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December 9 - December 15, 2019
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we’re meant to be doing.
Atheism was existentially insignificant, having nothing to say about the deepest questions of the human mind or the yearnings of the human heart.
The Inklings offered a supportive and encouraging environment, which helped its members strengthen and complete their works.
Looking back on his time as an atheist, Lewis was appalled at how easily he had been unthinkingly captivated by the metanarrative of his day.
A God that is reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshipped.
So what of virtue? As a scholar of both the classics and medieval literature, Lewis knew the importance of the quest for the good life. It is a theme that recurs throughout both Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Both show the need for people of character and virtue in a complex and confusing world. Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them. Both Lewis and Tolkien show how it is often the weak and lowly who are called upon to undertake great challenges.
When he began his studies at Oxford University in January 1919, Lewis hoped to be remembered as an atheist poet—someone who destroyed the plausibility of God through his verbal eloquence and the power of argument. Yet in the end, it was the plausibility of a dull and joyless atheism that crumbled before him.
Through experience, Lewis worked out how he could faithfully and effectively communicate the Christian faith to a culture which was having difficulty in understanding traditional Christian terms and ideas.
Lewis’s point is fair. Christians can’t just tell one another that their faith makes sense. They’ve got to get that message over to their culture at large. For Lewis, apologetics thus aims to create and sustain “an intellectual (and imaginative) climate favourable to Christianity.”[77] If we fail to do so, we will lose public credibility.
New ideas can be supremely bad ideas—and by the time people realise just how bad they are, it’s sometimes difficult to get rid of them.
Lewis asks us to realise that we have fallen into a trap. We’re assuming that our own ideas are right. What we need to appreciate is that every age assumes its ideas are right.
When reading Christian literature, Lewis came to realise that there was something special, something realistic and true, about its representation of things that contrasted favorably with secular alternatives.
So what is the purpose of education? Lewis would point to the way that it breaks our focus on the present, enlarges our view of the world, and encourages us to explore the depths of our faith.
