Tag: C.S. Lewis

the Gospel in a postmodern world

~ Vincent

Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 16, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 23, Ezekiel 20:18-31

Our first reading this morning was Psalm 23, and it was a version that I know I wasn’t used to.  When it comes to classic Scriptures, my mind just expects the King James version.  When I hear the NIV, it catches me off guard!  Here’s yet another translation of Psalm 23 that’s worth hearing:

The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep;
I don’t want to own anything.
The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field.
He wants me to go to the lake.
He makes my good spirit come back.
Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death,
I do not care.  You are with me.
You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable. 
You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch. 
You pour car grease on my head.
My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows. 
Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all of my life. 
And I will live in the Hut of the great boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.

(Richards and O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 91)

This psalm was translated by missionaries from Hebrew into the language of the Khmus tribe of Laos and then to English.  It’s always fun to find something that’s been through several translations because certain ideas inevitably get lost in the process. You get to see the limitations of language and just how hard it is to capture the essence of something in a tongue that might not might not even have words for certain things.  I mean, just look at verse five!  “You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes.  You pour car grease on my head.” God preparing a table in the presence of our enemies also becomes a more literal task than we usually assume.  And I’m guessing olive oil isn’t common in that region, so instead of that, we end up with car grease on our heads.  We also have the confusion in verse four where it reads, “Even though I walk through something the missionary calls ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’” They were so confused by what that missionary was trying to talk about that they just gave up on translating the idea entirely. “‘Even though I walk through…’ oh geeze.  I don’t know. Whatever that thing was that the missionary was going on about!  That!”  But the part I really want to hone in on is the last line “and I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.” That’s a lot grimmer than what it is in English, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That’s distinctly more positive than being forgotten.  Why is it so negative?

One of the biggest reasons for that negative tone is the Khmus tribe’s culture.  They live in a collectivist culture.  People in collectivist cultures tend to think of themselves as one piece of a larger cohesive social unit.  When they’re asked to describe themselves, they tend to explain the social relationships that they play a part in: “I’m a father,” “I’m a nurse,” “I’m a sister.”  Their self-identity is built on the relationships that they participate in and the obligations they have towards others.  That’s a very different outlook from us people in individualist cultures.  Individualist cultures tend to focus on how each individual is unique and has their own goals and purpose.  If we were asked to describe ourselves, our descriptors would probably point out the ways that we’re different from the people around us: “I’m smart,” “I’m hard-working,” “I’m strong.”  Our self-identity is wrapped up in the ways they’re unique from other people.  There can be hesitance about the idea of Heaven from people in collectivist cultures.  It sounds like they have to be torn away from the social network that defines who they are.  That’s no good! 

On top of that, the Khmus people think about death in a very different way than your average Westerner.  If you go back to ancient Greece, you can see some of the very early ways that Westerners started to think about death.  In Greek mythology, when you died, you had to pay the boatman, Charon, so that you could cross the river Styx and go on to the land of the dead.  You went from here to there.  We’re hardwired to be comfortable with the idea that death is going from here to there.  In Khmus culture, there’s no sense that death involves going anywhere.  When you die, nobody can see you, but you’re still there with your people.  Going somewhere after you die seems bizarre to them.  Between the collectivist urge to find identity in relationships and the sense that leaving after death is odd, you end up with a disappointing end to a classic psalm.

That being said, it is interesting that missionaries have found that there are parts of Scripture that resonate with them that we have trouble with.  For example, Revelation 21 says that God will recreate everything in the end.  He’ll make a new Heaven and a new Earth, and that new Earth is where all of his people will go.  We don’t just stay in Heaven forever!  We go to a perfect, sinless, recreated Earth.  Then and only then will everything finally be as God would have it.  I don’t know how many times I’ve told this to churchgoers and they’ve looked at me like I’m crazy.  To the average Westerner, death is going from here to there.  That just makes sense.  You don’t go from here to there and then back to a new form of here again.  That’s counterintuitive!  But the Khmus people heard about this passage and were incredibly excited.  Finally, something that made some sense!  You get to come back to a new Earth in the long term.  That was a reasonable sort of plan in their eyes.

Cultures make such a difference in the way we perceive the world.  They’re these collections of ancestral ideas that are tweaked and passed down time and time again.  They’re critical to understanding the world.  All too often, in modern Western culture, there’s this temptation to see someone’s culture as little more than window dressing.  It determines whether you wear a sari or a dress.  It determines whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanza.  Things like that.  Underneath our clothes and our celebrations, it’s assumed that we’re all decent secular citizens that broadly share the same ideas.  Culture appears to be little more than some seasoning for our otherwise flavorless lives.  But it is so much more than that. 

When we reduce culture to window dressing, we fail to capture the essence of it.  Cultures pass on more than clothes; they pass on ideas.  Tremendously good ideas and tremendously bad ones can both be passed on!  The ancient Spartans would kill children with any deformities.  Why?  Because they needed to be a strong, warrior society.  To them, that was a good idea.  It was a natural idea.  But what seems logical to them seems horrifying to us!  The Aztecs believed in human sacrifice.  If things weren’t going so well, they assumed that sacrificing someone might perk things up.  To us?  Horrifying.  To them?  Logical.  Some may resist calling this culture.  No, this is a matter of morality!  But consider that in Japan only 200 years ago, cultural tradition dictated that someone who made a big, humiliating mistake ought to kill themselves.  That showed that they had some shred of honor left in them.  To live after your mistake?  That was shameful.  To modern Westerners, that seems nightmarish!  If you make a mistake, even a horrible one, you’re expected to build back!  It happens to everybody.  You hear folk wisdom about how it’s not the number of times you get knocked down that matters; it’s the number of times you get back up.  To a 17th century samurai, that would have been the height of cowardice.  Culture is not just window dressing.  It changes our perception of the world itself. It affects what ideas we accept as good ideas, and what ideas we’re wary of.

Now, why do I keep talking about culture?  Because I think we need to address our own culture.  A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with some of the people over in the contemporary service.  Some of the band members were around my age (30-something), and we were just shocked at how much things have changed in the religious sphere since we were young.  It hasn’t even been that long!  We’re not that old!  But it’s changed so much.  When we were young, being Christian was pretty normal.  It’s what you did.  Of course we went to church.  That was pretty reasonable.  Most people did.  You could wear a “What Would Jesus Do” wristband and that was considered reasonably cool.  You watched VeggieTales because of course you watched Veggie Tales.  VeggieTales was awesome!  We couldn’t imagine any of that being popular today.

Christianity is no longer seen as something mainstream.  It’s seen as something odd. Something weird.  Something that’s hard to swallow.  And you can see that in the statistics. Someone that goes into undergrad as a confessing Christian has lower than a 30 percent chance of remaining a Christian over the next four years.  Depending on the poll, you can get as low as 18%.  30% is the high.  I spoke with some people in campus ministry at Ohio University this past week and they confirmed that it was incredibly tough to work in campus ministry.  They said that God’s Not Dead was a little too cheesy to be a reasonable comparison, but the natural cultural environment on a campus made Christianity really hard to practice for the average student.

College campuses aren’t the only place we can turn to for sobering statistics.  If we look at our own denomination, the United Methodist Church lost a net total of 180,000 active members from their lists last year.  The year before that, they lost 220,000 total active members.  We’re only a few million big!  We can’t take losses like this year after year, but people are dying faster than we can make new disciples.

A lot of us may be initially disheartened by these statistics, but we need to fight that reaction. I remember talking to a friend from England.  England is much further along in the process of secularization in the United States.  The number of confessing Christians there is even lower than the number here, and he was wrestling with that.  I got to hear one of his very early sermons and, man, it was just depressing.  His through line was, “The church is dying, and there’s nothing we can do.” He said that throughout the sermon, time and time and time again.  That was the line he ended on!   I left church that morning thinking, well shoot, how am I supposed to go enjoy brunch after that?  Right?  That’s grim!  I’m not one who believes that  sermons have an obligation to be peppy, but the gloom and doom approach is the wrong approach.  We shouldn’t count all of this as some sort of grand failure.  There’s more than that in front of us: there’s opportunity.  We have the opportunity to serve God at a historic moment!  We get to witness to a Western culture that has forgotten the most important thing there is.  That is new ground!  There have always been missionaries called to share the Gospel in challenging places, but the post-Christian West is still brand new on the world stage, and we’re the first ones called to spread the Gospel here.

Just look at how new this whole thing is!  There was obviously a time in Western nations for initial conversions.  We wouldn’t be here without those.  There were also times where individual people and even whole people groups were called back to the faith, but that’s just the thing!  They were called back to faith.  That cultural Christianity from the initial conversion was still strong in their minds.  People didn’t have to argue about whether or not Christianity was good or explain what its most basic premises were.  That was obvious!  The average citizen literally learned in schools that the goal of life was to love God and to glorify him forever.  That was a logical fact that even a child could tell you!  Evangelization wasn’t built on education or argument; it was built on convicting people to live out what they already knew was true.  That’s the history of Methodism.  How did Methodism get so big?  Because when America was a young nation, Methodist pastors had maximum enthusiasm, minimal educational requirements, and were willing to travel.  Baptists were the same way.  Those groups could get new pastors to frontier regions really quickly to convict people with a classic evangelistic sell: “You should be worshiping the God you know exists and live a life that’s pleasing to him.”  That’s why there are so many Methodist and Baptist churches across the United States.  They did so well because they were experts at reaching people that were already Christians that lived beyond the reach of established churches.  It doesn’t work like that anymore. We are now missionaries in a culture the likes of which we’ve never seen.  If we want to share the word of God with people, we can’t call them back to the faith they already know.  Culturally, it’s no longer dominant.  It doesn’t seem true or intuitive.  A lot of people may not even fully understand what it is!  We have to change the way we think about outreach if we want to be effective.

I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Hold on now, pastor, you’re saying we have to change the way that we go about doing things if we want to reach people with the word of God?  Not so!  I’ve seen some of the big churches around here and I know there’s three timeless things you need to grow a church: better preaching, better music, programs for families.  Do those three things your church will grow.  That’s what the big churches do!  If we do those three things, that’ll work.  Simple as that.”

 To that I respond: you’re not completely wrong.  You can do that… for now.  It kind of works.  Some large area churches do use that methodology.  They’re primarily reaching out to people that are already interested; people that I will call “cultural conservatives.” Of course, that doesn’t necessarily correspond to political conservatism.  That’s neither here nor there. In this instance, cultural conservatives are people that just like things from the past.  They might live in an area where they grew up, just because their family has roots there.  They might take up certain hobbies or historic styles of dress that aren’t particularly trendy anymore.  They might even explore Christianity!  And why?  Because they just have a certain affinity with the past. They enjoy things that connect them with their roots.  In the case of religion, this pull to the past is a massive blessing for them.  In following their inclination, they may stumble onto the beauty of the Gospel  But not everyone is going to do that.  Not everyone is a cultural conservative.  A lot of people will be looking at what is popular, rather than looking at things that have faded from popular imagination.  They’re not naturally interested in Christianity.  That’s their grandparents’ religion!  They went to a few services at Christmas to make ‘ol grandma happy, but it wasn’t trendy.  They think they know Christianity enough from cultural osmosis that it’s safe to dismiss it  They’d prefer engaging with something that has more of a contemporary buzz around it.

If we only reach out to people who are already interested, the group we’re reaching is going to get smaller and smaller.  Maybe we’ll get some cultural conservatives to join us, but will their children also be cultural conservatives?  What about their children’s children?  You get diminishing returns over time.  God doesn’t want us to just reach out to people that are easy to talk to.  We have to reach people beyond the reach of our safe, cultural boundaries!

We are people at the dawn of a new era.  We have the privilege of sharing the good news of Jesus with people who think they know it when they don’t. And the best part is God hasn’t demanded that we just keep grinding away with the same programs, the same slogans, and the same outreach opportunities year after year after year.  He did not tell his church we had already achieved the ideal final form and we’re obligated to keep it for all time.  He said something more exciting than that!  He said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation,” (Mk 16:15).  And what is that good news?  Christ died so that we could live. This is a life-altering truth, and we have the opportunity to take that to people.  That’s exciting.  It’s not all gloom and doom.  We’ve got something amazing to share.

I know that some people are intimidated about sharing their faith.  It’s been built up as this big, frightening, socially-awkward thing, and it shouldn’t be any of that.  I think C.S Lewis gives a helpful corrective for that fear of evangelism.  He asks, what do you do when you find a really good restaurant?  You tell people about it!  What about if you find a scenic vista?  You tell people about it!  That’s how we’re built!  When we find something that’s good, we want to share it.  And what greater good is there than the truth at the center of all things?  We should naturally want to reach out! 

That’s a passion that you have shared with me since I arrived at this church.  You’ve told me that you want more people in this church.  If you want to do that, you have to be missionaries in this new era.  You have to learn how to reach out in spite of a resistant culture.  Not every missionary shares our unique challenges!  There are some places where Christianity is growing rapidly, like Asia and Africa.  North America and Europe?  Not so much.  This place is a challenge.  If we want to reach out well, we have to learn the culture.  That’s what missionaries do!  That’s not the totality of evangelism, of course. You can’t deal with people in abstract.  The heart of it is always personal relationships, but how can you communicate well in those relationships?  By knowing a person’s culture.  You need to know what ideas will excite them, what they’ll freak out about, and what will likely feel natural to them.  That’s not to say you tailor the gospel to suit them.  Of course not.  You do, however, need to know how to share the truth compellingly with the person you want to share it with.

The advantages of a cultural study extend beyond evangelism.  Even if that were the only benefit, it would be worth doing, but there’s more than that.  As we study our culture for the sake of others, we learn about ways in which it’s impacted our vision of God.  Some of the things that we assume are godly are not in alignment with God’s will!  When we sit down and see how the philosophies of the day have impacted us, we get to learn about our own blind spots and learn how we can follow God better.  This second Scripture shows the Israelites experiencing this second benefit.  God is showing them the ways that they have been blinded because of cultural norms that seemed intuitive, but were wrong.  It starts in Ezekial chapter 20 verse 18:

I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents or keep their laws or defile yourselves with their idols. I am the Lord your God; follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

From the beginning of this passage, God is reminding the Israelites that he’s given them something so precious: the truth.  It’s not just an abstract, theoretical truth.  It’s a whole way of being.  He’s given that truth to them to keep, but repeatedly they’ve walked away from it to take on the accepted norms of the day.  As we continue on, we’ll see three different disobedient cultural practices that the Israelites always seem to come back around to.  They do these things throughout the Old Testament.  When you read the prophetic books or make your way through Kings or Chronicles, you’re sure to come across these three sooner or later.  The Israelites can’t seem to leave them alone!  They naturally assume these are reasonable practices, even though they’re repeatedly warned against them.  

First, we have the high places.  God asks them in verse 29, “What is this high place you go to?”  He didn’t want them revering these particular places!  But they sure seem to think he does!  Now, a high place is not necessarily literally high up off the ground.  It might be!  Verse 28 reads that any high hills or leafy trees were tempting for the Israelites to make a big deal out of, but throughout the whole of Scripture, not all of them are so elevated in a literal sense.  High places are often metaphorically high up.  These are places of all types that people saw and thought, “That’s close to Heaven!  God would like it if I worshiped there.”  Now, what makes them think that certain places are holier than others?  Associations with past Gods that they worshiped.  Can you imagine how insulting that is for God?  Imagine if you told your spouse that for your anniversary, you were going to a special spot: the place where you first kissed.  They get all excited and you drive them out there that evening and as you pull up they tell you… it’s the wrong place.  You never kissed them there!  That was some other person!  But rather than back down, you double down!  If it was good enough for someone else, it ought to be good enough for them!  You park the car and try to keep celebrating the anniversary.  How do you think that would go over?  They want to worship God in a place that was special… to some other god!  It’s insulting!

But it’s worse than that.  These other gods were not like God.  They demanded different ways of worshiping, and these ways were profane.  They wanted human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and other such things at their high places.  The true God doesn’t want anything to do with that!  He hates things like that!  He has no historically special relationship with these high places and he knows the associations they have with them are often impure, so he repeatedly tells them to stay away from them.  But whenever the Israelites get the chance, they think to themselves, “You know what God would really like?  The high places!  He’d love those!  He says he doesn’t, but someone must have misinterpreted him.  We’ve had such good memories in those places!  Good enough for other gods, good enough for this one.  Let’s go worship there!”  Not good.

You also see idolatry mentioned several times.  Verse 24 says that “their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols.”  The Israelites were very physical people.  They liked things that they could see and touch.  That made them feel more real.  Now, did they always worship the idol directly?  Not always.  Sometimes they were stand-ins for the god in question.  People thought that if they worshiped the image, they could grow closer to the god in whose image that idol was created.  God always commanded people not to do this!  If they were worshiping the idol in and of itself, they were worshiping something that was not real.  And if they were worshiping a God beyond the idol… that was still not real!  God is infinitely bigger than anything our minds can come up with.  When an idol is created, it’s always something less than the real thing.  Something more limited.  When you really think about it, the process of creating an idol for God is blasphemous.  It fundamentally reverses the order of creation.  God created us in his image.  When we make an idol of him, we turn around and try to make him in our image.  God wants nothing to do with the shallowness of our idols and tells us to avoid them.  But what did the Isralites do?  They get to thinking, “You know what God would like?  Some idols.  That’s the sort of thing gods like! It’s just a fact.  Everyone knows it!”  But God doesn’t actually like them.

Now we have what may be the most dramatic instance of disobedience in the Bible: child sacrifice.  Verse 31 reads, “When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day.”  Child sacrifice would have been something that the rival god Molech would have enjoyed.  Some of the groups around the Israelites worshiped Molech.  They would burn up their child, literally, in fire.  That was a good thing in the eyes of Molech.  That’s how you pleased him.  And the Israelites thought, child sacrifice?  I bet God would like that.”  Now, God has explicitly said not to do that.  There is a sacrifice necessary to make things right, but he will make it himself.  He will be the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf.  Our sacrifices are not good.  God doesn’t want people to sacrifice their children.  But the Israelites ignore God and do what is right in their own eyes.

You can see repeatedly that the Israelites are influenced by the trends of the people around them.  The tribes in their region lead them to make choices that are bad!  That fundamentally warp their view of who God is so far that God says, “That’s that’s not even me anymore!  You’re doing something horrible!  Stop!”

Taking the time to think about the culture that we’re in is not just for the sake of people outside the Church.  It’s for us!  When we critique culture, it’s not something we get to do at a distance.  It’s not us looking out at the outside world and seeing how they think.  It’s uncovering some of the assumptions we make too.  Culture is something we live and breathe.  We are inevitably affected by anything that we can point out and consider.  So as we look through this series, we’re not just seeing things that can help us be good missionaries in this new post-modern era.  We’ll learn things that can help us know God better and worship him rightly.  Remember, his thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways.

If we want to understand the nuances of God, our neighbor, and ourselves, this is the task we have before us.  In the coming weeks, we’ll look piece by piece at our postmodern Western culture.  How was it shaped?  What are the assumptions that it presses on us?  In what ways does it help us, and in what ways does it challenge us?  And in spite of its challenges, how can we be effective at making disciples?  I hope that each of us gets the opportunity to think about the way we can reach others with this precious truth we’ve been gifted with, and that we ourselves grow to recognize that truth even more perfectly.  Amen.

Recovering the Sacred: C.S. Lewis, Philip Rieff, and the Cleveland Museum of Art

~ Vincent ~ 1 Comment

A while back I wrote about my visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art and my reaction to all of their Mary-oriented medieval art. Today, I want to think about the bigger journey that gallery was a part of. As I walked through the museum, it was wildly apparent that the artistic ideal of society was deteriorating as each age passed. For example, let’s look at something from the medieval exhibit:

Crucified Christ, late 1300s

The point of the piece is immediately apparent: this is what the world is all about. Not only does it clearly present an ideal in the person of Jesus and the event of his crucifiction, but you can tell it’s a piece that the public was intended to interact with. It belongs in a church with people worshipping nearby. This is a sign intended to draw people’s minds to the highest understanding of perfection. It’s not a particularly unique piece for the era. The medieval galleries were stuffed with reliquaries, altars, and religious paintings. I can’t help but be staggered by the sheer level of devotion towards the sacred that people were expressing.

Now let’s look at something from the modern gallery:

Metal Fence, Cady Noland

What’s being conveyed? Certainly nothing positive. It’s a critique. Perhaps something like “Why build fences when you could build bridges,” “America is built on keeping others out,” “we need to knock down exclusionary structures,” etc. There’s no positive statement being made. There’s no indication that there’s a sacred ideal. If anything, it’s just the opposite. The plaque that accompanies this particular piece indicates that the author intended it as a critique of the history of the United States. This is a piece specifically intended to tear down images of the sacred. It’s definitely not beautiful. There’s also no possible way that a piece like this could be identified as an artistic endeavor outside of a museum. If you popped this in a community center, people wouldn’t stop to admire it. They would assume you were doing construction and avoid that part of the building! This is a piece intended for appreciation by cultural elites, not everyday people. Again, this example is anything but unique for the modern gallery. You have your fences, you have your baby carriages full of spray-painted phalluses, conglomerations of nude body parts, etc.

All of this is what came to mind as I read through C.S. Lewis’s A Confession:

A Confession
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem. (Poems, p. 3-4)

Right out of the gate, Lewis is striking out at the people who are deconstructing classic visions of beauty. T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is put on blast because there’s nothing sterile or dead about the evening sky. The evening is beautiful, melancholy, and momentous, but certainly not sterile. All these other popular poetic metaphors are equally unfitting. People keep taking these visions that should be massive, beautiful, even transcendent, and warping them into things that are mundane and ugly. The leading poets seem intent to warp the things that once inspired us into things that should disgust us.

As someone particularly fond of William Blake, I couldn’t help but think of him. He was one of the great masters of subverting the sacred. Take, for example, his poem Infant Sorrow:

My mother groand! my father wept. 
Into the dangerous world I leapt: 
Helpless, naked, piping loud; 
Like a fiend hid in a cloud. 

Struggling in my fathers hands: 
Striving against my swaddling bands: 
Bound and weary I thought best 
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

This was part of a collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It was a two part collection. In Songs of Innocence, he presented the beautiful ideal of something, and in his later Songs of Experience, he warped it to show how a world-weary mind mind might experience the same circumstance. In this case, we have birth. Is there a miracle of life? In one sense, sure. But in another, there is the horrible burden of life.

The longer he writes, the clearer that basic motif becomes. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell blurs the lines between the sacred and the profane to suggest that both good and evil, in their own way, are sacred. Devils and angels both have wisdom that we need to learn from. He even creates his own mythology and writes grand creation stories about the history of the world. He portrays God the Father (especially as seen in the Old Testament) as hideously oppressive and in constant war against the great spirit of artistic inspiration and human freedom. What was once sacred is now profane as Blake’s spirit of freedom descends upon the world.

That’s exactly what we have in the contemporary art gallery. We have people eager to call what was once sacred profane. Any sense that something is beautiful or worthy of particular praise is dangerous. Who is one person to tell another what is beautiful? To restrict in any way is wrong. That is the great truth in our era.

It pairs perfectly with the famed sociologist Philip Rieff’s critique of modern culture. Historically, a massive part of culture has been that series of restrictions placed on us (via both taboo and law) in the hopes of helping us live a good life. Do you want to be like Jesus? Then don’t sin. Do you want to honor the gods? Then don’t forget your sacrifices. By coming together around one great vision of purpose and orienting ourselves towards that vision, meaningful community is possible and visions of the sacred are kept. Modern culture, however, no longer has a meaningful vision of the sacred apart from autonomy from all external obligations. People do not long to be a grand embodiment of the good so much as they long to be free to do what they please. Under these circumstances, discussions of good or evil becomes almost laughable because so few people aspire to become more than what they already are:

Evil and immorality are disappearing… mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal , to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 6.

What we end up with is what Rieff calls an anti-culture. It can’t bind together or orient people towards a vision of the good life. The only thing really binding us together is mutual disgust at the thought of people telling us how to live, be the source older visions of natural law, religious obligations, or something else entirely. To paraphrase another great thinker, Stanley Hauerwas, the modern story is that we have no story except the story we choose for ourselves (Community of Character, 84). We end up rudderless in a life without meaning, desperately trying to create meaning for ourselves while knowing we just made it all up.

And what of the great thinkers and artists? Historically, their efforts were part of what bound us together. Buonarroti’s Creation of Adam, the icon Christ Pantocrator, the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle and other great works served the public by bringing them together to aspire to be like God. Today’s intellectual class does not feel the same burden:

I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naively danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose. Now, although there is some dancing again, the intellectuals mainly sit around and think in awe about the power and perversity of their instincts, disguising their rancorous worship of self in the religion of art.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 7.

While Rieff’s Moses seems a little elitist for my taste, I think there’s truth to what he’s trying to get at. We live in a world without a sense of the sacred with intellectuals and artists that would rather root out any remaining bits of transcendence than attempt to build anything that points to more than our own disenchantment and appetite.

That’s what I see Lewis lamenting here. The threads that have bound our culture together are unraveling. The waterfall is no longer a sign to point our eyes to God, so much as a mundane thing that might remind us of sex. The glaciers are no longer a sign that we are tiny, limited things in the world, so much as they are reminders of garbage. We have lost the sense that the world is pointing to something greater, and so historic memory of the sacred becomes bizarre. All we can do is ironically poke fun at the old world and trudge through our flattened-out world in frustration and disappointment.

But Lewis points to a solution: don’t give in. Don’t be someone who loses your sense of wonder. Be fascinated by the things that others think dull. Look at fresh cut crass and delight. Observe the miracle of honey. Taste it and be satisfied. Be astounded by the great cities of Jerusalem and Athens and the ideals they represent. Don’t lose hope, and don’t start defining yourself by opposition. Yes, he is absolutely being critical of his rivals in this poem, but the great hope he points to is not in opposition. That was Blake’s hope. “Opposition is true friendship,” he wrote (MHH20; E42) and eternal opposition seems to be the best that the modern anti-culture of self-gratification can offer. Don’t be like that. Be amazed. Rejoice in old stories about satyrs, magic, miracles, and devils. Recover the sacred, which never abandoned us even as we attempted to abandon it. Live a life defined by hope and beauty. Be the dunce in the eyes of the elites, “for the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,” (1 Cor. 1:25).

C.S. Lewis’s Nerdy Poetry: The Country of the Blind

~ Vincent ~ 1 Comment

Most of my experience with C.S. Lewis comes from those approachable classics that sit on many a Christian’s bookshelf: The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, The Great Divorce and a few others. Only recently have I started to see the more academic, professorial side of him. Books like The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval Literature are way more intense than Narnia, and frankly, they’re a bit of a slog. And now, I found out the man wrote poetry! Not just any poetry either. He wrote the nerdiest poetry you’ll ever find. These poems were not intended for general audiences. They’re just a smart guy playing with ideas in verse. If you enjoy them, great! If you don’t get ’em or don’t like ’em, I don’t think he would particularly care. My current success rate of “getting” his poetry is about 70%. Some of them are loaded with mythology and theory that I’m not familiar with (especially the Greek mythology, which he clearly loves), but the ones that I do get are brilliant. I thought I’d share a couple of them on here along with my thoughts as I work through them.

The Country of the Blind
Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some
Eunuch’d, etiolated,
Fungoid sense, as a symbol of

Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor
Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-
Sloped sea waves, or admired how
Warm tints change in a lady’s cheek,

None complained he had used words from an alien tongue,
None question’d. It was worse. All would agree ‘Of course,’
Came their answer. “We’ve all felt
Just like that.” They were wrong. And he

Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words —
Sold, raped flung to the dogs — now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily

Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among

Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,
Dear but dear as a mountain-
Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.

This one especially has consumed me as of late. I can’t help but read it and think about Jesus’s response to the disciple’s question: why do you speak in parables?

13 This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’ (Matt 13:13-15)

I generally assume that Jesus wants everyone to understand what he’s saying. Sure, I might rail against visions of him that are altogether too polite and soft, but by no means do I assume he would intentionally make his points opaque to keep people from understanding them. And we could go back and forth trying to soften the impact of the verse by applying different theological methodology to it (after all, it does say that they closed their eyes first), but it seems like it would be almost impossible to erase the sense that not everyone will understand what Jesus is saying and that that is intentional (John Calvin is smiling down on this paragraph, I’m sure).

Lewis’s poem is right in this same vein. We still have people that do not see, but it’s not their own willfulness or crafty parables that are keeping them from seeing. They’ve shut their eyes for so long that their biology has shifted to accommodate their decision. Even if they wanted to see, they lack the capacity. Worse than that, they refuse to confront the reality of their own blindness. They’re happy to discuss the world with the small amount of people that can still see, but only insofar as they’re treated as complete equals. Whatever is being discussed is primarily understood as a matter of internal experience, rather than external truth. “Of course, we’ve all felt like that,” they croon, completely missing the simple fact that they haven’t. Every piece of information being shared is radically different from anything they’ve ever conceptualized, but rather than admit it, they just insist that they already know and continue on.

What a tremendous way to look at the modern shift in metaphysics. I can’t help but think of it in terms of pastoral expectations as they were laid out in Andrew Root’s, The Pastor in a Secular Age. In each era, Christians have expected different things from pastors. In the medieval era, the priest had power. Even if the whole service was in Latin and you didn’t quite understand how communion worked, the popular imagination had such a strong sense of God’s action and a dynamic range of entities beyond human senses that you knew he carried power. He was the bridge between this world and the next. In a magical world, the priest stood as an obvious and clear figure worthy of your attention. With the shift to Protestantism, there was a fundamentally new way of imagining metaphysics. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the priest that was responsible for navigating the path between this world and the next; it was the individual believer. You were responsible for what you believed! You had to devote yourself to the highest ideals of Christian life and take responsibility for your own faith if you wanted to please God. Here, we see this tremendous shift towards the pastoral ideal as a professor. People like Luther and Calvin are the obvious legendary figures in this tradition, but the example Root provides is Johnathan Edwards. According to legend, Johnathan Edwards studied and prayed for thirteen hours every day. And his congregation was happy! They wanted to understand the intricacies of the world around them and the claims that were being made in the Bible, so if the pastor preached an hour long sermon that relied on multiple commentaries and theological bigwigs? Awesome! Bring it on. These were people that strove to see. They wanted to know the nature of the universe, and no watery spirituality would be an acceptable substitute.

Root details a long history of philosophical shifts that slowly lead to modernity, but as we approach our own era, the assumptions about what a pastor does have totally shifted. A pastor does not tell objective truths. That’s what math and science are for! No, a pastor works in the realm of values. They tell you how to live a good life. They help you understand who you are. They belong in the humanities section of a university, not the sciences side. Their value comes from their ability to befriend people, reflect an identity for others to consider, and build a massive church with multiple satellites to reflect the vitality of the community. The ideal pastor is a mix between an entrepreneur and an instagram influencer, encouraging us to try on a way of living that will make us happy. We moved from a world in which the Church was expected to teach objective truths about the world around us to a world in which the church was expected to help us feel subjective somethings within ourselves.

Unfortunately for moderns, Scripture is devilishly difficult to cast as something that’s primarily concerned with subjective feelings. The whole of the book bursts with objective claims about creation! And yet, religious dialogue is often dominated by what feels right and how we can live moral, decent lives. Not that either of these are inherently bad things, of course, but when they’re uprooted from the metaphysical grounding of the objective claims that surround them, they wither and shift whatever way the wind blows. Our cultural hesitance to let the audacious claims of Scripture be what they are muddies them considerably and betrays a certain unwillingness to claim them as true knowledge. Christians and non-Christians alike are put into a position where truth is what we make of it. We fail to see the reality around us because we’re so busy constructing our own narrative that suits us.

We do not see.

Even the claims in Scripture start to look less and less like truth claims and more and more like “sheer metaphors” and “myths.” What if Jesus was not actually Jesus? What if he’s only intended to be a metaphor for humanity’s capacity for good? What if Jesus’s resurrection is no longer an actual resurrection, but a symbol intended to reflect the eternal resurrection of hope and goodness in the world? That slow erosion of the claim slowly eats away at it, giving more and more authority to us and less and less to the claim itself. Symbolic meaning can always be uncovered in an objective event, but once the event or story is stripped of objectivity, not only does it lose the core of its meaning, but the possibility for symbolism becomes infinite. Without any semblance of authority, the claim exists only to allow others an opportunity to create their own meaning. The “divine forms, irremovable” that were once so obvious and clear to every eye have become “symbols of abstract thought;” ideas to toy with and little more.

The ultimate consequence is a sort of de-evolution. Lewis never was shy about suggesting that things in the premodern world were better, and here he’s said it in an incredibly direct way. The people he’s considering aren’t portrayed as the same bipartite beings that were created in Genesis: “God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” (Gen 2:7). Their descriptors lack that sense of divine spark. The language surrounding the blind creatures is primitive and earthy. They are “mouldwarps” with “fungoid” ways of describing things. They lack that spirit that separates them from the plants that preceded them.

And yet, the poem isn’t just a gripe about the good ‘ol days. At least, I don’t think it is. It’s profoundly melancholy. Some of these creatures still see. They see the grandeur of the stars, the waves, the human form, and the misty dawn. But even as they see the wonders around them, they have so few to to share it with. By the eyes they were given, they are able to see tremendous beauty, but they also become the bearers of an incredible sense of loneliness. What Christian in the postmodern era has not felt like that? Who has not lamented the inability of others to see the throngs of angels singing, the cloud of witnesses watching, the divine spark that lingers in every eye, and the glory of God in every rock? But attempts to uncover the transcendent turn shallow all too quickly. Even semi-regular churchgoers are all too often concerned with mere morality and tradition than the vibrant eternity around them, frustrating the Christian all the more. To see is to be lonely and burdened. How do you awaken others to the world?

Part of me wants to cut the intensity of the poem by suggesting that the claim isn’t quite what it is. It sounds hopelessly arrogant to claim to see when everyone else is blind. To say that you understand a reality that the rest of the world can only hopelessly grasp at until they are somehow granted sight is brash! But didn’t Jesus make those claims? Isn’t that the whole of the history of Christianity? Lewis has claimed to see, and while it would be more comfortable to mask the arrogance of claiming to know truth, it’s critically important for us to let his statement stand and consider it not as arrogance, but as humility in the face of a truth beyond himself.

Christianity-and-Water with C.S. Lewis

~ Vincent
Life hack: Taco Bell napkins make great bookmarks.

Continuing my grand tradition of reading way too many books at the same time, I picked up C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity again this week.  Lewis is so easy to read.  When he writes, I find that he doesn’t have to persuade me about much.  Instead, it’s almost like he’s uncovering all of the things I already believed in my heart, gathering them up, and presenting them back to me in a way far more logical and clever than I ever could have managed.  Don’t get me wrong.  I went through a period where I hated C.S. Lewis with a burning passion.  When you’re a Christian that wants to learn more about faith, he’s one of the only serious theologians that many pastors seem to be comfortable prescribing.  You’d get sick of anyone if they came up that many times!  But ultimately he’s prescribed for a reason: he’s phenomenally good.  Perhaps the closest thing to a mutual source of authority for Protestant churches in America.

In any case, this quote particularly struck me: 

I will tell you another view that is also too simple.  It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right- leaving out the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil and redemption.  Both of these are boys’ philosophies.  It is no good asking for a simple religion.  After all, real things are not simple.

Mere Christianity, 40

It was such a relief to hear that a man as distinguished as Lewis had experiences with pop faith that are so similar to ours today.  After all, how many people do you know that are just Christian enough to acknowledge that God exists, but can’t imagine that this God would want anything aside from their own happiness?  It’s so common! The term “moral therapeutic deism” is thrown around to describe that kind of faith today, and Lewis is talking about it all the way back in 1952.  That flimsy faith rarely gets further than this: God exists and he wants us to be happy.  Don’t be mean, love yourself, and everything will work itself out.  The best of secular wisdom is echoed back at an individual with a tint of religious nostalgia.  It’s distinctly frustrating to hear for those of us that are eager to dig in to Christianity as the core of our life, and a core that continually forces us to give things up, to repent, and to turn back to the baffling God that demands everything.  A faith less than that would seem frivolous to us!  As the famous agnostic philosopher Julian Barnes wrote, “there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you exactly how to live, which colours and stains everything,” (Nothing to be Frightened Of, 64).

On one hand, it was self-justifying.  I remembering being in seminary and seeing that the United Methodist baptismal liturgy didn’t contain the traditional question “Do you reject the Devil and all of his works?”  I asked the professor about the exclusion and his answer was blunt: “Oh, yes, they replaced that with ‘evil, injustice, and oppression.’  The governing body didn’t think they would be able to get the traditional language approved by a vote.”  What a loss! It’s a tragedy to throw away a liturgy over a thousand years old because we’ve fixed the language with something moderns find more comforting.  That stuck in my head. I imagined myself as the bold Christian, right alongside Lewis, representing the real faith for the world.

But don’t’ worry.  That spiritual cockiness didn’t make it through the week.

I’ve been working on a little project to try to understand how we can be better at Christian service. And as since I want to be better at serving in a distinctly Christian way, I have to understand what “Christian service” actually is and how it differs from other ways of serving it the world (community service, quid pro quo, etc.).  It’s been a delightful adventure so far.  A challenging one too!  I’ve begun by recording each narrative of service in the book of Acts and then recording commonalities between the events to see what consistently comes to the top.  And geeze!  It’s convicting! 

Two of the most common pieces of service in Acts are the invocation of the name of Jesus, and the proclamation of the Gospel.  I have to ask myself, do I do them?  Do I actually use the name Jesus?  The name that caused scandal all those years ago because of the brash claims that accompanied it?  Not really.  I often use “God,” which is a name that’s a lot more culturally comfortable.  It’s easy to say, causes less tension with other traditions, and is printed on all the money for maximum cultural complicity.  And how often do I proclaim the Gospel apart from preaching and teaching in the church?   The popular (and probably fake) St. Francis quote “Proclaim the gospel always.  Use words when necessary,” suits my sensibilities so well.  But is that what the apostles did?  Or is it a way that I can comfortably move in a secular world without risking discomfort?  I suppose none of this is “theology” in the way that Lewis meant it, but it’s certainly a way in which the faith I’m living is not like that of the Christians in the Bible.  I may include the “terrible doctrines” about Hell and sin, but I exclude the terrible actions that would risk embarrassment as I move through the world.

Lewis not only believed uncomfortable truths in the comfort of his own mind, but he lived them out in the real world.  And not always in a way that won him admiration!  Close Christian friends like J.R.R. Tolkien thought he was too evangelistic, and more than a few promotions went to other people because he was “too Christian” for the taste of others (131 Christians Everyone Should Know, 135).  He’s proven himself invaluable one more time on my journey.  On one hand, he gives a word that comforts.  On the other hand, the same word cuts to the core. I hope my faith is never too comfortable, in thought or in deed.