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July 23 - July 23, 2018
It was about choosing friends who would help us make the best decisions. “Don’t surround yourself with clones of yourself,” we were told. “Talk to people you really respect—even if they disagree with
you.”
realised that someone’s chance of survival depended on a will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in hopeless situations.
those who cope best are those who can see beneath the surface of an apparently random and pointless world and grasp the deeper structure of reality.
Old friends tend to be good and true friends. Friends encourage us when we are downhearted and demoralised, they motivate us to perform better, and they help us pick up the pieces when things go wrong.
Although Lewis was the author of all his works, most of them were seasoned and finely honed through interaction with other people whose views he trusted.
Christianity has to show that it can tell a more compelling and engaging story that will capture the imagination of its culture.
He did not see how the story of Jesus Christ could be of any relevance to us today.
Tolkien framed his reply using the word myth—a technical word which, unfortunately, is easily misunderstood. For most people, a “myth” is a false story—maybe a story that was once thought to be true, or something that was invented to deceive people. Tolkien uses the term in a technical sense, to mean something like a “grand narrative” or a “narrated worldview.”
For Tolkien, Christianity provides this total picture, which both unifies and transcends these fragmentary and imperfect insights. Christianity is a “true myth.” It has the outward appearance of a “myth”—a story about meaning. But this time, it really happened. And this story both makes sense of all the other stories that humans tell about themselves and their world and provides their fulfilment.
He had noted how H. G. Wells and others used works of science fiction to advance their secular humanism and optimism about the future of humanity.
Lewis realised that “stories of this kind” could “steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood.”
One of Lewis’s great achievements in Narnia is to help us understand that we live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right.
This “grand narrative” of interlocking stories makes sense of the riddles the children see and experience around them. It allows the children to understand their experiences with a new clarity and depth, like a camera lens bringing a landscape into sharp focus.
Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story and judge it by its ability to make sense of things and “chime in” with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and
goodness.
We can get locked into ways of thinking and acting that are purely self-serving.
Lewis’s point is that Feuerbach and Freud have cast a spell over Western culture, aiming to convince us that they are right and we are wrong. They present their speculative theories as if they were self-evident truths: Only a fool would think there is a God! Lewis helps us see that, in the first place, their approach is only a theory, and in the second, it is not a particularly plausible
plausible
Lewis’s conversion to Christianity took place in two stages. In the first phase, Lewis came to believe in God, seeing this as linked with the existence of heaven, as a transcendent realm.[55] Second, a little later he began to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The order of analysis in The Silver Chair parallels Lewis’s own conversion story. Lewis initially
A God that is reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshipped.
Lewis reminds us that Christ masters us, and that part of our discipleship of the mind is to expand our intellectual vision and range so that we can appreciate him more fully.
The other four novels (Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Horse and His Boy, and The Silver Chair) reflect on the life of faith, which is framed in terms of the past and future comings of Aslan.
a major theme in the Chronicles of Narnia is how we become—and remain!—good people.
A role model is worth a thousand words! It’s much better to tell a story which shows us how someone acted nobly than to read a textbook about the abstract idea of nobility.
one of Aslan’s chief roles is to enable people to discover the truth about themselves.
Lewis is trying to help us realise that the quest for virtue involves both breaking the power of sin and embracing the power of good.
Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.
He shows us what virtue looks like, and helps us understand how we become virtuous.
Lewis’s impassioned speeches and writings on the Christian faith have earned him a reputation as one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time.
Owen Barfield—raised questions about his atheism that Lewis knew couldn’t be answered.
Second, Lewis read works by Christian writers—such as G. K. Chesterton—which helped him to realise that their faith provided a rich and realistic way of seeing, understanding, and experiencing the world.
Defending. Here the apologist tries to work out what stops people from believing.
Commending. Here the apologist sets out to allow the truth and relevance of the gospel to be appreciated.
how we help the audience to grasp this relevance—for example, by using helpful illustrations, analogies, or stories to allow them to connect with it.
Translating. Here the apologist recognises that many of the core ideas and themes of the Christian faith are likely to be unfamiliar. They need to be explained using familiar or accessible images, terms, or stories.
forced him to translate his ideas into “uneducated language.”
First, he would insist that we discover how ordinary people speak: “We must learn the language of our audience.”
to listen before we speak.
the ideas that they find helpful,
the analogies and stories that connect with them. Then we need to weave t...
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Second, having learned the language of our audience, we need to translate what we want ...
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explain what technical words mean.
incarnation and atonement,
to use other genres to open these terms up. We could tell a story to unpack the doctr...
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“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.”[73]
Christianity gives us a “big picture” that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But once we are given it, we discover just how much sense it makes.
Yet once we have been given this way of seeing things, we discover just how much sense it makes.
reason was unable to prove the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith. But it could nevertheless point us in the right direction.
he drew on common human experience, and reflection about
