In a letter to a correspondent identified as Mrs. Johnson;
Lewis writes on August 7, 1956:
All you tell me is good and very good. Your Mother in Law has done good
to the whole circle by the way she died. And where she has gone I don’t doubt
that she will do you more still. For I believe that what was true of Our Lord
Himself (‘It is expedient for you that I go, for then the Comforter will come
to you’) is true in its degree (of course, an
infinitesimal degree in comparison, but still true) of all His
followers. I think they do something for us by dying and shortly after they
have died which they couldn’t do before – and sometimes one can almost feel it
happening. (You are right by the way: there is a lot to be said for dying – and
being born – at home).
What do we do with a paragraph
such as the above? Some of us may endorse it; some may say that they don’t
really see a Biblical basis for it, but that Lewis is certainly entitled to his
opinion and conjecture; some may ponder it with the thought – “Well, I guess
it’s possible”; and others may cry “Heresy – Lewis is teaching heresy!”
There’s a sense in which C.S.
Lewis is like Abraham Lincoln – different constituencies want to take ownership
of him and recreate him in their image. The thing about learning about a man or
woman, or learning about the history of a people, whether a village, a nation,
or a family, is that things get pretty complex before it’s all over – as if
learning about history, any history, could ever be said to be really “over”.
People that call a wart a beauty
mark can be accused of glossing over the facts, and those who call a beauty
mark a wart are often accused of having agendas to discredit the subject –
whether a person or family or village or nation.
My take on Lewis is that he’d be
quick to say that he doesn’t know it all – and you’d be under suspicion if you
told him that you, or your theological camp, knew it all. Lewis knew the danger
of thinking that you know it all, and he knew the danger of looking down on
others – he had been like that, and I think that when he met Christ, and as he
came to know Christ – that perhaps he had a good look at Christ and then a good
look at himself; with the result that his days of knowing it all were history.
Not everything in the Bible fits
into a neat little definable compartment, nor does everything in life – and I
think that not recognizing that, that glossing over the unexplainable as if it
doesn’t exist, serves to dull our minds and imaginations and dampen our hearts.
Consider Paul’s words in
Colossians 1:24: Now I rejoice in my
sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in
Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church...
Some of us can try to work what
that statement, others gloss over it and act as if Paul never wrote those
words.
Or what about Paul in 1
Corinthians 5:4: When you are assembled
in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present…
Some of us can try work with that
statement, others gloss over it and act as if Paul never wrote those words. To
explain away either of the above Pauline quotations, to put them in a box
(probably more for quarantine than for anything else), is to shut the door on
the mystery behind the words. The Bible has statements in it that most of us –
likely all of us – simply don’t fully understand. Life has experiences that we
don’t understand. As we engage Biblical statements and paradigms, and as we
engage life, hopefully we’ll do the best we can by the grace of God and be wise
enough not to take all of our understanding for infallible dogma. If we never
push the envelope of thinking, of imagination, or of heart ponderings, if we do
not have the liberty in Christ to honestly engage the mysteries before us – and
if we deny the freedom to others to do so in Christ, within the framework of
the Bible and the Gospel – then we become not only our own jailers, but the
jailers of others.
Much of my early Christian
experience was one of forcing every Biblical verse into a straightjacket of
doctrinal rigidity – whether the verse or passage or paradigm fit or not.
Biblical passages were meant to be ridden and broken like a wild bronco,
saddled with rigid thinking, devoid of imagination (for the most part), and
controlled by the reins of conformity to denomination or particular tradition. Deviation
from the norm was not acceptable.
I think that Lewis would hardly
have considered his words to Mrs. Johnson as dogma, and I think he gladly gave
others room for exploration of mysteries. Was Lewis pushing the envelope? I
don’t think so, though you might, and that’s okay with me. Lewis was simply
sharing his thoughts with a correspondent. Was Lewis exercising Christian
liberty? I think he was; he must have felt free to express himself to Mrs.
Johnson – too bad we all don’t feel free to share our musings. I wonder what
we’d collectively find if we did exercise liberty in Christ to discuss and
explore and roam the Biblical terrain?
Lest you should misunderstand me,
I’m all for Biblical exegesis with integrity; but that means there are times
when I have to say, “I don’t know what that means.”
I’ll close with another quotation
from Paul; 1 Corinthians 13:12: For now
we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I
shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love
abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
No comments:
Post a Comment