Recently a friend assured me that a book by a well-known evangelical Christian was the new “Mere Christianity.” For an evangelical this possibly cryptic statement needs no explanation. As evangelicals, we are called to evangelize — to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Most of us also are surrounded by friends and co-workers who may be curious about our beliefs. And for over 55 years, Christians have turned to C.S. Lewis’s little book “Mere Christianity” for both of these reasons.
Of course, C.S. Lewis was an Irish-born Anglican and was committed to a mode of worship and a tradition far removed from those of American evangelicals. But he was also an adept Christian apologist who used his literary gifts — his fluent prose style, his powers of description, his engaging narrative voice, his way with metaphor — to explain the basic tenets of Christianity: what it meant to believe in Jesus Christ and to live according to Christian principles. More than that: He was at pains to capture, in prose, what it meant to discover Christianity as something worthy of belief. On the page, he thought his own faith through, trying to make sense of it for himself and others. There is always something ecumenical and instructive to Lewis’s religious writings, and “Mere Christianity” — which has sold several million copies since it was first published in 1952 after its original incarnation as a series of radio broadcasts — is the nonfiction book by which American Christians, not least American evangelicals, know Lewis best.
But much has changed in the last half-century.
I was 50 years old before I could really appreciate Lewis.
I think that I was too impatient in college. I suspect that I think slowly.
Don
[blockquote]or, in Wright’s case, are distracted by the pressures of trying to help hold the Anglican church together), [/blockquote]
This is one of the biggest reasons we need to just quit TRYING – there is ministry to be done, souls to save, and a Faith to defend. How silly to continue to waste all that time and energy trying to convince those who have stopped their ears to the Truth that they are wrong.
Time to get back to God’s business.
I adore CS Lewis.
[blockquote] 1. DonGander wrote:
I was 50 years old before I could really appreciate Lewis. [/blockquote]
Part of Lewis’ immense genius was the ability to convey the Faith in several astonishingly different ways — children’s stories, science fiction, satire as well as straightforward prose — which can speak to many different people [b] and [/b] to different stages in the lives of individuals. I read [i] Screwtape, The Great Divorce, [/i] the Narnia stories and the space trilogy at a time when [i] Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, [/i] etc., would not have been very appealing or helpful. The older I get, the more I appreciate Lewis, and I always seem to find myself coming back to his books and finding good things I hadn’t seen before.
From the article:
Another example of unsupportable false-dichotomy thinking. It’s right up there with Lewis’s liar-lunatic-or-Lord trichotomy. It’s another reason (joining this one and this one) to conclude that +Wright is well-meaning, and in some ways brilliant, but still seriously misguided.
Also from the article,
[blockquote]
“Why can’t evangelical authors produce a true successor to “Mere Christianity”? The main reason, I think, is that today’s best scholars, like Mr. Plantinga and Yale philosophy professor Nicholas Wolterstorff, can’t write for a general audience (or, in Wright’s case, are distracted by the pressures of trying to help hold the Anglican church together), and the writers who can accomplish this are no longer real scholars. Lewis was both, at a time when the two were thought to be compatible”[/blockquote]
Surely there must be other reasons.
Why can’t evangelical authors produce a true successor to “Mere Christianity”?
Perhaps because no one will ever be able to succeed Lewis. For one thing, English-speaking societies no longer produce individuals as literate and well-educated as Lewis. Yes, everyone and their brother gets a college degree, but we are no well as well-formed in the Western literary and philosophical tradition. Lewis was brilliant, with a remarkable command of the English language. He thought and felt deeply. And who can match his imaginative and poetic power? It’s not just that he had a wonderful way with metaphor, but he lived poetry and myth.
C. S. Lewis was unique. There can be no successors.
“Of course, C.S. Lewis was an Irish-born Anglican and was committed to a mode of worship and a tradition far removed from those of American evangelicals”
I don’t think that this is a true statement or even close to the truth. CS Lewis was in touch with all that we are seeing now – Read “the Great Divorce” and you will see all of the flavors that one could find both then and now. (Even the faithless Anglican Liberal Priest).
Why does there need to be a contemporary successor? If a book is timeless, then it doesn’t need to be updated, right? But even if his book was not available (a silly notion since it is), there are other works which God can use for the education and edification of his people.
It was in the late 70’s I began to realize something was wrong in ECUSA when clergy tried to get me to *stop* reading Lewis; anything but him. He was the last theologian the Anglicans had. No substitutes needed. In fact, reading Lewis you’ll find he tells people to just tell the truth and they’ll be “original” without trying to be.
[blockquote]Why can’t evangelical authors produce a true successor to [u]Mere Christianity[/u]?[/blockquote]
Why [i]should[/i] they? Is it broken?
John Stott’s “Basic Christianity” is also a good primer.
[blockquote]Another example of unsupportable false-dichotomy thinking. It’s right up there with Lewis’s liar-lunatic-or-Lord trichotomy.[/blockquote]
That there are false dichotomies does not mean that there are not true dichotomies. DC is obligated to explain why both Wright’s and Lewis’s dichotomies are false ones. Lewis’s dichotomy as presented does omit one glaring possibility–that Jesus did not in fact make the claims that Lewis presumes that he made. The dichotomy would then be liar-lunatic-Lord-or legend. Unfortunately, the last category is really unsupportable. As Sir Edwin Hoskyns’ The Riddle of the New Testament demonstrated seventy years ago, granted all that can be accomplished by the most rigorous tools of historical-critical scholarship, it is impossible to arrive at a Jesus who did not from the beginning claim to have divine authority. The evidence indicates that from the earliest times Christians believed that Jesus had risen from the dead and that he was the Son of God. Going beyond the evidence of what the early Christians believed to what Jesus believed about himself, the most rigorous application of critical method to the Synoptic gospels never provides us with a Jesus who did not proclaim that one’s participation in the coming Kingdom of God depended on one’s relationship to him, who did not regard God as uniquely his Father, who did not proclaim himself as Son of Man (an eschatological title), who did not believe that his death would be an atonement for sin. That is, all the evidence indicates that not only the earliest Christians, but Jesus himself, had a high Christology.
Of course one can claim that Jesus never made such claims. He never believed himself to have a decisive kind of role in God’s Kingdom. He did not believe that God was uniquely his Father. He did not identity with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, and he did not believe that his death was a “ransom for many.” But such claim is mere bravado. It is not argument, but mere assumption. It has no basis whatsoever in the texts that we have. DC loves to point to Jesus’ Great Commandment–to love God and neighbor–as the heart of what Jesus is about. Unfortunately, the historical evidence that Jesus thought himself to be God’s Son is actually greater than the evidence that Jesus gave the Great Commandment.
So we really are back to the trichotomy. If Jesus really did make the kinds of claims about his personal identity that the synoptic gospels indicate that he made, then the options really are: 1) he lied; 2) he was deluded; 3) he was who he said he was. If not 3), then 1) or 2). The answer to which option of the trichotomy is most probably true depends on what happened on the first Easter Sunday.
What about
John Stott’s “Basic christianity”
Josh McDowell’s “More than a Carpenter” “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” “Jesus a Biblical defense of His Diety” etc.
Charles Colson’s “Now how shall we live”
“Jesus’ greatest commandment” did not originate with Him. It came from Leviticus, and is, of course, therefore (viz. the shellfish argument) not binding.