What makes a great author? Among attributes like winsome style and insightful content remains the uncanny ability to see cultural trends, the seeds of which are being sown now, but that won’t bloom for decades.
Read this and tell me if this isn’t today’s “postmodern,” pluralistic world?
Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.
Written seventy years ago in a religious newspaper called The Guardian, C. S. Lewis sought to describe the environment in which a devil-tempter tries to draw a human being, “the Patient” away from God. This is the environment Lewis brilliantly, poignantly described in first entry in a set of newspaper articles later published as The Screwtape Letters.
What do you think? Does that describe the world you live in?
1 comment:
While I think this is true, I find it disturbing in a varity of ways.
"Incompatible philosophies"? It seems a multitude of inconsistencies can be covered with merely the word "mystery." Inconsistency is something we scrutinize in others more easily than in ourselves. Is their ANY philosophy that some form of Christianity HASN'T adapted to and vigorously defended as compatible?
"Incompatible" may have more weight in our own self-examinations between our behavior and claims, rather than any actual "philosophies" (that resist the finiteness to close an argument). For example, most Christians hold several conflicting ideas about the atonement, not realizing each is part of a conflicting theological history.
It is a curious fact that many feel the need to lay claim to hodgepodge of philosophies to justify their behavior. But perhaps it's just defensive.
The real test is when you commit to a particular philosophy that challenges some of your valued desires. That is an "incompatibility" requiring you to truly examine what you think is true.
Bill Jackson, Oroville
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