During the Month of St. Clive

I write this as my community of Chico-Paradise is still feeling the devastation of the Camp Fire. This is also the "Month of St. Clive" (i.e., Clive Staples Lewis). So here's something to honor his memory and to celebrate his gift at speaking in times of crisis because he lived through many himself. 

I've adapted a piece I wrote that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a few years back.

November is a notable month for fans of C.S. Lewis: He was born on this day (29 November) in 1898 and left the world on the 22nd of the same month in 1963. The passing of this major figure in Christian thinking thus became a footnote to the day of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Lewis deserves to be remembered as one of the great lights of English academics for his scholarship on Medieval and Renaissance literature. But he is best known as a spokesman for Christianity. If anything, Lewis’s work is more widely read now than during his lifetime, thanks in part to the Hollywood films based on his landmark fantasy series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” It appears that a fourth Narnia film is reportedly in the works.

His more theological books—such as The Screwtape Letters, in which devils discuss how to corrupt a well-meaning human—have broad appeal because they defend Christian belief by answering questions that a doubting public might be struggling with. Author Anthony Burgess once wrote that “Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”

The crises that Lewis faced were substantial (although to the best of my knowledge, he never faced a literal fire storm)—his mother’s death when he was 9; being sent to a series of boarding schools that he detested shortly thereafter; fighting and being wounded in World War I; living through the Great Depression and World War II; caring for his alcoholic brother; and, finally, the death of his wife, Joy. 

How did he work through those crises? His stepson, Douglas Gresham, comments on Lewis’s response to Joy’s death, 

“He did what he always did under extreme stress. He sat down at his desk, and looking into himself and carefully observing what was happening deep in his mind where we keep our inmost secrets, he picked up his pen and an old exercise book and began to write.” Douglas Gresham about his stepfather, C. S. Lewis

He wrote about the crises he faced with atheism, with the Christian faith and the crises he faced simply because he was human. Lewis tells us that he became an atheist around age 14, but that he sought something more. 

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S. Lewis

In his early 30s he became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” as he put it. He struggled on his way to prominence as a champion of Christian orthodoxy, and that struggle animates his writing.

As he pondered conversion, Lewis grappled with his love of myth, which he called “at its best, a real unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” How could he believe in the Bible in light of all the other myths he treasured?

Here his love of literature helped him. “There is nothing in literature which does not, in some degree, percolate into life,” Lewis determined in his 1936 academic study The Allegory of Love.

He believed that the Bible was a book full of narratives and meaningful stories that “carries” the word of God and that derives its authority from Jesus Christ. He was not a fundamentalist, believing every word from scripture contains truth that's best uncovered through a literalist interpretation. Instead of literalism, Lewis interpreted the Bible as a literary text.

With the Bible as a source, Lewis took on crises that no human being can avoid—suffering, death and what one might call “the crisis of feeling.” The latter is that problem everyone faces when emotions simply don’t lead us to contentment. If life is supposed to feel good, what happens when it doesn’t? Feelings—particularly the emotional rush of life—remain for many the final arbiter of truth.

Yet Lewis found his feelings hard to handle when his wife died. Not only had he lost a

CSL (Hopkins) and Joy (Winger) in the film Shadowlands

cherished spouse, but he saw his own life replayed—Joy had two young sons whom she left behind at almost the same age as Lewis and his brother at their mother’s death. His searing honesty remains the most arresting feature of A Grief Observed, the book he wrote after Joy’s death: 

“Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.” C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed

But later in the book he resolved that even God does not respond to every inquiry: 

"When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.'" C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed

Accepting that not every question receives an answer brought Lewis the resolution and peace that lie beyond human understanding. He put himself into the One who doesn't always give answers, but who is the Answer.

C. S. Lewis & the Crisis of Feelings

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll begin to see frequent posts from the new book, Mere Science and Christian Faith, in the coming weeks. On the way there, I'm musing about another book on Christian spirituality called "Fully Alive." It some ways, it builds off a chapter I wrote in C.S. Lewis and the Crisis of a Christian, which I'm excerpting and adapting below.

During the early 1960s, the Christian Century published a series of answers by prominent

authors to the question, “What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?” The June 6, 1962, issue featured C. S. Lewis. Here are the ten books in his list:

1. Phantastes by George MacDonald  
2. The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
3. The Aeneid by Virgil
4. The Temple by George Herbert
5. The Prelude by William Wordsworth
6. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
7. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
8. Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell 
9. Descent into Hell by Charles Williams
10. Theism and Humanism by Arthur James Balfour

What strikes me is the mixture. Some have a specific engagement with secular philosophy—here I particularly highlight Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation and his profound critical reception of Greek philosophy. Others are especially Christian, like Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, which offers a Christian vision of all human history and which affected Lewis profoundly; similarly affecting was MacDonald’s Phantastes, a book that Lewis said "baptized" his teenage imagination. He read both before he became a Christian—one provided a rational vision, a supposition of how to make sense of history from Christian faith; the other featured an imaginative approach to Christian truth. But others are not in any way Christian, like The Aeneid, written decades before Christ and which Lewis loved so much he began a translation of this classic. This too moved and shaped him.

Since Lewis was foremost a literary man, this list also reveals a great deal about three sides of Lewis and mirrors the three sets of crises he faced: first of all, those related to moving away from atheism; second, those that had a theological focus; and finally, those that expressed common human themes. 

Outside of his fantasy work in The Chronicles of Narnia (where some of this apologetic work is slipped in through imagination), Lewis is perhaps best known for countering atheism. He turned his considerable intellectual and imaginative powers to the crises of Christian faith in the twentieth century and the issues presented by believing in Jesus Christ as the unique Son of God—even as this insight overlaps with his arguments against atheism—and then to the Bible as God’s word. But there remains one additional side to him.

Lewis always maintained a healthy and sustained understanding of life as it is lived by all human beings: marked by disappointment and depression, suffering and trials, as well as the prospect of death, which we can all see and which none of us will escape. I suspect his setting in life—his teaching at two secular universities, Oxford and Cambridge—kept him mindful of those that never walked inside Magdalen College’s chapel or read the pages of the King James Bible as a devotional practice.

Here was a man who relished a good walk, a pint of beer with his friends, and reading exceptional books. Here was a man who also described personal crises not limited to believers in Christ, like sorrow over the death of a friend in battle and disappointment over never achieving recognition as a poet. Indeed, the Bible itself recognizes the destiny of all humankind and its sorrows: “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7). For this reason, I continue to turn to Lewis because, frankly, I’m not always drawn to people that display their spirituality too boldly in their writing or who seem to think that all of life consists of praying, reading Scripture, and singing hymns. Writers who resonate with me acknowledge the mundane things of life, like filling the car with gas; having keys copied at the hardware store; and buying butter, flour, and orange juice at the grocery store. They also acknowledge the hard things in life, like watching your children grow up, realizing your time on earth is also passing, seeing parents age and die, or grasping that dreams you once held will never come to pass.

SEYA & CSL

As September comes to a close, two significant dates converge for me: September 26 marked the one-year anniversary of the publication of my book, C. S. Lewis and the Crisis of a Christian, and today (September 30) signifies the completion of the 16-month grant project I've been directing, SEYA (Science for Students and Emerging, Young Adults). In my previous post, I offered an overview of SEYA's findings, and here I'd like to ask one more time: What did I learn, and does "St. Clive" (aka C. S. Lewis) have anything to add?

With one long (perhaps even run-on) sentence, I'll summarize the strategy that emerged from this project: 

As a result of SEYA, I’ve discovered that there  is interest among emerging adults (ages 18-30) on how to integrate mere Christianity with mainstream science, and the strategy for this integration is to connect it with pressing life issues through a robust biblical hermeneutic, through relationships of trust, through skilled communicators, and through the use of high-quality and high-impact resources.

How do I evaluate the current "state of the question," as academics like to say? Is the integration of mere Christianity and mainstream science happening? Certainly, if we listen to Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, it's all for naught. But they may not have the full story. As Elaine Ecklund has discovered in her research--some of the most comprehensive to date:

"76 percent of scientists in the general population identify with a religious tradition" and "85 percent of Americans and 84 percent of evangelicals say modern science is doing good in the world." 

Both the qualitative analysis of our SEYA surveys with target groups of approximately 100 emerging adults, as well as the two-dozen in-depth interviews I conducted, indicate that there is interest among 18-30 year olds and that high-quality resources makes a significant difference in emerging adults' attitudes toward integrating Christian faith and mainstream science. (For you statisticians out there, the p-value on this sample group was .001.)

I think we still need more skilled communicators who, first of all, employ a robust (and thus not literalistic) biblical hermeneutic. For one engaging example, see Dave Navarra (from the SEYA team) and Scott Farmer take on the topic, "Hasn't Science Disproved God?" 

Of course, we could simply go back to Augustine who insisted that Christians shouldn't ignorantly talk nonsense about astronomy and other fields in their exposition of the Bible. "Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn." (The longer quote is in the Endnote.) 

It's true--we can't be stuck in a biblical approach that ignores scientific insights. Though John Calvin could be about as hard-headed as they come, he never tired of learning from secular (i.e., non-Christian and non-biblical) writers, and he wrote quite pointedly on this all the way back in 1559,

“If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God."

We know that God created the world--and we properly worship our Creator as a result--but we can't be sure how God did it from Scripture, because, for one thing, the Bible doesn't address that issue.

In fact, the Bible is concerned with something else entirely: our transformation as followers of Christ. As Lewis phrased it in Reflections on the Psalms, God's revelation in Scripture is not "something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table," as convenient as that would seem. This approach, however, is misguided. Instead Lewis presented one central component of a more robust, biblical hermeneutic: 

Follow the intent of the text. Read what it says, not what you want it to say.  

Instead of imbedding a math table in our brains, Lewis wrote, we take Jesus seriously and discover something unexpected:

"He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred fish."

And so, with Lewis in mind, I arrive at two elements of the strategy SEYA identified that we are still lacking: skilled communicators who present a sound approach to science and Scripture. I realize, of course, that Lewis wasn't perfect nor was he a scientist, but he did grasp the effects of science on the wider culture and expertly articulated mere Christianity in that cultural context. And so we could certainly use more of his ilk. He called it "translating" and left us with a question that has not been satisfactorily answered: 

"People praise me for being a translator. But where are the others? I wanted to start a school of translation."

Where indeed are these translators who understand the glories, challenges, and intricacies of science and bring mere Christianity to a scientifically and technologically saturated age? Part of the work I've been about with SEYA is to identify these translators--and perhaps to become one myself--but there's much more left to do.


Endnote: Here's the full citation from Augustine's Literal Meaning of Genesis (Bk. 1, ch. 19): "Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

The Bible: Outdated in Light of Science?

As I’ve been interviewing emerging adults (age 18-30) about their views on science and religion, here’s one key discovery: Ancient religious texts seem outdated and therefore unscientific. Why? Scientific knowledge and technology looks forward; it advances and improves. Religious knowledge seems to always look in the rearview mirror, and therefore religion stagnates.

      And though I try assiduously not to invoke “Saint Clive” (aka Clive Staples, or C. S., Lewis) at every turn, with angels singing in the background, thereby invoking putative infallibility, I can’t deny that Lewis both addressed this question and presented a thoughtful and entirely defensible answer.

      In his 1955 paper delivered at Oxford’s Socratic Club, “On the Obstinacy of Belief,” Lewis presented the contention (which he then sought to disprove) that scientists give up their beliefs in proportion to contrary evidence; believers cling to their beliefs despite evidence to the contrary. How can that be justified?

      Lewis resolved this problem by distinguishing between the “logic of speculative thought” (which dominates science) and the “logic of personal relations” (which is essential to belief in, and relationship with, God). But here I want to change the focus not to belief in God, but in the veracity of the Bible. I return to Lewis on this particular task in a moment (and more generally, I discuss it in chapter 6 of my book on St. Clive, which you can find here.) Shouldn’t we give up the Bible in light of science? 

      Certainly, the Bible does need to be updated and correlated with good science. Frankly, there are some notions that may appear “biblical,” which have to be jettisoned. When I’ve read various accounts of the Galileo trial—which, incidentally was not primarily about “science versus religion” since both Galileo and his adversaries were believing Catholics—there was considerable dispute about how to interpret the Bible’s assertion that the sun circled the earth (as in Psalm 19). Today, I doubt many Christians would conclude that the Bible teaches geocentricism. Instead the image of the sun’s running its “circuit” around the sky doesn’t teach that it revolves around the earth, but it metaphorically depicts what we actually see every day. In the same way, Galileo, along with Augustine over 1200 years before, concluded that if scriptural interpretation disagreed with known science, we should revise our interpretation.

      And so we should. Today, floating around many Christian circles are the dualistic versions of the soul—that there is an entirely separable substance within our bodies—something like air inside a tire, or more philosophically, a “ghost in the machine.” This owes much more to Plato than the Hebrew Bible. Accordingly, we can update and correct our doctrine of the soul by looking at the Scripture, which sees human beings as body/soul, a psychosomatic unity. We can also learn this from contemporary neuroscience, which certainly cannot find an immaterial soul. Or we can remember that a sharp tap on the head with a hammer will probably interrupt our prayer life.

      All this means we need to follow the truth wherever it leads and, whenever appropriate, update our biblical interpretation. As John Calvin rightly commented in his 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion,

If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.

If the truth appears in natural science, we need to learn and follow it. For this reason, a six twenty-four hour day creation is untenable if Christians want to take on mainstream science. But this is not a new idea. Back now to Lewis who pointed out that Genesis 1-2 probably “derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical,” or as the church Father Jerome put it, was written “after the manner of a popular poet” (thus a myth).  Put another way, the Bible is not a scientific textbook and doesn’t claim to be.

      Indeed and paradoxically, there is a grand positive here: science is not the sole arbiter of truth, and that our biblical interpretation is about learning to live within the narrative of the Scripture, to let God’s story become our story, as it were. We don’t memorize the Bible as we do the Periodic Table. Again to cite Lewis: the Bible

carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone and temper and so learning its overall message.

So, no, Lewis wasn’t infallible, nor does he have an answer for everything we face today. But he did get some things right, and we do well to listen and learn.

Another Problem for the Future of Science and Religion

(I'm continuing this series on the future of the dialogue of science and religion by citing the problems I've observed in emerging adults' engagement with this topic.)

For many young adults, the topic of science and religion seems too heady, takes too much effort, and is not connected with pressing life issues.

 

This is a problem that is not too different from the general cultural trend away from intellectual engagement. When I look over the U. S. cultural context, I see a nation that doesn’t spend excessive time in working its brains. Thinking does in fact involve work--if nothing else, the use of glucose in brain activity. It may also disturb formerly held patterns of thought. 

I have also mentioned in other contexts (e.g., chapter 7 of C. S. Lewis and theCrisis of a Christian) that the American context places an enormous weight on how we feel and what we’ve experienced. In some ways, this is a part of our marketing-advertising culture. In another, it’s a legacy of religious revivalism. What I emphasize in Lewis's writing is his conviction that letting emotions serve as the sole arbiter of truth isn't beneficial, but neither is entirely detached intellectual speculation. The resolution is to bring together feelings and thoughts. I'll insert an excerpt below:

Lewis was not given over simply to intellectual abstraction either. He believed that what we know must affect our lives. In this way, he mirrors the biblical emphasis on the heart not as the arbiter of emotions but as the center of action. So it’s neither feelings nor abstract cognition that matters. Eugene Peterson, when he paraphrases the Bible in The Message, gets it exactly right in his rendering of Galatians 5:25: “Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives” (italics are mine).  Mere ideas and changeable feelings do not themselves lead to action. Or as Lewis put in the mouth of Screwtape, his nephew Wormwood must “prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it . . . Let him do anything but act.” (C. S. Lewis and the Crisis of a Christian, pages 112-2).

A strategy for responding might also imply an angle of approach. It is also an issue of strategy for any number of topics—how do we help young adults want to engage intellectual issues, to bring thought to life? Generally, a key method is to demonstrate how the intellectual issue is not simply detached, but has practical relevance. In this case, it could be tapping into the topic of technology. 18-30 year olds seems more connected with how their iPhone might affect their happiness than whether the quantum theory supports belief in God. Minimally, it’s going to require engaging communicators who in many ways, want to reanimate intellectual work as a good human endeavor. Besides that, I have to admit we are swimming here against a strong cultural current.