory.” As a layman, Lewis didn’t preach weekly but occasionally had his chance at a pulpit. His most remembered sermon is one he preached under this title—“The Weight of Glory.”

The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination [of standing before God], shall find approval, shall please God. To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.4

Indeed, we are far too easily pleased when we pine finally for anything less than God—and when we ache only for seeing his splendor from afar, rather than going further up and further in, to being “accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.”5 The weight of glory “means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things.”6

Our Creator has written on our hearts not only to enjoy eternity as a spectator in his majestic stadium, watching happily from the bleachers, but also, being brought onto the field, given a jersey, and adopted as a full member of his team, to live in his acceptance and embrace. We never become God, but we do become spectacularly one with him in his Son and our glad conformity to Jesus (Rom. 8:29). Surely such is a weight of glory almost too great to even consider in our current condition.

No Ordinary People

When Lewis breathed his last and quietly slipped from this life, more than half a century ago now, he took one big step toward becoming the kind of glorious creature in the coming new creation that he speaks about in that sermon:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously.7

For a growing number of us, Lewis occupies a class to himself. Few, if any, have taught us so much about this world, and the next, save the Scriptures.

The Romantic Rationalist

Perhaps that’s why you’ve turned to this book. We hope you’ve dipped into Lewis for yourself, whether his Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters; The Abolition of Man; the Chronicles of Narnia; or his voluminous, brilliant, personal correspondence. You know that his writings are pervasively thoughtful, engaging, provoking, and rewarding and that he only rarely disappoints. And now you want more.

More than any other, chapter 1 addresses Lewis, the man. John Piper explains why it is that we join Peter Kreeft in calling Lewis a “romantic rationalist.” Chapters 2 and 3 then tackle two of the larger concerns Reformed evangelicals raise about Lewis’s theology: his doctrine of Scripture (especially inerrancy) and his doctrine of salvation. Philip Ryken and Douglas Wilson, respectively, tackle these two tough issues with brilliance and flair.

Next Kevin Vanhoozer turns to Lewis’s vision of the imagination, its relevance, and even essentiality, for Christian doctrine and discipleship. Then Randy Alcorn brings us soaring with Lewis into the new heavens and the new earth. Finally, Piper rounds out our study with an exposition of the very “Lewisian” text 1 Timothy 4:1–5 and what we can glean from the apostle Paul and the Oxford don. (Appendix 1 is Alcorn’s treatment of Lewis’s controversial take on the doctrine of hell, and Appendix 2 is a lightly edited conversation among the contributors.)

We wouldn’t want this book to keep you from reading Lewis yourself, but we hope that these reflections on his work and vision of the world will deepen not only your appreciation of Lewis but, even more, of his Lord.

_________________

1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 136–37.

2 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 26 (emphasis added).

3 John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2011), 23.

4 Lewis, Weight of Glory, 38–39.

5 Ibid., 40.

6 Ibid., 41.

7 C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 1949), 45–46.

1

C. S. LEWIS, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST

How His Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry

JOHN PIPER

For those of you who may wonder why we would devote a book to a mere mortal like C. S. Lewis, let’s begin with an accolade from Peter Kreeft from a book chapter titled, “The Romantic Rationalist: Lewis the Man.”

Once upon a dreary era, when the world of . . . specialization had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses, romantic poets, Platonic idealists, rhetorical craftsmen, and even orthodox Christians, there appeared a man (almost as if from another world, one of the worlds of his own fiction: was he a man or something more like elf or Angel?) who was all of these things as amateur, as well as probably the world’s foremost authority in his professional province, Medieval and Renaissance English literature. Before his death in 1963 he found time to produce some first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, biblical studies, historical philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary, religious allegory, short stories, and children’s novels. Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world.1

Those are the kinds of accolades you read again and again. Which means there must have been something extraordinary about the man. Indeed, we believe there was. And in this fiftieth year since his death, it seemed to many of us that a book like this would be a small expression of our thankfulness to God for him, and our admiration of him, and our desire that his gifts to the world be preserved and spread.

Childhood and Schooling

The various authors in this book draw out facts of Lewis’s life that are relevant to their concern, but let me give you a three-minute summary of his life so that some of the hard facts are before us. Lewis loved hard facts. The kind you want under your house when the rains come down and the floods come up.

Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. His mother died when he was nine years old, and his father never remarried. Between the death of his mother in August 1908 and the autumn of 1914, Lewis attended four different boarding schools. Then for two and a half years, he studied with William Kirkpatrick, whom he called the Great Knock. And there his emerging atheism was confirmed, and his reasoning powers were refined in an extraordinary way. Lewis said, “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity that man was Kirk.”2 He described himself later as a seventeen-year-old rationalist.

Becoming the Voice

But just as his rationalism was at its peak, he stumbled onto George MacDonald’s fantasy novel Phantastes. “That night,” he said, “my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized.”3 Something had broken in—a “new quality,” a “bright shadow,” he called it.4 The romantic impulse of his childhood was again awake. Only now it seemed real, and holy.

At eighteen, he took his place at Oxford University, but before he could begin his studies, he entered the army, and in February of 1918 he was wounded in France and returned to England to recover. He resumed his studies in Oxford in January 1919 and over the next six years took three first-class honors in classics, humanities, and English literature. He became a teaching fellow in October 1925 at the age of twenty-six.

Six years later, in 1931, he professed faith in Jesus Christ and was settled in the conviction that Christianity is true. Within ten years he had become the “voice of faith” for the nation of England during the Second World War, and his broadcast talks in 1941–1942 “achieved classic status.”5

Lewis in Full Flower

He was now in the full flower of his creative and apologetic productivity. In his prime, he was probably the world’s leading authority on medieval English literature and, according to one of his adversaries, “the best read man of his generation.”6 But he was vastly more. Books of many kinds were rolling out: The Pilgrim’s Regress; The Allegory of Love; TheScrewtape Letters; Perelandra. Then in 1950 began the Chronicles of Narnia. All these titles were of different genres and showed the amazing versatility of Lewis as a writer and thinker and imaginative visionary.

He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. Then, after thirty years at Oxford, he took a professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge in 1955. The next year, at the age of fifty-seven, he married Joy Davidman. And just short of their fourth anniversary, she died of cancer, and three and a half years later—two weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday, on November 22, 1963—Lewis followed her in death.