Tags
apologist, C. S. Lewis, Christian, Christian apologetics, Christianity, Clive Staples Lewis, CS Lewis, Eric Metaxas, G. K. Chesterton, God, Holy Spirit, immortal, James Como, Lewis, Mere Christianity, Theism to Christianity
1898 – 1963
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I am posting this today because I believe that God made us to be immortal. Further, I believe that anyone that decides to seek God is blessed in such a manner as that they will know this. I am Christian, however, I personally believe that God’s Holy Spirit embraces every soul, plant, animal and even inorganic matter. Science can “see” this as quantum energy. Science cannot explain this. It requires faith to understand the mysteries of God’s Divine Love.
Aside from a handful of apostles and saints that I cannot locate on YouTube, there is in my experience, no greater explainer for Christianity that was C. S. Lewis.
Our hearts must be on fire for the things of God; and so must our reason.
~ C. S. Lewis
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Lewis was not always devoutly Christian. In fact, as a young man, Lewis was deeply bothered by evil and suffering in the world that didn’t fit with whom he imagined God to be. In his early adult years he was actually an outspoken atheist.
In his words: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. Just how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? … Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”
(Mere Christianity, 45-46)
Being disciplined and diligent about the truth of his beliefs, Lewis came in some time to dramatically reverse his decision.
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A former atheist he once exclaimed “Had God designed the world, it would not be A world so frail and faulty as we see.”
There is an old saying, “When the pupil is ready, the master will appear.”
C. S. Lewis has been a teacher and a mentor whose books and writings appeared at just the right time in countless lives.
The documentary seeks to answer the question of why C. S. Lewis — an Oxford scholar who specialized in Renaissance literature — still matters today. Lewis’s importance is heard through a renowned group of Christian pastors, artists, producers, writers and scholars.
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Who was this man, C. S. Lewis?
Clive Staples Lewis, commonly called C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as “Jack”, was a novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist.
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C. S. Lewis from Theism to Christianity:
C. S. Lewis 1:25: [Reading from G. K. Chesterton]
“A great man knows he is not God and the greater he is, the better he knows it. The gospels declare that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. The most that any religious prophet has said was that he was the true servant of such a being. But if the creator was present in the daily life of the Roman empire, that is something unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word. It makes dust and nonsense of comparative religion.”
James Como 6:16:
I think it would be a mistake to think that argument converted C.S. Lewis. Because he thinks that we have to be oblique. We can’t look at things directly. They escape us. This is what his attempt at introspection taught him. When you’re thinking and now you start to think about your thinking — you’re not thinking about the original object anymore, you know. I’m thinking about baseball, now I’m thinking about how I’m thinking about baseball, so now I’m not thinking about baseball, you see. Very elusive. So Lewis understood that we had to have an oblique approach, as he put it, you have to sneak past the watchful dragons of self-consciousness.
C. S. Lewis 6:52:
I know very well when but hardly how the final step was taken. I went with my brother to have a picnic at Whipsnade Zoo. We started in fog, but by the end of our journey the sun was shining. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did. I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, becomes aware that he is now awake.
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More C. S. Lewis
- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (Youtube read aloud by Jeffrey Howard)
- Mere Christianity (MP3 read aloud by Jeffrey Howard)
- Text and PDF (online – download)
- C. S. Lewis: The Magician’s Twin
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I hope you’ll come back often — there is more to be discovered.
Need help or want to collaborate with me? Just e-mail me at thehunt4truth@yahoo.com
Thanks for learning with me.
Eric
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Related articles (hunt4truth.wordpress.com)
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How the Universe Works (in 25 minutes) - Looking at yourself honestly – Respect
Looking at yourself honestly – Gratitude - mindfulness and prayerful healing
- is the brain spirituality wired?
change from within - stillness – your essential nature
Rippling - Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
Only one Word was on my mind
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the Hunt for Truth 
Pretty astounding revelations. Deep thoughts.
Here is a transcript for the last video in this post – It seems accurate:
C. S. Lewis: It must be understood that my conversion at that point was only to theism pure and simple. I knew nothing yet about the incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly non-human.
Narrator: Lewis believed there was a God — but he did not yet have a specific way to worship him. He was attracted to Hinduism and Christianity.
Peter Kreeft: I think Lewis made the conventional objection to Christianity that it’s so much like other religions, dying and rising gods, and redemption from sin, and the triumph of life over death. These seem to be common patterns so they could be explained psychologically instead of historically. And then one of his friends who was an atheist, who looked at the life of Christ and said, “Rum thing. Seems to have really happened once.” And that shocked Lewis.
Lewis: If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of toughs, were not — as I would still have put it — safe, where could I turn? Was there then no escape?
James Como: He was reading G.K. Chesterton because Chesterton tells, in effect, the history of the world and how it was leading up to the incarnation.
Lewis: [Reading from Chesterton] A great man knows he is not God and the greater he is, the better he knows it. The gospels declare that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. The most that any religious prophet has said was that he was the true servant of such a being. But if the creator was present in the daily life of the Roman empire, that is something unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word. It makes dust and nonsense of comparative religion.
Bond: He begins to read the New Testament in Greek, he begins to understand that the New Testament is not just a set of stories, but actually a witness to the presence of a historical human being who embodied the spirit of God. That this person did not sin. And so this was only possible if this person truly was God in human form. The claims that Christians believe actually came from Jesus, are either absolutely true, and this argument stems from Chesterton, or Jesus needs to be confined to the lunatic fringe.
Kreeft: To believe in some sort of a God is fairly comfortable. It’s more inconvenient to believe in a God who is so specific and so particular that you can say, “There he is in history, there are his words, there are my responsibilities, I can’t make it up.
Lewis: As I drew near to Christianity, I felt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to theism. As strong but shorter lived for I understood it better. But each step, one had less chance to call one’s soul one’s own.
Walter Hooper: Lewis simply did not understand what Christ fitted into it. Until finally that night in 1931, he had invited Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, two of his closest friends, to Magdalen College. It was a windy night, they went along before dinner, they walked along Addison’s Walk talking about mythology. They stayed up till 4:00 AM and Tolkien did his work well.
Lewis: What Tolkien showed me was this — that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story I didn’t mind it at all — I was mysteriously moved by it. The reason was that in pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth.
Colin Duriez: His imaginative questionings and his imaginative longings came together by focusing upon the Christian gospels, as outlined by Tolkien and Dyson.
Como: He was a literary critic. And as such, he said, “I know myth when I see it, I know legend when I see it and I know an eye-witness account when I see it. I recognize metaphor when it’s there. All of this is in the Bible. All of it is inspired. But far from all of it is literal history.” Well Dyson and Tolkien pointed out that the only difference was we don’t know that Osiris walked the earth. But Jesus left footprints. People saw him and talked about it.
Lewis: As we continued walking, we were interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, appreciating the ecstasy of such a moment.
Como: I think it would be a mistake to think that argument converted C.S. Lewis. Because he thinks that we have to be oblique. We can’t look at things directly. They escape us. This is what his attempt at introspection taught him. When you’re thinking and now you start to think about your thinking — you’re not thinking about the original object anymore, you know. I’m thinking about baseball, now I’m thinking about how I’m thinking about baseball, so now I’m not thinking about baseball, you see. Very elusive. So Lewis understood that we had to have an oblique approach, as he put it, you have to sneak past the watchful dragons of self-consciousness.
Lewis: I know very well when but hardly how the final step was taken. I went with my brother to have a picnic at Whipsnade Zoo. We started in fog, but by the end of our journey the sun was shining. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did. I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, becomes aware that he is now awake.