In a letter from Lewis to the Church Times, published February 8, 1952, he writes:
I welcome the letter from the Rural Dean of Gravesend, though I am sorry that anyone should have regarded it necessary to describe the Bishop of Birmingham as an Evangelical. To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the ‘Liberal’ or ‘Modernist’ is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the Four Last Things. [The Four Last Things are: death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell]. This unites them not only with one another, but with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus.
The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions, or than the gulf which separates both from any non-miraculous version of Christianity, is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether ‘Low” or ‘High’ Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest ‘Deep Church’; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s ‘mere Christians’?
The letters I’m quoting from C.S. Lewis are from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper. This is a three-volume set well worth the journey.
Hooper notes that the Latin quotation, ubique et ab omnibus, is “an abbreviated form of the quotation from St. Vincent of Lerins, ‘Let us hold on to that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.’ ”
The reference to Richard Baxter is to Baxter’s statement in 1680:
You know not of what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MERE CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible.”
Some thoughts and observations on the above:
Today it would be necessary to describe an Anglican bishop as Evangelical (if that were the case) since, to use Lewis’s criteria, many Anglicans no longer believe in the supernatural. How things have changed in sixty years.
Then there is the question for those of us who claim to be Evangelicals or Anglo-Catholics in the sense Lewis means; While we ascribe to supernatural Christianity, while we profess belief in the great doctrines Lewis lists, is our ascription intellectual or is it holistic? That is, do we live in the supernatural in Christ or do we simply say that we believe these primary doctrines? For Biblical belief is not solely intellectual assent, it is holistic engagement; heart, soul, mind, and body. Biblical belief is not compartmentalizing; it is not looking at a glass of water and acknowledging there is water in the glass; nor is it taking the glass of water and drinking it; it is rather bypassing the glass altogether and throwing oneself into the ocean, swimming in it, living in it, and becoming one with it.
The world will often tolerate to some degree those who acknowledge water in the glass; and the world will often tolerate to a lesser degree those who drink the water in the glass; but seldom will the world tolerate those who throw themselves in the ocean and declare that ocean to be their biosphere. And yet, in a naturalistic Western world this is exactly what Christ-followers are called to do – to throw ourselves into Jesus Christ, to live in Jesus Christ – and can there be any other life in Christ than a supernatural life, than a life that is above and beyond the gravity of earth, the pull of the natural? Is it any wonder a dominant New Testament phrase is; in Christ? We are to live in Christ, to breathe in Christ, to love in Christ, to die in Christ.
There is no ocean as vast, as wide, as deep, as grand, as life-giving…as the ocean of the Trinity.
To be continued…
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