"Christianity is founded on the greatest of all miracles, the resurrection of our Lord. If that be admitted, other miracles cease to be improbable."C.S. Lewis starts chapter XIV by promoting a different miracle as the greatest of all:
"The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this."However, I think that the two are similar enough that Lewis' discussion will still hold some jewels of merit for us. Lewis maintains that miracles are not "arbitrary interferences" or "disconnected raids", but
"the various steps of a strategically coherent invastion - an invasion which intends complete conquest and "occupation." The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile."In other words, all miracles are in some way connected to the condescension of God. Lewis would I think definitely agree with the last sentence of the LDS definition given above: "If that [the resurrection] be admitted, other miracles cease to be improbable."
Lewis says that the position we are in is as if we possessed parts of a novel or symphony, and had found the missing part upon which the whole work depends, the main theme. "Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and "pull them together.""
"It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else." This idea is similarly expressed in "Is Theology Poetry?", where Lewis states, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
My belief on the nature of God and Jesus Christ differs substantially from Lewis' and so parts of this chapter are a bit irrelevant to me. It's still nice thoughts though, well organized and logically put forth. I'm just not really the intended audience. However I definitely believe in the condescension of God, and I like what Lewis says about how "He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him." He gives the analogy of a strong man stooping to get himself under "some great complicated burden" and lifting it up, or of a diver going down into the depths of the water and then bringing some "dripping, precious thing that we went down to recover" up with him again. I like these images.
"In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognise a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Re-birth - go down to go up - it is a key principle... All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key."{Lewis also wrote in Mere Christianity about the analogy of a baby in the womb - but this time we are the baby. This I think strengthens his idea that we are going to become like Christ. He descended, and so must we.}
I've written elsewhere about how much I love Lewis's idea that everything, all over the world and throughout history, points to the truthfulness of the Christian story. Lewis explains Christ's similarities to other kingly figures who die and are reborn, just like the corn, thus:
"He is like the Corn-King because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the least unreal or accidental. For the Corn-King is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth pattern is in her because it was first in Him."Lewis next talks about the Fall and free will in language very similar to Mere Christianity.
"[God] saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out... a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit... God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been."Interesting that Lewis proposes that the statement, "In the day ye eat of that fruit ye shall die" may be regarded "equally as a punitive sentence... as a mercy, and as a safety device." Positive views of the Fall are rare among traditional Christians, but not at all among Latter-day Saints. From our own Bible Dictionary:
"The fall was no surprise to the Lord. It was a necessary step in the progress of man, and provisions for a Savior had been made even before the fall had occurred. Jesus Christ came to atone for the fall of Adam and also for man’s individual sins... Among other things [latter-day revelation] makes clear that the fall is a blessing, and that Adam and Eve should be honored in their station as the first parents of the earth. Significant references are... Moses 5:9–13."I also find it interesting that Lewis regards the fall as a safety-device "because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him." I had always been a bit puzzled by the cherubim who "keep the way of the tree of life" and prevent Adam and Eve from eating it. I sort of thought that his flaming sword was just a punishment to keep Adam and Eve from returning to the Garden of Eden. But in reading further and from my Old Testament professor, I learned that this was a safety-device because, "if Adam had put forth his hand immediately, and partaken of the tree of life, he would have lived forever, according to the word of God, having no space for repentance; yea, and also the word of God would have been void, and the great plan of salvation would have been frustrated." {Alma 42:5} In other words, and I think Lewis would agree, we've got to die. We can't live forever this way and expect to become perfected. Dying is an essential part of rebirth. Lewis also brings up his ideas on repentance that he talked about in Mere Christianity: that is, that
"only a Man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also only one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfect dying; and thus... either defeat death or redeem it. He tasted death on behalf of all others. He is the representative "Die-er" of the universe: and for that very reason the Resurrection and the Life... He who from all eternity has been incessantly plunging Himself in the blessed death of self-surrender to the Father can also most fully descend into the horrible and (for us) involuntary death of the body. Because Vicariousness is the very idiom of the reality He has created, His death can become ours."This also hearkens back to the idea of "good infection" Lewis espoused in Mere Christianity. {"Idiom" comes from the Latin word for "special property", and the Greek word for "special feature, special phrasing", or "one’s own", if you were wondering.} Further, Lewis' almost side-comment about death being voluntary for Christ reminds me of what James E. Talmage wrote in Jesus the Christ:
"What other man has been without sin, and therefore wholly exempt from the dominion of Satan, and to whom death, the wage of sin, is not naturally due? ... What other man has lived with power to withstand death, over whom death could not prevail except through his own submission? Yet Jesus Christ could not be slain until His “hour had come”, and that, the hour in which He voluntarily surrendered His life, and permitted His own decease through an act of will. Born of a mortal mother He inherited the capacity to die; begotten by an immortal Sire He possessed as a heritage the power to withstand death indefinitely. He literally gave up His life; to this effect is His own affirmation: “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18). And further: “For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Only such a One could conquer death; in none but Jesus the Christ was realized this requisite condition of a Redeemer of the world."I would say that Lewis' idea of the Incarnation at least includes the LDS idea of the Resurrection, and so I can accept his claim that the Incarnation is the greatest miracle of all.
All of this reminds me of another Lewis quote I read a while ago: "Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."
As we enter chapter XV, I would like to include another section of the LDS Bible Dictionary definition of miracles:
"Miracles. An important element in the work of Jesus Christ, being not only divine acts, but forming also a part of the divine teaching... They were intended to be a proof to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ. Many of them were also parabolic and instructive, teaching by means of symbols such divine truths as the result of sin and the cure of sin; the value of faith; the curse of impurity; and the law of love. The miracles of healing also show how the law of love is to deal with the actual facts of life."Lewis claims that "the Christian miracles have a much greater intrinsic probability in virtue of their organic connection with one another and with the whole structure of the religion they exhibit." They are not isolated, nor anomalous facts. As defined by the Bible Dictionary quote above, they establish a body of doctrine.
Oh! I see here in chapter XV the same quote I used about, phrased slightly differently: "Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature."
In talking about the miracle of turning water into wine, Lewis adresses an issue that I had with his ideas earlier. I can now see that I agree with him. The Bible Dictionary states that "miracles should not be regarded as deviations from the ordinary course of nature so much as manifestations of divine or spiritual power. Some lower law was in each case superseded by the action of a higher." Lewis says that when Christ turned the water into wine he short-circuited the process by which He constantly turns water into win (for wine, like all drinks, is but water modified.) In this instance, He made wine in a moment, using earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibres to hold the water. But He uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one.
I think Lewis' opinion about the Virgin Birth is very interesting - his idea that God is behind all conception, and in Mary's case "He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument... His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events," and that "He is doing now, small and close, what He does in a different fashion for every woman who conceives. He does it this time without a line of human ancestors, but even where He uses human ancestors it is not the less He who gives life." Very interesting.
In discussing healing miracles, Lewis reminds us that the human body heals itself, and that in Christ, "the Power that always was behind all healings puts on a face and hands." Lewis explains Jesus calming the storms by reminding us that "God made Nature such that there would be both storms and calms: in that way all storms... have been stilled by God."
Lewis makes a distinction between miracles of the Old Nature (things that have already been done) and miracles of the New Creation (a foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future.) Jesus, "the Captain, the forerunner, is already in May or June, though His followers on earth are still living in the frosts and east winds of Old Nature - for "spring comes slowly up this way."" This reminds me of how Aslan brings spring with him in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe :)
Chapter XVI begins with a discussion of the Resurrection and maintains that "to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection... The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon... The Resurrection, and it's consequences, were the "gospel" or good news which the Christians brought."
This is directly in line with the statement in the Bible Dictionary that "Christianity is founded on the greatest of all miracles, the resurrection of our Lord."
Lewis believes that the miracle of Christ walking on the water is a foretelling of the New Life, where Nature can be made to do whatever spirit pleases. When He raised Lazarus from the dead, he was giving us a hint at what was coming.
I don't really understand Lewis' thoughts on the nature of "heaven" and the Ascension... nor do I really care to (no offense) since I have hold a fundamentally different belief from Lewis on the nature of God and Jesus Christ.
In his Epilogue, Lewis says a lot of things that remind me of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. He talks about how when miracles happen, we dismiss them and return to the "real world." This is an attack by "Nature," or, as he might say in The Screwtape Letters, a devil. He mentions "the spirit of the age", "mental habit" and "temperment" taking over rational thought. Lewis defined faith as "the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods" in Mere Christianity, and here again he reminds us that
"The firmest theoretical conviction in favour of miracles will not prevent another kind of man, in other conditions, from feeling a heavy, inescapable certainty that no miracle can ever occur... But the feelings of a tried and nervous man, unexpectedly reduced to passing a night in a large empty country house at the end of a journey on which he has been reading a ghost-story, are no evidence that ghosts exist. Your feelings at this moment are no evidence that miracles do not occur."
No comments:
Post a Comment