Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

“There Are No Ordinary People”

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refugee tent city [Klaus Reisinger]These are demanding times for Christians who are committed to loving neighbor as they love themselves. It is becoming increasingly easy to slip into less exacting paths. I am glad that our pastor has been addressing this theme in various ways in a number of sermons in recent months. C. S. Lewis, a highly regarded Christian thinker and writer, also took it on. In a sermon titled “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis offered a stunning insight about loving neighbor, which he delivered during a period of world history when division, conflict, and war offered a steady diet of hate for the soul.

A similar diet is being dished out to our generation – and you know that what you eat you are. Having eaten enough to hate our enemy, we are now being fattened to ignore another of Jesus’ commands: love of neighbor. Why bother loving our neighbor and loving our enemy? Indeed, if we are not being loved I return, why bother? Lewis grappled with this during World War Two. Here, in that inimitable way he had, are his concluding remarks in “The Weight of Glory”:

“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 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.”

“All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”

©2017 by Charles Strohmer

Image of Tent City by Klaus Reisinger via Creative Commons.

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Think About It

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thinking sculptureNot long ago I was nervously seated near the front of a church listening to myself being introduced as the guest preacher for that Sunday morning. Even though I’ve been there, done that many times in many churches, and arrive over-prepared for my talks, I’m never at ease in that introductory moment.

But that Sunday my nerves intensified when the host added that I was an “intellectual.” Nooooo. What do I do with that? I groaned. Sure, he’d said it amiably and as a compliment, which I appreciated, but intellectual? How do I undo that? I don’t see myself as one, and this wasn’t a university classroom. Mind you, the millennials in that space were probably jazzed to hear it. But what about the others? I’ve been around. I could almost hear the congregation, friendly as they were, suddenly wondering if there wasn’t a better way they could be spending their time that morning.

In hopes of trying to get the audience back, I opened with an impromptu joke. “I’m glad to be here this morning as an intellectual with all of you intellectuals. After all, who among us doesn’t use our brains?” Okay. Okay. I knew it was a naff as it was coming out. I’m not your man for spontaneous jokes. But I had to say something!

Flash forward to today. Perusing a stack of files in my office, I ran across a transcript of a short radio talk given some years ago in Detroit by my dear friend, the British pastor and writer John Peck. I read it and immediately wished it had been on my lips that Sunday morning. With a slight wave of the editorial hand and John’s permission, I’m able to share it with you here. I hope it inspires you as much as it does me.

“Jesus in Mark 12 told one man that he was not far from the kingdom of God because he spoke, as the original Greek word indicates, ‘thoughtfully.’

“Thinking is hard going. Some people give it a bad name by using it as a substitute for action, which is a pity because we can’t do without it. Odd thing is, we take it for granted in areas like business or science, but when it comes to faith we often switch off the mind, and when we do, substitutes for thinking take over, such as emotion.

“A favorite substitute is rhetoric. We are inspired by a powerful preacher who has the art of getting us excited about the gospel. He makes us feel it’s true. And in the midst of a world that is constantly pouring cold water on our faith, we need that. But that’s not teaching. It doesn’t have anything to do with the way we think. In fact, the rhetoric may even use the world’s techniques of persuasion – some preaching sounds like an extended TV commercial, in spite of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:4.

puzzled“Christian teaching is about understanding the meaning of the gospel. And don’t confuse inspiration with teaching. Inspiration is God motivating us, and it is aroused by emotive words and vivid images. Teaching is God’s way of working us through the problems that arise in applying the gospel consistently in everyday life. It is about changing our thinking to something more like the mind of Christ.

“Paul says to the Philippians, ‘Let love be with discrimination.’ By this he does not mean bigoted sterotyping or naive innocence. He wants love to exercise wisdom in deciding what is the best thing to do, rather in the way C. S. Lewis said, ‘It is not a question of “be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever, [but] be good … and be as clever as you can.”’ Writing to the Ephesians, Paul says that mature Christians don’t get blown about by every wind of doctrine.

“Thinking, therefore, is not just about going to college. It’s about growing up. Some people are called to heavy theoretical intellectualizing; most of us aren’t. But either way, we are all called to use judgment, discernment. If we don’t, our laziness will keep us immature.

“We need to think at least as hard about our faith as we do about business or our hobbies. Some say this ruins spontaneity: thinking makes you inhibited, calculating, unemotional. Unfortunately, it often does. There are special reasons for this, to do with the influences at work in our Western culture. But it doesn’t have to. Paul was an intensely passionate person. But he was also a profound thinker. He spoke in tongues more than anyone in the Corinthian church; yet he treasured one word spoken “with understanding” more than all that.

“How could he let himself go like that? Because he had thought through the issues beforehand, so he could trust his instincts. Understanding brings safety. And he taught this to everyone: don’t just listen to me, he told the Corinthians, judge for yourselves. Don’t just swallow even the greatest preacher’s message whole. Listen to the arguments, keep asking questions. Think.”

©2015 by Charles Strohmer and John Peck

Images by Davide Restivo and Daniel, respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

The Wisdom of Old Books & Original Sources

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old books“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.” That’s C. S. Lewis, from his Introduction to a classic text, St. Athanasius on the Incarnation. Lewis wrote that Introduction seventy years ago, and it’s well worth hearing the rest of his admonition today.

He continues: “Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

“The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to understand.

ancient library (Duke edu.)“This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology…. Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert from the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all the hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light…. It is a good rule, therefore, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one until you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

I have been thinking about Lewis’s admonition in the context of presidential speeches – the original sources where we hear the actual words of a President and make up our own minds – one-to-one, in an unmediated way – about what a President has actually said, rather than relying on a second- or third- or fourth-hand interpretation. As Lewis might have said, we have a mistaken preference for listening to how our political analysts interpret a President rather than listening ourselves the President.

It is a good rule, therefore, never to allow yourself to listen to an analyst, or a political challenger, or a pundit on talk radio until you have first heard the President describe a problem and explain a solution to end the problem. I began doing this myself much more often since the 1990s, beginning with President Bill Clinton, and it has been very surprising to me to see how distorted a view analysts, challengers, and others, with their rigid ideological agendas, can have of a President’s actual words and meanings.

Let us remember Lewis’s admonition as we here in the States now head into a year-and-a-half of political campaigning for the November 2016 elections. Heeding Lewis will make us not only wiser citizens and voters but greater respecters of truth.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer