Endings Are Also Beginnings

And so we come to the end of our discussion of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Every Wednesday for the past 33 weeks, Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact and Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines have led us chapter by chapter in thinking and writing about one of the classics of Christian writing.

And it is a classic. Its origins lie in a series of broadcast talks for the BBC by Lewis during the dark days of World War II. The talks were actually printed in three parts during the war. Afterward, Lewis edited and assembled them into Mere Christianity, first published in its entirety in 1952.

It’s stood the test of time, because the basic issues it addresses haven’t changed. The world has been transformed many times over in the past 60 years – scientifically, politically, technologically, culturally – but the basic human issues Lewis talks about in the book haven’t changed one bit.

What is fun for someone like me, who’s spent a great part of my working life as a speechwriter, is to see how “verbal” this book is. Time and again I’ve run across phrases and lines that seem odd to read until you say them aloud, and then it makes sense. Mere Christianity’s began as the spoken word – a reminder of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That word translated “Word” is “spoken word,” not the word you see on a printed page or a computer screen, but the living breathing spoken word you hear with your ears and your heart.

In this final chapter, Lewis describes what he means by “New Men,” the creatures being transformed from “old men” to – something else. And we don’t precisely know what the “something else” is. I chuckled to read how he compares this process to evolution and natural selection – and how we don’t know what the “Next Step” is we’re being spiritually evolved to.

Part of this “Next Step” involved a seeming contradiction. “the more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.” Lewis writes about this in many of his books, most obviously in the Chronicles of Narnia, where the four children sent out of London during the war for safety find themselves transformed into kings and queens in the magical land of Narnia – but not before going through significant trials and tribulations.

And so it is with us. On Sunday, I wrote about Brennan Manning’s farewell memoir, All Is Grace. Manning’s teaching has been consistent for decades: God loves us where we are. “Where we are” is why Christ died for us.

Lewis adds this: “God loves us where we are, and He sees where we’re going to be.” The ending of the old self is the beginning of the new self. And the journey is called life.

To see more posts on this final chapter of Mere Christianity, entitled “The New Men,” please visit Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines. And thanks to Jason and Sarah for leading us every week for the last eight months -- true examples of servanthood.

The Hippie in the Choir Robe

I was reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis this week, and I was reminded of the hippie in the choir robe.

I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. When I was in high school, however, I attended a Baptist church for a fairly considerable amount of time. The youth group at my Lutheran church had essentially disappeared, and several of my friends attended the Baptist church. I started going to the Baptist youth group on Sunday evenings, and was actually convinced to show up early for youth choir practice. And that led to singing with the choir on occasional Sundays, and, well, you can see what happened. Those Baptists were smart marketers.

For the Sunday morning worship service, the teenagers did what most teenagers usually do at worship services. We sat together in the balcony, unless we were singing that morning; then we sat in the choir loft in our robes. That was another thing my Lutheran church didn’t have – a choir. Not to mention the robes.

The balcony afforded a few of the entire worship space. We could see the pastor, the choir and most of the congregation. And the balcony was my introduction to something I had never before experienced – people would occasionally speak aloud during the sermon (which would never happen in my Lutheran church).

Sometimes they would shout, which didn’t seem to faze any of my peers in the balcony but rather blew my mind the first few times I heard it.

The pastor would make a point in the sermon. Someone would invariably say “Amen!” in response. Sometimes several people would say “Amen!” and sound something like a chorus. If the point was really, well, pointed, someone might even shout “AMEN!” and partially rise from their seat.

Invariably, we could count on Fred to shout the loudest “AMEN!”

Fred was on the short side, and sported a moustache, which wasn’t something you saw much of in the 40+ age bracket at the time. Fred was likely around 50. His wife had left him some years before. His son had moved out of their house in his late teens and then left the city. His daughter, Betty, was a year younger than I was. And she was something you might find down around Jackson Square in the French Quarter but you did not find in a Southern Baptist church in the suburbs – a hippie.

Betty was also one of my closest friends at the church. I loved her fearless flouting of convention and her sweet, winsome personality. She liked my acceptance of convention, my rather shy demeanor, and the fact that I was comfortable enough in my own skin to be good friends with the Baptist rebel hippie. We never dated; we talked a lot on the telephone and ate together at the meal before choir practice; we usually sat next to each other in the worship service.

One Sunday, her father shouted his “AMEN!” during the sermon – not once but three times. And I saw Betty do something I hadn’t seen before. She clenched her fists. “Are you OK?” I whispered. She shook her head and silently mouthed “Later.”

After choir practice that night, she asked if I could drive her home. This wasn’t unusual; I would often pick her up for choir practice or bring her home because her father would be out. We parked in front of her house, and it all came pouring out of her.

Her father, the shouter of the loud “AMEN!” during the sermons, was an alcoholic. Whenever he drank too much, which was often, he would begin telling her she was the devil’s child for how she dressed. And then he would begin hitting her, to “beat the devil out of her.”

And then I understood why she occasionally sported a bruise on her face. She’d claim she ran into a door or wall, and she was just spacey enough to convince me. But it had been only an excuse.

I asked her why she didn’t tell someone, some adult, and she shook her head. “I’m afraid. I don’t know what would happen to me.” The devil she knew was better than the devil she didn’t know.

She didn’t want me to tell anyone. She thought he could straighten himself out. But she agreed to call me if it happened again.

A few days later, she called. It had been bad enough this time that she couldn’t go to school.

I went to the pastor at the church.

As it turned out, the pastor knew about Fred’s drinking problem. He didn’t know about the beatings. He promised to do something. And he did. For quite a while, the beatings stopped. At church, Betty seemed almost lighthearted.

And then she called. It had started again. I was back in the pastor’s office. He said he’d look into it. He may have, for all I know.

Betty called me one last time. She said she was leaving, running away. She wanted to say goodbye. And just like that, she was gone, likely disappearing into the hippie culture that had become a national phenomenon. I never saw or heard from her again.

Her father still attended church, but he no longer shouted “AMEN.” I stopped going to the church not long after.

C.S. Lewis addresses the question, how do you explain why there seem to be so many nasty Christians and so many nice non-Christians? Aren’t Christians supposed to be different? He does a good job with his answer – essentially saying we are works in progress, and that some of us need a lot more progress than others.

And I remember the hippie in the choir robe, and her father, and I think Lewis is right. But the answer still can hurt.

Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion of Mere Christianity. To see more posts on this chapter, “Nice People or New Men,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Counting the cost

When I first starting reading Flannery O’Connor, I was as taken by her essays and non-fiction writing as I was by her fiction. She had these wonderful quotes, where she could take a subject and turn it on its head, and make you see something you hadn’t seen before. In fact, she was much like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis in that regard.

I read her letters, many of which were collected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald for The Habit of Being, and her essays in Mystery and Manners (edited by Fitzgerald with her husband Robert). In fact, I read both books twice, the second time with a pen in hand to mark the great quotes. One of my favorites was, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers. My opinion is, they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Another one: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

One statement she made surprised me at the time; I read it only two or three years after becoming a Christian and I didn’t quite understand it, at least from my own experience. This is what she said in one of her letters: “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

O’Connor was echoing Jesus when she wrote this. Jesus didn’t say, “Pick up your warm electric blanket and follow me.” No, he said, “Pick up your cross and follow me.”

We know what happens on a cross.

You die.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis doesn’t so much explain what the cost is and describe how it comes to be paid, or counted. If you go to the Lord to deal with some particular sin, you’ll be cured, but He’s going to want more, a lot more. “That is why,” Lewis writes, “he warned people to ‘count the cost’ before becoming Christians. ‘Make no mistake,’ He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that.’”

As difficult as this sounds, there’s an unexpected side to it: “…this Helper who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty.” Lewis quotes the 19^th century George MacDonald to put this is its simplest terms: “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

I was puzzled by O’Connor’s words when I first read them. Thirty or so years later, they make perfect sense. Time, experience and learning has taught me the truth of her words. Faith is indeed the cross, and nothing less than the cross.

As odd as it sounds, that’s a good thing.

Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter have been leading us us in a discussion of Mere Christianity. To see other posts about this chapter, "Counting the Cost," please visit Sarah's site at Living Between the Lines.

Holes

My life was filled with holes, holes that kept getting bigger. So big, I was in danger of falling through.

From the outside, it didn’t look that way. I was a senior in college. I’d been treasurer and president of my fraternity. I was managing editor of the college newspaper. Named to the national men’s leadership fraternity and Who’s Who. I had achieved all of the things I had set out to achieve my freshman year, and I had gone beyond that.

I had all the things I thought could fill the emptiness. But the holes were growing bigger.

I had sought and gained all the things my natural self wanted and needed – awards and recognition; honors and accolades. My natural self should have been more than satisfied. Instead, it craved more, and I didn’t have more. Nothing was left.

Except those holes.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about the demands of the natural self: “Make no mistake: if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on.”

What I learned – what several people helped me see – was that the natural self had to die. And I was being chased down for that to start happening. As Lewis says, “Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.’”

Reading that in Mere Christianity is reading more than one chapter of my life story. The process that started in late January of 1973 in a college lecture hall didn’t turn me into a cult-like clone. Just the opposite began happening: I began to break free of what the culture and my natural self told me were “the good things in life.” I began to understand the holes for what they were. I began to see that the holes couldn’t be filled with what I had been filling them with.

I began to see that the holes were a fraud I had perpetrated upon myself.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “Is Christianity Hard or Easy,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Playing Pretend

My childhood neighborhood in New Orleans was packed with the children of the Baby Boom. Most families had at least two kids; many had three and two on our block had six each (think about it: six kids, three-bedroom house, no basement). There was never a problem organizing a street football game or a sandlot baseball game. And with extensive wooded areas just across the street, we had ample opportunities to explore and play games.

Many of the games we play were about pretending. It didn’t take much to stir the imagination here – a movie, a television show, a book, a story someone’s father told. Hear or see any of those things, and we were off, fighting Nazis in World War II (the woods made a good Ardennes Forest), playing cowboys and Indians, and waging Civil War battles (this was New Orleans so the South always won). We all knew this was pretending – and it would last until someone accused someone else of cheating, or someone got made at being captured and stalked home. It was all great fun and kept us out of our mothers’ hair.

We knew the difference, of course, between pretending and “real life” Most of our games started with someone saying, “Let’s play X,” and it didn’t really matter what X was. And when we were finished, we find something else to do or return home to “real life.”

I was reminding of these children games when I read “Let’s Pretend,” the chapter in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis that we’re discussing this week. Lewis says something that at first seems rather startling and then makes sense (this is a Lewis trademark – startle with what should be obvious). He talks about the Lord’s Prayer, whose very first words are “Our Father.” And he says this:

“Do you see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending.”

In all the games we played as children, we never played Jesus. We never romped through the woods as the 12 disciples, or pretended a picnic was the last supper. But here is Lewis saying that, any time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are essentially pretending to be Jesus. And we pray the Lord’s Prayer because the Lord ordered us to pray it. So, in effect, the Lord ordered us to pretend we are Jesus.

And there’s a point to all this pretense, Lewis says. The more we pretend to be Jesus as we pray to “Our Father who art in heaven,” the more we see the gap between the reality and our pretense of the reality. The more we see the gap, the more we realize that, in a sense, God is also pretending – he sees us as his Son, because the Son – the real thing – died in our place.

Pretending never felt this good.

To see more posts on this chapter of Mere Christianity, hosted by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, please visit Sarah’s site, LivingBetween the Lines.

Neither One nor the Other

At my company, there is a story told about a vice president of research and development who had been a rather unusual organizational leader. It wasn’t his warmth and enthusiasm at a time when business executives were known for wearing gray flannel suits, although he was certainly warm and certainly enthusiastic.

If he had drawn line at wandering around the R&D labs and blowing his trumpet, it might have been okay. But what did him in, ultimately, was choice of his office furniture. Since he said he did his best thinking in bed, he junked the executive desk and instead used a four-poster bed. For office meetings, visitors would sit by the side of his bed while he sat in the bed. And no, this wasn’t Silicon Valley. This was traditional Midwest, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It would still be considered bizarre today.

This executive was both what C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity calls an Individualist and a Totalitarian. On the one hand, he tended to zig when the rest of the organization would zag. And no one else blew a bugle at the people who worked for him or had a bed for a desk. But he also wanted his organization to think like he did – even of he was creative, innovative and fun, and he wanted everyone else to be just like him too.

Lewis says that Christians are to be neither. We are not supposed to be Totalitarians, and we are not supposed to be Individualists. “Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group, but as organs in a body – different from one another and each contributing what no other could.

God never meant for us to be exactly alike. He made us with different skills, talents, attributes and abilities, but he never intended that we were to be the same. At the same time, contrary to American culture, he didn’t make us to be rugged individualists, either. We are not designed to all be Marlboro Men. Instead, he means us to be in community, also known as the church, and complementing each other as we go about his work.

Over the course of the past century, mankind has gotten itself in all kinds of trouble as it veered from one extreme to the other. So do individual people. We show no signs of letting up, either.

But as for us, the church, for us it’s supposed to be a different matter altogether.

We’ve been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “Two Notes,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact for the links.

What He Did

For some time, we’ve been moving deeper and deeper into Christian theology with Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In the last section of the book, Lewis is undertaking to describe complex theological teachings and tenets in simple, easy-to-understand terms and pictures.

This chapter, “The Obstinate Toy Soldiers,” is about the dual nature of Christ – human and divine. And Lewis speaks in words and terms that are as profound as they are simple,

The result of God becoming man (and not just man but a baby man) “was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from His mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. This is one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ.

“And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed,’ He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn – poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed – killed every day in a sense – the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the god. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man.”

Lewis draws a picture here of what it took his disciples a long time to see and understand – and every day Jesus “died” to his human desires, to be a living teaching for us. This is what it means to deny self. This is what is means to “take up the cross.” It doesn’t mean that we have to be physically crucified on a cross. It means that each day we learn to deny ourselves – not for the sake of some ascetic purification and that we become more “spiritually aware” – but for the sake of others, just like He did.

That’s the most difficult lesson for us to learn, and we have to keep relearning it all of our lives. It’s not about us. It’s about what He did and why He did it.

And in that learning, we don’t see our individual personalities destroyed. We see them become what they were originally meant to be.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact, and Sarah’s site, Living Between the Lines.

We're Supposed to be What?

I reached the last two sentences of this week’s chapter of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and I nearly choked:

“Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

I thought this was a chapter about the Trinity, and instead it looked like I walked into idolatry.

Retrace steps. Reread. Repeat several times.

Then I understood. I had to go back several pages, but I understood.

Earlier, Lewis has said that perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions is that, in Christianity, God is not a static thing, not even a person, “but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”

If we “come to let God have his way, come to share in the life of Christ,” we become part of the drama, part of the dance. Like Christ, we are sons of god. We love the Father as Christ does, and the Holy Spirit arises in us.

That’s what Lewis meant about Christians becoming “little Christs.”

I understand what he meant, but it still doesn’t mean I understand the Trinity. I believe it to be true, but that “pulsating activity” and that kind of drama is like nothing I know or have known in my life. It’s puzzled wiser heads than mine, so I’m in good company.

But I read Lewis here, and I see what he says about “the dance,” and I understand him to be right.

Years ago, I read a series of rather extraordinary novels by the British novelist Charles Williams, a friend of C.S. Lewis and close enough to be considered one of the Inklings. The novels have rather fantastic titles, like War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Greater Trumps and Descent into Hell. The novels are rather fantastic stories, “fantastic” in the sense of “like fantasy” but something else. I can’t think of anyone today writing in a similar vein.

But they all capture something of this dance, this kind of drama about God that Lewis describes. And he would have been working on his radio broadcasts that became Mere Christianity at the time Williams (an editor with Oxford Press) was living in Oxford due to the bombing in London.

I think Williams would have understood this dance described by Lewis perfectly well.

Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion of Mere Christianity. Too see more posts on this chapter, “Good Infection,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact and Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

The Momentary and the Eternal

I’ve been thinking about time lately, or rather, the passing of time. Perhaps it’s because I’ve reached one of those milestone birthdays. I don’t obsess about birthdays, but I know I enjoyed them more when I was younger and still had a lot of them left to anticipate. I didn’t think about how many were left because there was a whole bunch. Either I have to accept there aren’t a whole bunch or I have to redefine “bunch.”

I don’t know why it is, but as we get older, time seems to accelerate. My mother often says that things began to speed up as she went through her 40s. The 50s were faster, the 60s went even faster, she says. She’s now 88, and I think she’s stopped checking the speed.

Part of it is the sheer busy-ness of life. Time is going about as fast as it ever did, but when you’re young, and ambitious and trying to make a name for yourself and establish yourself – things seem to move at a snail’s pace. Part of it is perception – we just think time moves faster as we get older.

Technology plays a role, too. We can do things faster. We can communicate faster, and send messages faster. We get impatient when the computer takes two or three minutes to load. Of course, faster communication doesn’t necessarily mean better communication. Nor does faster mean increased understanding; in fact, it might result too often in just the opposite. All of us have the experience of the email we wish we hadn’t sent.

What I’m finding odd is that as time seems to accelerate, it becomes less important. I’m not frantic to accomplish all of the things I still have on my to-do list; in fact, I don’t have a to-do list. If I have any list at all, it is more of a to-be list. It’s hard to explain, but I think grandparents and young children understand this better than teenagers and adults. Perhaps it is because when you sit toward the ends of the spectrum, young or old(er), you’re physically closer to the eternal and less caught up in the temporal, or momentary.

We exist in time. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “Our life comes to us moment by moment…We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do.” And then he says this: “Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another.”

Only once did God enter time as we know it, 2,000 years ago in a little backwater Roman colony called Judea. And it changed everything.

We’ve been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis for some months now, and the end of the book is in sight. Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter have been leading the discussion. To see more posts, please visit their sites, Connecting to Impact and Living Between the Lines. 

Propaganda and The Whole Self

In 1993, the Washington Post published a correction to a story. The correction was rather short:

Correction: An article yesterday characterized followers of television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” There is no factual basis for that statement.

The article was by reporter Michael Weiskopf, and it was included in the story as a fact, with no attribution, no study cited or anything else. It was simply the reporter’s opinion, and that (1) he included it and (2) his editor had not challenged it was proof positive, for a lot of people, of the inherent bias against Christians by the national news media. The Post was flooded with letters, phone calls and faxed copies of master’s degrees from followers of Robertson and Falwell.

I can recall the hubbub and reading the story, and I can remember my reaction, even though I was not a follower or admirer of either man: “This is what passes for journalism these days.” I could say that, because my undergraduate degree was in journalism. And my professors would have placed a nice F if I had turned a story in that included that statement.

The world has moved on since that quote. The Christian Right is no longer, and this kind of comment is usually (and just as wrongfully) reserved today for members of the Tea Party.

I wonder what Weiskopf would have made of a statement by a French sociologist and philosopher named Jacques Ellul (1912-1994). In his book Propaganda, Ellul asserted that the people most susceptible to propaganda were not the poor and uneducated, but the more affluent and educated members of society (the so-called “elites”). And the reason, he said, was that they read more and are exposed to so much more, and could not possibly verify everything they read and accepted. What was worse was that they didn’t realize how susceptible they were to propaganda.

I was reminded of Weiskopf and Ellul when I read this week’s chapter in our discussion of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Lewis makes that rather startling assertion that theology, in a sense, is an experimental science (I could hear the howls of the professional atheists, but the phrase “in a sense” is the telling one). Some might call it an example of Christian propaganda, but Lewis is actually rather logical about it as he describes how Christians developed the idea of a three-person God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). He compares it to how a geologist would study rocks by examining them, with no cooperation needed from the rocks; how a zoologist would study live animals (cautiously and quietly); how you get to know something about a person (with his agreement and cooperation – the initiative would be divided); and how someone would get to know more about God – when the initiative lies entirely on God’s side.

Once God takes that initiative, “The instrument through which you see God is your whole self.” That lens of the whole self may and usually does take an entire lifetime to repair and clean, because we come to this process broken and sinful.

If a reporter – as broken and sinful as the rest of us – doesn’t understand God, we shouldn’t be surprised to see boneheaded opinions made about God’s people expressed in a news article.

But to be fair, we Christians – we educated Christians – can be just as susceptible to propaganda. Last year, I was reading an article in Christianity Today about food, of all things, and stumbled over statements made as fact with no references, citations or footnotes. Like Wesikopf’s statement in the Washington Post, the statements assumed that people reading the story would simply agree, and the writer or editor or both felt no attribution was needed. They were opinion, not fact. No one, including me, challenged the statements. No corrections were run. But they were just as wrong – and prejudiced – as the one in the Washington Post.

Our online discussion of Mere Christianity is being led by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact and Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines. Please visit their sites for additional posts on this chapter, “The Three-Personal God.”

No, not that! Anything but that! (Theology)

Some 37 years ago, my wife and I moved to Houston. We lived there for almost five years, and belonged to two churches during that time. The first church was actually recommended to me by a football player for the Miami Dolphins. We sat next to each other on an airline flight to Indianapolis (big guy, his tie had dolphins on it, and he wore this ring which said SUPER BOWL, so I thought, “I wonder if he’s a football player?”). He was a fan of the head minister at a church in Houston, a big church, with some 12,000 members, and this was before anyone had heard the term “mega-church.” It was part of a big national denomination.

The minister was an excellent preacher. We joined the church, and then went looking for a Sunday School class. We found a young marrieds class, which had about five other couples. That should have told us something right there – a 12,000-member church and only five couples in a young marrieds class?

We really liked the class and the people in it. But after several months, we began to see that the teacher had some unusual ideas. I’d been a Christian for all of a year, but even I could figure out that something was odd about a church teacher questioning the authorship of the Bible and how some of the stories probably got stuck in there long after the Bible was written. That was for starters. We’d ask questions, and get looks like we were aliens. Which we likely were.

I went to a bookstore, found the denomination’s latest doctrinal statement, and knew we had a problem. We were aliens in that church; the teacher was teaching the church’s theology. We eventually heard about another church, a non-denominational church not terribly far from where we lived, and we visited and found our home.

Then we moved to St. Louis. We were confident that we could find a church something like ours in Houston. And – we were wrong. We looked and visited and looked and visited. One church we almost joined made a big deal about the consumption of alcohol – and you had to sign a statement that you wouldn’t drink. We said no. (We learned later that virtually everyone in the church ignored the requirement, including the elders.) We finally landed at a church that was part of a small denomination, but after we joined we heard all this talk about the heresy connected to the Armenians. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the teachings of a small area of the Soviet Union near Turkey was so feared (yes, I was that naïve about theology).

Someone finally took pity on my ignorance and explained that it was actually “Arminianism,” the doctrine originating with Jacob Arminius, and that it was diametrically opposed to the true teaching of Calvinism, or what people fondly referred to as “the tulip.” Arminians were doctrinally wrong, frowned upon, and often ridiculed. We then realized that “Arminians” included the church we’d attended and loved in Houston. (For the record, no one at our Houston church ridiculed or even talked about the tulip, which we had previously understood to be a flower.)

The issue for us wasn’t the theology; it was more the lack of love. And we thought people were crazy to think they were fighting the Reformation all over again.

Since then, we’ve migrated a few times, learned more about theology, and understand why it’s important. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis explains it as simply and succinctly as I’ve ever heard it: “Theology is like a map…Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God…And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map.”

That makes sense. If you don’t know how to get where you’re going, a map is a necessity.

We've been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts in the discussion, please visit Sarah's site, Living Between the Lines. The links can be found in the comment section.

Liberation Theology

It’s one of the most liberating statements of theology I’ve ever read.

“…what God cares about is not exactly our own actions,” C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity. "What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind of quality – the kind of creatures He intended us to be – creatures related to Him in a certain way.” And the relationship starts, Lewis says, when we discover our bankruptcy.

In other words, we have nothing to offer God. There is nothing we can do, nothing that we can accomplish, that will earn His favor.

But he loves us anyway, almost in spite of ourselves. He loves us because he made us.

We get a glimpse – a mere glimpse – when we raise children. We love our children, often in spite of their behavior (particularly when they become teenagers) (I speak from experience). There are things our children do that please us, but that’s not why we love them. We love them because they are part of us, and they are made in our image. We don’t achieve the ideal of unconditional love that God embodies, but we do love our children, and it has nothing to do with their achievements, what they do, the honors and accolades they earn. Those things might make us proud of them, but they’re not why we love them.

Recognizing our “bankruptcy” (which, by the way is a good and telling word that Lewis uses) essentially sets us free. It’s  liberating idea, and it’s different from every other religion on the planet.

What it means is this: you don’t have to have a big name, or have done something, or achieved some pinnacle of success. In God’s eyes, all those human achievements and measurements are worthless.

What does matter is you. He wants your heart. He wants you committed to Him – and leave the heavy lifting to Him. He doesn’t care if you’re reach or poor, or whether you have some fabulous IQ or something less than a fabulous IQ. The fact that you’re a CEO or won the best salesman of the year award or sweep floors is of no consequence.

Or we can try to keep God’s laws or be the perfect Christian. He’s not impressed. There’s not much
God can do with people who think they’re perfect and have it all figured out. But when you come to Him knowing your bankrupt, there’s all kinds of things He can do.

That’s real liberation theology.

We’ve been discussing Mere Christianity, hosted by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts on this chapter on faith, please visit Jason's site, Connecting to Impact.

Moody isn't just a Bible institute

The first time I heard the name “Moody Bible Institute,” I wondered what it was all about, with a name like that.

I’m not picking on the Chicago-based institute. It’s a fine institution. But as fascinated as I am with words, and their sounds and meanings, I can remember the first time I heard someone refer to it, and I thought it was a place for people with personality issues. So I asked, and was told it was named for Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), one of the great evangelists of the 19^th century.

Moody sounds like a 19^th century name, something out of Dickens, or perhaps Mark Twain.  It’s also a word that applies to all of us, in that it is part of the human condition that we are often moody. We have moods, and when we say someone is moody, we usually do not mean it as a compliment, unless, of course, it's my wife talking about me being moody. Fortunately, moods change, and a bad mood usually gives way to a good mood.

Moods (and emotions), as innate a part of the human personality as they are, are no basis for making major decisions. Yet we do it all the time, even in matters of faith. (At the risk of a barb or two being flung, I would suggest – only suggest, not state categorically – that joining a church only because you like the pastor’s sermons is more a decision based on a mood rather than reason. Pastors change; they retire or are called by another church.)

“Now Faith,” writes C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, “in the sense I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.”

And, we might add, circumstances change, too.

If our faith is true, it survives moods and circumstances.

What I particularly responded to in that statement by Lewis was him calling faith an art, the art of “holding on to things your reason once accepted.” The word “art” suggests creativity and imagination, and more than that, it suggests individuality.

St. Paul said we each have different gifts, according to the grace given us (Romans 12:6). How we come to faith, that art, is as different as we are different. And how we display that faith, how it plays out in our lives, through all the changing moods and circumstances, is like how we each paint a picture, or write a poem, or carve a piece of wood, or write and sing a piece of music.

Faith is not a mood, nor does it depend upon everything going right in our lives. It is an art, specific to each of us, sharing the great themes and ideas of Christianity between and among us but written out in our own particular, individual style called a life.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. To see more posts on this chapter about faith, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

It Is Meant to Be Done

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues,” writes C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. “This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.”

Hope is not an option.

What’s more, while we might think this hope for the eternal would thrust our heads into the clouds and out of the “real world,” Lewis notes it does something totally unexpected and precisely the opposite – the people who are most focused on the eternal world somehow manage to be the people who do the greatest good – and create the greatest positive change in the present world.

Hope is a force for change.

He cites examples. The apostles in the Roman Empire (and it was the Christians, not the Romans, who cared about widows and orphans). The evangelicals in England who worked for decades to bring an end to the slave trade. And we could add Martin Luther King and the fight for civil rights, and evangelicals battling today against the global sex trade in women and children.

Hope looks to the future and lands in the here-and-now.

It’s puzzling, at least at first. But consider how we mistake results for strategy. In business, for example, so many focus on sales – gaining sales – or reaching a certain profit level, or a return on equity. Years ago, I worked at a company where the primary corporate goal became a pre-determined return on equity. From that perspective, everything became a cost, and massive upheaval followed. The company made the target – for one year. Rarely do we stop to consider that sales and profits are an effect of doing things right and well – customer service, good products, a reputation for treating people fairly.

Hope is not a result; hope is a strategy.

It’s also easy to confuse hope for the eternal with the United States, and American culture. I once knew a pastor who carried a pocket Bible in his left coat pocket and a copy of the Constitution in his right coat pocket. He could speak eloquently on both. He combined American exceptionalism with Christian theology. As much as I want to believe that my country is a special, exceptional country, the fact is that my true citizenship is not here; it’s eternal.

Hope is not a nation, or a politician, or a celebrity; hope is eternal, about eternal things.

And because it’s about eternal things, it has terrific possibilities for now.

Hope is meant to be done.


We’re discussing Mere Christianity, led by Jason Stasyzen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts on the current chapter, “Hope,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.

Charity is Selfish?

Today, when we hear the word “charity,” we think of United Way, the Salvation Army, philanthropy, giving to the need and the poor, what used to called “alms” a hundred years ago. The meaning of the word has changed over time; the Biblical meaning is, C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, is something more like “love, in the Christian sense.”

He’s not talking about love as an emotion or feeling. “It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”

I have to think about that: charity as a state of the will, a state of determination, of doing.

One key to Lewis’ description is that phrase that is easy to overlook, “which we have naturally about ourselves.” When we want to do something that we want to do, we will move heaven and earth to get it done.

Well, I do, anyway. Ask my wife.

That act of selfishness is closer to what the Biblical definition of charity actually is – having that same capacity for others that you have for yourself. This sounds something akin to the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others as much as you love yourself.

Ever practical, Lewis asks, what do you do when you don’t love someone? What happens when people can’t find any feeling in themselves to love others, or love God?

His answer: Act as if you do. “Don’t manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”

What?

His point is that in the very act (and the emphasis is on “act”) of doing, we will find the way. Sometimes – perhaps more than sometimes – this kind of love, this “charity,” is what faith is about, faith in serving others, in serving God and changing our own hearts.

And this was a short chapter – a little over four pages.


Jason Stasyzen and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. To see more posts on the chapter entitled “Charity,” please visit Sarah’s blog, Living Between the Lines.

My Precious

I am somewhat embarrassed to say this, but my wife has a name for my BlackBerry. You know, that thing we grownups wear like a toy gun and holster on our belts? That thing that buzzes my hip like a little friendly bumble bee, waiting impatiently for me to pay attention?

My Precious.

Yes, that’s what she’s calls my BlackBerry, My Precious. Like Gollum. But I won’t bite off Frodo’s finger for it, that’s for sure. Well, I don’t think I would.

So what is it about Blackberrys and other smart phones that will make us ignore our kids and spouses, ignore where we’re driving on the highway, and turn our attention away from the most compelling news on the television set? What is it that so mesmerizes us?

Standing in the lunch line in our company cafeteria this week, I looked up from my BlackBerry to see that eight other people in line with me – all eight – were doing exactly the same thing as I was.

And then there was the time I interviewed a job candidate whose BlackBerry buzzed, he looked at the name of the sender, and apologized for having to take the call – from another possible employer. That ended the interview on the spot.

We all have our reasons and our excuses, but the real answer is that that little piece of computerized, connected equipment is all about us. The Great Sin.

C.S. Lewis doesn’t shy away from the hard subjects. So far in our discussion so far of Mere Christianity, we’ve seen him tackle everything from morality, belief and tolerance to sexuality, marriage and behavior, among others.

In this chapter, it’s The Great Sin.

It’s the one we’re all guilty of. The one we know intimately. The one that – for Christians – is indeed The Big One. The one that gets in the way of everything.

Pride, or self-conceit.

And it’s not an exclusively American sin. No, this one transcends cultures. If you want proof, the personal, portable phone can be found in every country around the world. Some countries are even worse than the United States.

I never expected to be thinking of my BlackBerry as The Great Sin.

But I think that’s what it is.


Our discussion of Mere Christianity is being hosted by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts on this chapter, "The Great Sin," please visit Jason's site, Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Woman Texting by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.