1. Willard J. Houghton and the Founding of Houghton College

site of the original "seminary"

1. I've been at Houghton now for over a year and have been meaning to write down some notes on its story for some time. It has a rich history. You don't always know the history of a place, even when you go to school there, even when you work there. You know your part of the story.

original location

For example, it would be easy not to realize that it was actually started about a half-mile south, down the road, as "Houghton Seminary" in 1883. The word seminary is misleading because it was really just a high school (Houghton Academy also considers 1883 the year of its founding). And very little of the curriculum was Bible. The classes were much like any public high school today, except every student took a lot of Latin. Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Chemistry, German, Botany, Rhetoric, Physiology, and so the list goes on.

Willard J. Houghton
1825-96

2. Willard J. Houghton wanted the youth of this very rural county to have an education, and he wanted them to have a Christian, holiness education. He was a farmer, perhaps with the equivalent of a third-grade education. A revival in 1851 led him to rededicate his life to God. From then on he was a Christian force to be reckoned with.

In addition to farmer, now he became a preacher and a reformer. He was grieved at the sin brought to Houghton Creek by the traffic on the Genesee Valley Canal. The main drag of town was "Jockey Street," where on Sundays they raced and bet on horses.

When the Wesleyan Church building was constructed in 1876, [1] Houghton had a hand put on on the steeple to point individuals coming out of the tavern across the street to God. It gives a good sense of the piety of this man. He carried cards with Scriptures on them around with him. If he ran into any child of any color anywhere, he would stop his horse, jump off and give one to the child.

He became a lay preacher and evangelist. He often signed his letters, "yours for fixing up the world." The Wesleyan Methodist church of that day saw no division between what we would call social justice and personal holiness. It was founded against slavery. It played its part in the women's rights movement. They opposed drinking and card-playing and gambling and secret societies. And they preached personal holiness and entire sanctification. The first president of the seminary struggled with wearing a tie for several years. These issues all blurred together.

3. In 1882, Willard Houghton had seen to the rededication of a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Short Tract, not far from where he lived in Houghton Creek. While there, a denominational official put a burden on his heart to start a "first class seminary" in Western New York. The Wesleyan Methodists had started Wheaton College a few years previous, but had not given it adequate financial support and it was turned over to the Congregationalists.

ca. 1890, women, men, black, white

Now it was time to try again. The church wanted a school "away from the cities and large towns where it would be free from the environment of evil." It would be for all students, male and female, regardless of race. The school was to be a moral "lighthouse to this dark world," a "strictly Christian school." Only firm believers in Christ "and we hope partakers of the divine nature" would teach there. And "we want to make this school one of the easiest for poor children in the county."

Houghton started raising funds in February 1883. The incorporation papers were completed in April. The charter approved by May. Ground was broken in August, 1883. The first students arrived in the almost completed building the next year in September 1884. It had a principal (W.H. Kennedy), three teachers, and 70-80 students on both the elementary and high school levels. In 1888 they added a "Bible Training Department" to the high school.

Houghton became its financial agent, traveling to raise money for the new school. He would work himself to death raising money for the school. He wrote the year the school opened, "I have lifted and lifted, runn and runn night and day until it seems to me that I shall die... Please remember me in your prayers. And pray especialy for our school work."

He would live, work, and preach another eight years, finally passing in 1896.

[1] The church stood till 1989.

Sermon Starters -- "But if not"

Title: "But If Not"
Date: November 14, 2020
McCrae Brook Wesleyan Church, Eldred, PA

Text: Daniel 3

Introduction

• We know the story--Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
• Central verses: Daniel 3:13-18
• Thesis: We don't always know what God is going to do. (We know he'll do what's best.) We just need to be faithful.

1. Sometimes we don't know for sure what God is actually calling us to do.

• The current evangelical divide -- two groups, both of which with spiritual, godly people, who are totally convinced they know what God wants to be done.
• C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle -- the Ape and the Donkey. Confusion -- after all, "Aslan is not a tame lion."

What should we do?

• Seek God's face. Prayer, Scripture, Christian community
• Love and listen to the other side of the church.
• Be faithful. Step forward in faith. You have to live by your own faith (Rom 14; Isa 30)

2. Sometimes it works out.

• The 3 Hebrew men of Daniel 3.
• Beware victory -- "power corrupts." The fake Spurgeon quote about the Baptists not burning anyone at the stake.
• The story of Jehu -- the tension between 2 Kings 9-10 and Hosea 1 -- a tale of two prophets with a different vision. Those in 2 Kings want decimation. Hosea sees a basis for the fall of Israel.
• At least to some extent, Jehu must have done the right thing for the wrong reason.
• We need to be faithful even in victory.

3. Sometimes it doesn't work out.

• God can allow defeat or persecution for some greater purpose.
• Job -- it's a heavenly bet
• The strangeness of God's blessing, when loss turns out to be victory
• Hebrews 11:32-39

Conclusion

• "One step at a time"
• Love and listen to others in the church who disagree with you.
• Seek God's face and be faithful.

C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle

We read two pieces this week for the C.S. Lewis webinar with Peter Meilaender at Houghton College. Yesterday I posted my notes on his essay, "The World's Last Night" on the second coming.

Other works we have read so far include:

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy (his autobiography)
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume, which is about being attuned to the spiritual realm beyond the merely material

1. The Last Battle (1956) was the last of the Chronicles of Narnia both in the story world of the series and the last of the series to be written. On a popular level, this series is what Lewis is most known for, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (hereafter LWW) being the most famous.

Since I am a Philistine, I had not read any of these. I saw the 2005 movie of LWW. The lampost allegedly was modeled off a lampost down on Prebends bridge in Durham, just a few strides down on the Bailey from St. John's College where I lived and worked during my doctoral program. Man, those are pleasant memories.

I am not much one for novels, and I find it difficult to get momentum on those rare occasions I have read them. However, I will say that my pace quickened as I got about halfway through this one. I had divided my reading of the book into four days, 60 pages each. The first and second days were tough to keep myself going.

But the last two days of reading flew, and I was genuinely moved at the end.

2. I did not realize how rich a story world Lewis had created. I kept wondering if J. K. Rowling had taken some pointers from Lewis. There is a richness to a series of novels that creates a world. The hardest part is to get the world going. But once a group knows the backstory, a momentum exists that is very forceful.

When a series like Star Trek reboots, there is genuine excitement and richness when you meet old characters you know so well again. That's Uhura. That's Scotty. You can hear clapping as each familiar character takes the stage. Same with Avengers.

Despite how little I knew of the Narnia world, I felt this emotion to meet Reepicheep at the gates of heaven. I knew he had separated from the group in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There is Mr. Tumnus from LWW. I genuinely didn't know that The Last Battle would culminate and tie together the entire series.

The Magician's Nephew involves the creation of the world of Narnia. In the same way, The Last Battle is the end of Narnia. It is not exactly the end of the world, and I was left with questions about Lewis' understanding of the second coming, even after reading "The World's Last Night." Those who are there at the end are those who have died in the material world. Spoiler alert--a train accident kills the whole lot at once.

I think Lewis believes in the actual return of Christ to the world. But in the story world of Last Battle, the material world still continues on. It is the material Narnia that has ended. Nevertheless, "all worlds draw to an end, except Aslan's own country" (111).

3. Let me get out Lewis' metaphysic here. Lewis' Platonic tendencies are in full display in Last Battle. The physical Narnia they have known, "it was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world" (211-212).

There you have it. I saw the 1993 movie Shadowlands about a part of Lewis' life. Now I know where the term comes from and what it means. It's Plato. The physical realm in which we live is a shadow of the real, heavenly realm. We are currently in the "Shadowlands" (228). In heaven, "you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia" (226).

Digory puts its very clearly when he realizes what's going on--"It's all in Plato, all in Plato" (212). "This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it until now" (213).

So Lewis seems to have a sense that the material world will be destroyed and will cease to exist in the end, and we will all go to live in heaven. This is the view I grew up with as well. In fact, I read it into the book of Hebrews in my scholarly work. Although I haven't published my change of understanding, I have increasingly realized over the years that this understanding simply wasn't existent at the time of Christ. Language of the world's destruction always involves a new creation.

So we have rightly seen a recapturing of the importance of embodiment these last twenty years. The New Testament seems to focus on a new earth and not merely a "cut at the dotted line" and remove the inferior creation.

4. There are a number of fascinating, possibly brilliant, and also some cringe-worthy elements in the story. I'll mention them in order.

The initial "bad guy" in the story is an Ape named "Shift." On one level does he symbolize shallow progress or evolution, as Lewis addresses in "The World's Last Night"? He is smarter than the donkey, but not morally. The donkey (named Puzzle), although not too smart, has the right moral intuitions. He lets himself get talked out of the right courses of action by the Ape.

There are of course moral lessons here. Lewis is exalting a less intelligent person with the right moral instincts over a more educated moral fool. As it turns out, the Ape himself is a pawn in an even higher level evil game. The Ape thinks only of himself and is thus weak, susceptible to the manipulation of a much viler--and cleverer--cat and the Calormene from the south.

5. The depiction of the Calormenes from the south will cause a contemporary person like me to cringe. Lewis makes the bad guys black, and King Tirian disguises himself in black face. At least the black men are bearded. There would be no thought of the imagery this reinforces in Lewis' day. His world was a thoroughly white one. I mentioned in the previous post that Lewis seemed to have no interest in racial justice or "the great campaign against White Slavery."

He thinks nothing of creating a world where the realm and servants of Satan (Tash) are aligned with black-skinned individuals from the south (Africa), the "Darkies" (150).

6. An interesting feature early in the story is the repeated mention that Aslan is not a tame lion. It is perhaps ironic that the unpredictability of God can make it difficult sometimes to discern whether something is the work of God in the world or the work of the Devil! Repeatedly, the "good guys" question their true moral intuitions by overthinking it. "Aslan after all is not a tame lion."

Nevertheless, it can take some time even for the righteous to figure out the difference between what is God and what is not, between what is right and what is not.

7. The proximity of the truth to what the Ape and the deceivers say is sobering. The Ape says, "You think freedom means doing what you like? ... True freedom means doing what I tell you" (39). This would be true if God were speaking. The Ape "apes" the truth.

Indeed, the Ape and his lot innoculate the Dwarfs from the truth. When King Tirian shows them that the donkey is not Aslan, they do not rally to the cause of truth. They are less likely to believe anyone now. "Tirian had never dreamed that one of the results of an Ape's setting up a false Aslan would be to stop people from believing in the real one" (92). "By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger" (127).

This is a truly sobering statement and one worth some series reflection. One of the reasons it is important to disciple our children and the children of the church is because faith is much more easily instilled in a child than in a person who is already set in their intellectual ways. College students are often still very malleable when they are encountering ideas for the first time.

But a word of caution. If we set them up with something flimsy, flimsy faith, it will not be so easy to reinstall something more sturdy if it falls apart. And fundamentalist faith is very flimsy. The evangelical church right now is pursuing conspiracy theories and an alternative reality that will blow away with a puff of wind. And what will come of the faith of the children growing up right now in those homes? Will they become "nones"?

8. Lewis uses the cat Ginger and the Calormene Rishda to take faithlessness to a higher level. The Ape is simply out for himself. He is a selfish individual acting only for himself.

The Dwarfs have a group selfishness. "The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs" (91). This is a slightly higher level selfishness because they are for each other. The Ape is just looking out for number 1. The Dwarfs are out for their group. They will fight any other group that threatens their herd independence.

But the cat and the Calormene leader are out for a higher level evil. This is, by the way, a fear I have for America. What if an Ape comes along, a bit of a buffoon just out for himself. He has no long-term strategy. He's just out for himself, but is clever enough to deceive a lot of good people to his ends. After all, Aslan is not a tame lion.

But what if after the Ape comes a cat with a more strategic and pervasive cunning. What if someone comes behind with the tools of the Ape but a more devastating end? We had been sort out what Aslan is really like before a day like that should try to come.

9. The Dwarfs are quite fascinating. Near the end of the story they appear to be in the same heavenly space as the kings and queens of Narnia. But they think they are in a dark shed eating horrible food (180-86, chapter 13). I'm sure more penetrating reflection has been done on who they symbolize, but I thought of humanism. The Roman Seneca once said in the first century, "The proper study of humanity is humanity." "The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs."

Perhaps Aslan gives us the key to them. "They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in they cannot be taken out" (185-86). I wonder if Lewis had some of his Oxford colleagues in mind here, so clever, and yet so imprisoned.

This scene also reminds one of Lewis' thesis in The Great Divorce. In that story, those in hell could in theory transfer to heaven, but they don't want to. They are blind to their own situation. They are the person whose immediate reaction to heavenly things is disgust rather than longing.

10. The cat and Calormene leader do not believe in Tash any more than they believe in Aslan (98). This is another striking thing about the story. Tash is real (103). The Devil is real.

We had an interesting discussion of this question in the webinar last night. Are the gods that the Romans or Norse people worshiped real, like Tash? If you're like me, you grew up thinking, "Those nice but stupid Romans actually thought Zeus was real."

But at some point I took home 1 Corinthians 10:20. Paul believed that the Greeks of Corinth were sacrificing to demons. So it is not that Athena was real, but there were demons associated with every temple to Athena. We would call them demons rather than gods, but Paul certainly believed there were real, evil spiritual powers associated with pagan temples. Tash is real.

11. Another mistake Lewis exposes is that of pluralism. The cat and Calormene merge Aslan and Tash together into one being--Tashlan (e.g., 126). Of course they don't believe in either. But Lewis is exposing the believe that all gods are more or less the same. You call him Zeus. I call him Yahweh.

Notice that this is different than what happens with the Calormene soldier Emeth ("truth" in Hebrew). Emeth believes in Aslan but calls him Tash (201-205). This is a problem of Emeth's mind rather than heart. Aslan very strongly rejects the hypothesis that he and Tash are one.

"Is it then true," Emeth asks, "that thou and Tash are one?" "The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but it was not against me) and said, 'It is false.'"

So Lewis soundly rejects the idea that all religions are the same or that all gods are the same. What Lewis is arguing is the concept Karl Rahner called, "anonymous Christians." These are individuals whose heart believes in Yahweh even though their head doesn't think so. In Emeth's case, he thought he hated Aslan. But it turned out that it was Aslan that he was worshiping.

"If any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted" (205). This statement by Aslan reminded me of a statement in Mere Christianity: "We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" (II.5).

Bottom line is that Emeth "did not believe in Tash at all" (202).

12. Susan does not make it. "My sister Susan," Lucy says, "is no longer a friend of Narnia" (169). Then we have a cheap shot at lipstick, nylons, and invitations. I experienced this comment as a bit sexist.

Then eternity begins for them. "For them it was only the beginning of he real story... now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before" (228).

C. S. Lewis "The World's Last Night"

I have been posting my reflections on Lewis as we read selections for Peter Meilaender's C.S. Lewis webinar. Thus far:

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name.
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume

This week we read The Last Battle and the essay, "The World's Last Night" (1952). The key theme in both is eschatology, the first with heaven and the second with the second coming. This post is on the essay, "The World's Last Night.

1. Lewis suggests two basic categories for why some moderns find the idea of the second coming of Christ embarrassing. The first group involves theoretical objections, the second practical.

The first theoretical objection has to do with the fact that Jesus' teaching on the second coming sits against the backdrop of Jewish apocalyptic. A harsh critic might say, "Jesus was really the same sort of crank or charlatan as all the other writers of apocalyptic" (101). In other words, that Jesus was a lunatic.

Lewis has a number of objections to this line of thinking. First, the fact that there have been apocalyptic whackos would not negate legitimate apocalypticism. William Miller who founded the Adventist movement is mentioned. Lewis counters, "A thing does not vanish--it is not even discredited--because someone has spoke of it with exaggeration" (101). 

There's a Latin expression here, abusus non tolit usum--"Abuse is no excuse." You can't automatically disqualify an idea because someone abuses it. 

2. A softer push back would say, "Every great man is partly of his own age and partly for all time. What matters in his work is always that which transcends his age, not that which he shared with a thousand forgotten contemporaries" (102). Lewis rightly notes that in this view, "we are assuming that the thought of our age is correct."

Let me leave Jesus out of it for a moment and say that I do believe that there are items of progress in which we do have a better understanding--or at least more useful one--than in ages past. The laptop I am typing on is better than anything anyone from Lewis back to Adam ever had. Obviously our understanding of science is superior--or at least our constructs are far more useful--than any place or time before in history. It is simply the case.

I am/we are not smarter than the people of the past, but how could we not be at a great collective advantage to be able to stand on the shoulders of the smartest people from all over the world throughout all of history? How could not the average understanding not be more likely to be more insightful, over time, when we have everything from the past to start from?

That's assuming we listen. No generation is smarter than the previous ones. It may only be a remnant at any time that benefits--the majority may drive us all to perdition at any time. The twisted may blow us all to a nuclear Armaggedon at any time. But the "insightful remnant" at any time should in theory stand on ever higher heights in any field that affords a collective wisdom. 

There will be fits and starts, regress and progress. But I continue to believe that this insightful remnant reached a new level of historical consciousness in the late 1800s. The current generation sees plenty of regress, but there is an intellectual remnant.

So I reserve the right to critique Jewish apocalypticism. For example, the world is not flat. The dead are not in a cave with four hollows in a mountain somewhere. Heaven is not a series of skies straight up to God. I am not smarter than the author of 1 Enoch, but I am right and he was wrong on many things. My understanding has progressed from 1 Enoch's apocalyptic worldview.

3. With regard to Jesus and the earliest generations, Lewis says some curious things. Lewis says that Jesus got it wrong in Mark 13:30 and 9:1--"This generation will not pass until all these things come to pass." Moreover, "they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime" (104).

He considers this a great sign of the authenticity of the Gospels, on the one hand. He also points to Jesus claims to be "ignorant" in Mark 13:32. His bluntness is a little jarring. I don't like using the word ignorant in relation to Jesus. 

However, he expresses a position that I often have in a more tactful way: "The God-Man was omniscient as God and ignorant as Man" (106). Jesus was unconscious when he slept. He did not read Plato as an infant. And Lewis says he was "merely organic life in His mother's womb." Lewis says we must "asquience in mystery." "It would be difficult... repellent, to suppose that Jesus never asked a genuine question" (107). 

4. He continues to rail against a progressive view of history. He and his generation lost this view after WW1 smashed it to bits. "The modern conception of Progress or Evolution... is simply a myth" (108). He is not talking about biological evolution--"I am not in the least concerned to refute Darwinism as a theorem in biology" (108).

He does note, however, that the myth of evolution preceded the biological theory (109). Nor does biological evolution have a straightforward sense of progress. I have described it as "survival of the flukest." Most importantly, even if evolution did imply inevitable biological progress, it would not suggest "any law of progress in ethical, cultural, and social history" (111).

I do not disagree with Lewis here. However, I do believe that egalitarian culture is morally superior to the colonialist world he grew up with. The values of a contemporary American public school is morally superior to the "concentration camp" school so typical of England in his childhood (see Surprised by Joy). 

He makes a snide remark against "the great campaign against White Slavery" (120). I squarely reject comments he makes in more than one place as if to say we shouldn't worry about trying to make the world a more just and equitable place. I'm a Wesleyan, after all.

5. There are some good warnings here though. We should not assume we know where we are in God's story. "How can the characters in a play guess the plot?" (112). "We do not and cannot know when the world drama will end" (113). "We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows."

6. We should not fear the second coming. But "at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question, 'What if this present were the world's last night?'" (117). At the same time, while perfect love casts out fear, "so do several other things--ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity."

God's judgment "will be infallible judgment" (121).  

Science, Scripture, and Faith

This fall I am teaching "Science and Scripture" for the second time. The structure of the week is a recorded video on the science and then a live session engaging questions of Scripture and faith. After each week, I have been making the science lectures public. I plan to deposit them here. 

Perhaps eventually I will also independently record the lectures on the Scripture/faith side of the equation. Or maybe I'll write it all up into a book someday. In any case, here are the lectures on science as they come out publicly.

1. Science and Faith: A Mixed History

2. The Big Bang and Creation

3. Quantum Indeterminism and Faith

4. Adam, Eve, and Genetics

C.S. Lewis -- "Transposition"

The final installment in our reading this week for the C.S. Lewis webinar with Peter Meilaender is Lewis' sermon, "Transposition," published in the same collection of sermons as "Weight of Glory." We have also read Surprised by Joy, and Books I and II of Mere Christianity.

"Transposition" was delivered on May 28, 1944, in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford. Apparently, Lewis broke down in the middle of reading it and had to sit down before he could finish. I think it would be fair to say that it is the most profound piece of his thinking that I have read.

1. Perhaps the best way to slide into the sermon is to say that he is arguing against reductionism. But I also think he would be dissatisfied with that description. He is arguing for the transcendent. His basic tact, quite fascinating I think, is to note that the same visible "sign" can relate to more than one "signified" (102). He is using here the language of Ferdinand de Saussure.

So some instances of individuals speaking in tongues may just be gibberish, but many of us believe that on the Day of Pentecost something transcendent was happening, something truly spiritual. To put it a more convincing way to outsiders, the same acts can reflect both revenge and justice. The same vowel letter can reflect different sounds. The same sensation can reflect different emotions.

"Transposition occurs whenever the higher reproduces itself in the lower" (103).

2. What if there were a symphonic piece that was put into a purely piano piece. The person who had heard the symphony would know that the piano version was a reduced version, but the person who knew only the piano piece would not know this.

He gave a couple examples that were reminiscent of Plato's myth of the cave. It seems beyond question to me that he is a kind of Platonist (he uses the word archetype more than once). I'm also reminded that some of the Romantics, for whom I believe Lewis had great sympathies, considered themselves neo-Platonists.

One illustration is that of a Flatlander to whom you might try to explain three dimensions. He might say, "Isn't it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it?" (101).

Also, say a mother and son were in a dungeon, but he too young to remember the outside world (109-110). She, an artist, draws the outside world for him with a drawing pad and a box of pencils. She thinks he understands until, one day, she realizes that he actually thinks the outside world is made up of pencil marks.

The bottom line is that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned" (105). In other words, if you do not have an awareness of the spiritual, the world will inevitably seem materialistic.

3. There is something beyond a sign that signifies something. A picture of a sun or lamp, for example, can be seen because the sun or a lamp is shining on it. "Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it" (102). This relationship, where the sign not only points arbitrarily to something but "the thing signified is really in a certain mode present" goes beyond the symbolical to what he would cal the "sacramental."

What he calls transposition is of this sort. "The heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal existence (111).

4. He ends the sermon with four points. First, "transposition" is not development. It's not growing into the spiritual out of the material, like evolution. "The Spiritual reality... existed before there were any creatures who ate" (112). "Real landscapes enter into pictures" rather than real trees and grass grow out of pictures. This also feels a little Platonic on Lewis' lips, but it can be read in a non-Platonic way.

Point two has to do with the incarnation. Lewis has no problem with the words of the Athanasian Creed that the incarnation worked "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of Manhood into God" (113). His fourth point is similarly on the resurrection. We may feel with our senses the transcendant experience of the Spirit. Not entirely sure what he is getting at here.

Finally, his third point deals with the reductionist, the one who can see "all the facts but not the meaning" (113). He likens the materialist to a dog that can't understand pointing. "A finger is a finger to him, and that is all" (114).

C.S. Lewis -- Mere Christianity Book II

Earlier in the week I posted some thoughts on Book I of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Today we move on to Book II. This is as far as we are reading in the book for the C.S. Lewis webinar.

1. Book I was titled, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." In it, Lewis basically argues that we can discern the existence of a moral standard in the universe and that such a standard is best explained by something like a mind placing demands on us. However, though this law exists, we find that we thoroughly fail to achieve its demands.

Book II is titled, "What Christians Believe."

2. As Book II begins, Lewis characteristically begins working his way through a decision tree, at each step honing in on a more refined understanding of the moral situation of the universe and on the character of its God. For example, the Christian can accept that there is partial correctness in all the other religions of the world. By contrast, if you are an atheist, then you must conclude that the majority of humans that have lived have been wrong about the existence of deity. Score one for theism.

Then he moves to the question of what kind of God we are likely talking about. Is the deity such that there really is no right or wrong? Is the deity beyond good and evil? Or is there definite good and a God who takes sides? He has already argued that good exists. 

So now he contrasts pantheism with a God who is distinct from the creation as creator. If God is identical to the universe or if the universe is part of God, then the moral ambiguity of the universe also applies to God. "If you think some things really bad, and God really good, you cannot talk like that" (40). I do agree with Lewis that God is distinct from the creation. But I argue for this distinction on the basis of ex nihilo creation rather than from a moral perspective because I am more Aristotelian than Platonic. [1]

3. This leads to the problem of evil. "If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?" (41). Lewis now makes an argument that works with people but I don't think works with logic. It amounts to this. If there is no God then what are you complaining about? "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line" (41). Here is again his sense that an innate human sense of right and wrong implies it exists. "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning" (41).

Now I think it was in Surprised by Joy that Lewis remarked that some people who don't believe in God are very angry with God. I think this is a fair observation. It also is self-contradictory. So Lewis rightly points out, I think, that you cannot fault God for evil and suffering if you don't think God exists. I believe Lewis correctly points out that if there is no God, then there is no evil. This is a reason to want to believe in God--if God does not exist, then evil and suffering have no ultimate significance. We're just road kill waiting to happen.

However, there are plenty of atheists who are ok with being road kill. Not very pleasant, but at least consistent.

4. In the second chapter of this Book, he argues that "this is a good world that has gone wrong" (43). He addresses the person who would say, "That's just odd" or "That's too complicated to be likely." He calls such objections "boys' philosophy" (42). "Reality... is usually odd" (43). "Reality... is usually something you could not have guessed." I'm not real fond of this "credo quod absurdum est" argument (I believe because it's absurd), but it's really a side note anyway.

If God is good and the world has evil, Lewis has argued God must be apart from the creation. (I'm good with this point, but I suspect there is a tinge of Neoplatonism here in Lewis' mind.) So is this a situation of a world that has gone wrong (orthodox Christian position) or is there something like a dualism of good and evil in the universe?

In this section Lewis drips Augustine. "Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way" (44). "No one ever did a cruel action because cruelty is wrong--only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him" (45). "You can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted."

Dualism thus does not work because evil is the twisting of the good. The good is the standard and default. "We have no experience of anyone liking badness because it is bad" (44). This fits, by the way, with his comments on pederasty in Surprised.

Now I am not a dualist either, and I am sympathetic to Lewis' argument here. But I am not a moral ontologist like Lewis either, who almost sees good as something like a thing with its own existence. I am more like that great nominalist the apostle Paul when he said, "Nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean if someone thinks it is unclean" (Rom. 14:14). 

So for me our intentions make an act evil in a particular context, not the act itself. It is the nature of our choices in particular contexts, not the acts or even the consequences, although consequences are important to God because people are important to God. There is a difference between evil and suffering.

At the end of chapter 2, Lewis introduces Satan and the "Dark-power in the universe." He is not arguing for dualism so I don't think he would say Satan's existence is in some way necessary. Nevertheless, "Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war" (45). "Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong."

5. Chapter 3 largely presents the free will theodicy (Augustine strikes again). I am sympathetic to this argument. "Free will is what has made evil possible" (47). "If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad." "The better stuff a creature is made of--the cleverer and stronger and freer it is--then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong" (48).

"God designed the human machine to run itself" (49). This human machine was made to run on God-fuel. "God designed the human machine to run on Himself." But human civilization doesn't use the right gas. "That is the key to history." "Each time something goes wrong." We do not run on the right fuel. "They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans." [3] 

But God has sent in help. The first is the human conscience. See my previous post. The second is Jesus, "a man who goes about talking as if He was God" (49).

6. Here then at the end of chapter 3 and into chapter 4, Lewis presents his signature "Lord, liar, or lunatic" argument. The train of thought goes like this:

• Jesus claimed to be God. Therefore,
• Either he was telling the truth (which makes him Lord) or
• He wasn't and knew it (which makes him a liar) or
• He wasn't and he didn't know it (which makes him a lunatic).

I suspect that twenty-first century Brits are more open to the other options than they were in the 1940s. Lewis says you cannot chose the option that says, "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God" (50). No, if he isn't Lord, he must either be a liar or a lunatic.

Now of course if you read someone like Bart Ehrman, he would deny the first premise. Ehrman would deny that the historical Jesus actually claimed to be God. I've also noted that Josh McDowell has added "legend" to the list of options, addressing mythicists who claim that Jesus wasn't even a real person.

7. Chapter 4 addresses the question of atonement. Here I love the phrase "deep magic" from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Lewis doesn't use that phrase here. Lewis insists that Christians do not have to believe one particular theory on how it works. "My own church--the Church of England--does not lay down any one of them as the right one" (53). But "a man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him."

But Lewis gives his sense of one such theory, penal substitution. He does not take punishment here in the sense of the "police-court sense" (54). Rather, it's about getting humanity out of a hole it got itself into. Humanity is a "rebel who must lay down his arms." "This movement full speed astern is what Christians call repentance."

"Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly" (54). So God becomes human. "He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God" (55). My Western individualism has always made this argument difficult for me to follow. I think Jesus death makes sense broadly as a satisfaction of the justice and "moral order" of the cosmos. 

But the detailed logic of penal substitution seems forced to me, and ultimately I do believe God had the authority and sovereignty simply to pardon humanity. The cross was far more for us than for God. In the end, there is a deep magic done here, but I'm not sure we can put it into a tight syllogism.

He helpfully adds, "Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture" (56).

8. The final chapter of Book II anticipates the next Book on morals, which unfortunately I will not be covering at this time. In chapter 5, Lewis makes an altar call for a decision. I thought of Billy Graham, whose ministry began in earnest at about the same time. 

"The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him" (59)... or her. "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names--Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. At least those are the three ordinary methods" (57-58). 

I am always fascinated in such contexts by the fact that the Holy Spirit is not mentioned so often (e.g., in Richard Peace's, Conversion in the New Testament). The Holy Spirit is the indication that a person is a Christian and the only means to the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is the juice on which baptism, faith, and communion run if they run at all. Nevertheless, I do believe in means of grace.

He ends the chapter and Book with two fascinating side notes. One is that "God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" (60). I am deeply sympathetic to these statements because of the revealed character of God in Scripture.

The final side note has to do with why God doesn't just invade the world to end evil. "Well, Christians think He is going to land in force." (The allusions to WW2 are interesting, which was in process at the original time these lectures were given on the radio). 

"Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it" (61).

[1] And I am more "nominalist" than Aristotelian. Or shall I say Wittgensteinian? I prefer to think of groupings of things by commonalities, "family resemblances," rather than by essences. This third answer to the problem of universals and particulars also fits with what we might call pragmatism.

[2] I doubt Satan has genitalia.

[3] I remembered here that my old colleague Steve Horst is quite fond of Greg Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil. I believe Horst likes Lewis, and Boyd points to Satan as the biggest explanation to the problem of evil.

C.S. Lewis -- Mere Christianity Book I

1. Last week the C.S. Lewis class/webinar began at Houghton College. Last week we read Lewis' autobiography, Surprised by Joy and his sermon, "Weight of Glory." The argument for God in these works was described as an "argument from desire."

I might note that, in Surprised by Joy, Lewis mentions that the Joy argument was one that featured on his path to Christianity but was not one that particularly continued beyond that phase. The basic argument, it seems, is that the longing for Joy, without being able to attain it in this life, is an indication of the existence of glory/joy beyond this life.

This argument felt vaguely Platonic to me. It reminded me of the ontological argument for the existence of God. A little research reassured me that I was not entirely crazy. Last year I bought Michael Peterson's C.S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview to give me a more systematic perspective on Lewis' philosophy. Sure enough, Lewis is sometimes considered a "Christian Platonist" (9), and in The Last Battle Professor Digory tells Lucy, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato" (11-12). 

2. I suppose this all partially explains why Lewis has never spoken to me. I feel a little bad about this fact because so many of my friends absolutely love him. And I note that Francis Collins basically came to faith on Lewis' moral argument, as he says in The Language of God.

Mere Christianity is the one work of Lewis that I read either in college or seminary. I had difficulty understanding it at the time. I wonder in part if it's because I just don't think like Lewis. At that stage of my life, I was much more Aristotelian I would say than Platonic. I had much more of a scientific mind than a idealist one. 

It was clear in Surprised by Joy that Lewis came to faith through idealism. He became first convinced that realism is wrong, that truth is to be found in a sense of an absolute ideal. Hegel, then Bergson's elan vital, then God. This is a path completely foreign to me. 

Bergson shows up at the end of chapter 4 in Book I. He mentions the sense of a life-force as an in-between stage. We know from Surprised that these comments were autobiographical. "One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences" (31-32). [1]

3. The argument in Book I goes as follows:

• "Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way" and "they do not behave that way" (18). Lewis calls this the "Law of Human Nature."
• Explanations of this common sense are not explained as a herd instinct (19) or a social convention (21).
• This must be a real thing, "a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves" (27). This is the Platonic move.
• A materialist view does not explain this thing. Only a "religious view" does. There is a direction to this moral law within us. It indicates purpose. We would expect something akin to a mind to be behind it. 
• This is somewhat disconcerting to us. We are aware of this standard over us that we cannot meet. "If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft" (34).

4. In my early years, I found the cosmological argument the most convincing argument for God, like a good Thomist/Aristotelian. "Nothing comes from nothing." Currently, I find the "fine-tuning argument" most convincing, a form of the argument from design. The only other alternative I see is a multiverse.

But I've never found the ontological or moral argument persuasive. "If I can conceive of a greatest possible Being it must exist." "If all humanity has an innate sense of right and wrong it must exist."

As I implied in my critique of "Weight of Glory," one has a sense that Lewis was not fully conscious (aware, yes, but it didn't sink in) of the extent of human cultural diversity. I will read The Abolition of Man after this course is over, where I think he addresses this question more extensively. But I think I see peek through his argument twentieth century British sensibilities, even "white" sensibilities, even his personality. [2] 

Although it is often responded that Lewis was not speaking to a specific common moral sense (rather the fact of a moral sense itself), this is not really what he says in Mere Christianity here. He gives specifics to right conduct as he understands it--"fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness" (34). I thought of the Spartans and Dobu who taught their children to steal. I thought of Ayn Rand and the "virtue" of selfishness. 

I'm not sure that a lot of people today feel even the slightest twinge of guilt when they don't "do to others as you would have them do to you." As a former car salesman once told me glibly with a smile, "If a sucker comes in, I'm going to make some money." The idea that everyone has a conscience, a little voice telling them when they do wrong, seems very much a feature of British and certain strands of European culture to me in its formulation.

5. Chapter 5 of Book I also explained another feature of Lewis I thought I had observed. There can ironically be a certain moral "coldness" to Lewis. Indeed, I think I have observed a certain "duty-based" ethical orientation in some of those who find Lewis' thought most attractive. This is the attitude that relishes for just a second that the Prodigal has gotten what he deserved and makes sure he has thought through and learned his moral lesson before he's allowed to step back into the village.

In short, it seems to me that there is a moral legalism to Lewis. Before God was a person to Lewis, he was a moral absolute. In that sense, the flavor of God in Lewis seems a little skewed to me. God is a measuring rod before God is a person. Romans 3:23 for Lewis is "all have sinned because they have fallen short of God's absolute standard." I think its actual meaning was "all have sinned and thus are lacking the honor God intended for them." 

A revealing comment is when Lewis sees justice as a balancing force to love. "You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice..." (21). In my theology, justice is a subcategory of God's love. If I am right that he pits them against each other here, it is a significant defect in his theology, in my opinion. It contributes to a certain moral coldness that I think I have sometimes observed in some who love Lewis.

I hear a Reformed Anglicanism lurking here, not unlike a friend I had in England who was an Anglican priest at the time. He was concerned that I didn't feel my own vileness enough. It seems to me there is a bit of the penal substitution of the Middle Ages lurking here--Anselm, another Platonist.

But what am I to say? I am thankful that many have come to Christ through Lewis. He was clearly brilliant. I am nothing. I will continue to open myself up to his critique.

[1] My page numbers correspond to The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics.

[2] He mentions in Surprised that he just couldn't accept a philosophy where morality wasn't innate. That's not a philosophical argument but a personal one.

Book Review: C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was auditing a course at Houghton on C.S. Lewis, taught by Peter Meilaender. I hope you'll excuse the fact that my previous post lacked some depth of understanding of Lewis. Not that I have it now, but I am continuing to binge read Lewis for this class.

1. In the last three days I rushed through Surprised by Joy, the autobiography of Lewis' conversion. To be frank, I felt a good deal of sadness about Lewis' childhood. I had never thought of Lewis as a tragic figure. But it seems to me that his childhood was quite unhappy in some key respects. 

It got happier it seems in his late teens. Even happier after WW1. I suspect much happier in his 40s. But I feel like I have a better understanding of what feels to me the strange combination of cold logic and Romanticism in Lewis.

2. His mother died when he was nine, almost ten. He did not get along well with his father. His dad seems an odd bird of the sort you would meet in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Melodramatic. Twisted things. I immediately thought of an acquaintance of mine that always seemed to get things twisted in their mind, and once it was lodged, it was very difficult to dislodge.

Both Lewis' initial time at boarding school and his year at Wyvern seemed particularly bad. I was appalled at what seemed to be institutionally sanctioned bullying. Lewis also talks about what he calls "pederasty"--older boys with younger boys in the school. This was around 1910.

Beatings for bad grades on exams doesn't seem like a particularly good teaching technique. Hazing of younger students by older ones is not completely foreign to the US. I consider what happens during pledge week at many universities to be somewhat of this sort. I've even heard of bullying initiations at Christian colleges several decades ago. Unchristian nonsense. 

Lewis' remarks on the pederasty were quite astounding. He paints it as one of lesser evils of Wyvern, certainly less evil than the cruelty of the place. "Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh" (109). He considered those relationships voluntary rather than forced, and the older boys, he suggested, became less cruel in those encounters. "In his unnatural love affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood [older bully] went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was 'One of the Most Important People There Are.'" 

And while the love was twisted "Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity" (110). This is quite an astounding passage. He is clearly not endorsing the practice. He is more indicting the violence of the "public schools" of that day (which in England are actually what we would call private schools). And he is indicting what he considers the hypocrisy of those who rail against such things. He attributes their feelings to "nausea" and disreputableness. "The real reason for all the pother is, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law. The World will lead you to Hell, but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job" (109).

Lewis himself was heterosexual, if a bit unromantic in that sense. He mentions a tryst with a girl in what we would be our early high school (68-69). He alludes to a twenty-year period when he lived with a woman twenty years his senior (198). Probably some Freudian things going on there. It started before he was converted and perhaps he felt duty bound to remain with her thereafter, which he did until she died.

Of his comments on pederasty, he confirms the thesis I have held now for twenty-five years that the notion of an orientation or "sexuality" is relatively new in history. Even for Lewis, indeed I would say even for my mother who is 94, same-sex is something people do rather than something they are as a matter of being. Lewis says of the boys at the school, "The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them" (109).

3. But the above is not the point of the book, of course. The point of the book is to share how he came to faith.

He was raised in the church. Most were in England 1900. He mentions his mentor Kirk (chapter 9) who was an atheist and yet still dressed up for the Sabbath (139). He mentions several atheists in his journey. Lewis allows himself to be confirmed while he is still an atheist because he doesn't want to get into it with his father (161).

Lewis first got a little serious about faith at his first boarding school (33), but it mostly involved fear and duty (34, 171). Indeed, he tries so hard and fails that he somewhat burns out on it. I identified with this in my college days, the tyranny of the oughts. Thou must get up and do devotions before 8. Thou must pray longer and longer of an evening before bed. These are now easy things but not so much to a hyperactive, attention deficient 17 year old male.

At Chartres, the lower school at Wyvern, he lost his faith and became an atheist. He gives a number of causes. One was a lovely matron who introduced him to all sorts of unorthodoxies and, in the process, made him realize there was more spirituality on the market than just orthodox Christianity. Then he was all too happy to be rid of fear and duty. 

Then there was classic mythology. Why should one be ridiculous and Christianity different? Then there was his pessimism, not least assisted by his father's pervasive expectation to end in ruin. "And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief" (66).

4. The title of his autobiography hints of how he came to faith. It is a kind of argument from desire. I've heard people say, "Anyone can be happy, but joy is a Christian word." I always thought that was a little sappy. But I wonder if the idea is ultimately taken from Lewis.

Lewis speaks of Joy as something distinct from happiness and pleasure. For one, in some respects you can get pleasure whenever you want. For him, however, Joy is something that comes on you unexpectedly, something you can't make happen. And Joy is not something you have but a strange paradox of a glimpse of a delight you don't have. 

"The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting" (166). It is "desire, not possession." I wrote "prevenient grace" in the margin.

It seems related to the glory of the sermon "Weight of Glory" from my last post. Joy is something like a glimpse of glory. Meilaender also connected it to The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader and Reepicheek's final destination. Lewis mentions three times in his childhood that he got a vision of this Joy (16-17).

5. His return to faith began when he was receiving private tutelage at Bookham, from 1914-16. What different times, where a person might go live with a tutor to prepare for Oxford entrance exams. Lewis remembers moments of previous Joy, particularly a spark of delight toward Norse mythology he had at one point (he calls the experience "Northernness").

"Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else... does the thrill arise" (168). He becomes aware of "something other and outer." But it is "the Object, the Desirable," something "further away, more external, less subjective." The title of this chapter is "Check" as God, the "Adversary" at this point, begins to make his move toward Lewis.

A doubt arises in his atheism, a crack. "A drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism" (175). He falls under the spell of Yeats, who is a believer. "I now learned that there were people, not traditionally orthodox, who nevertheless rejected the whole Materialist philosophy out of hand" (175). 

So God moves Lewis toward faith. He fears there might be "a world, behind, or around, the material world." He is drawn to "Holiness" (179). 

6. After the war, Lewis came to Oxford. There God moves him one more step. First, through Henri Bergson, he becomes convinced that the universe must existent. Something has necessary existence. Then through a friend he becomes convinced that there must be something beyond the sensory world. He cannot become a behaviorist and his friend shows him this is the alternative (209). He becomes an Idealist (like most at Oxford at that time--this is the stream of Platonism I mentioned in my previous post.) He comes to believe in the existence of "the Absolute."

Chapter 14 is titled "Checkmate," where he comes "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction" back to a belief in God (229). "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England" (228-29). This chapter outlines the steps from belief in the Absolute, to belief in Spirit to belief in God. "My Adversary [God] began to make His final moves" (216).

It begins with the realization that all the people he admires are Christians. First it was a fellow student. Then it dawns on him that so many of his favorite authors are believers--George MacDonald, George Herbert, Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, Milton. Next he comes to an important philosophical distinction between reality and reflection on reality. Joy is not reflection on joy. It is real.

"A desire is turned not to itself but to its object... it owes all its character to its object" (220). "Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses, the naked Other, imageless... unknown, undefined, desired" (221). This is what I am calling Lewis' Platonic ontology (and also why I don't really resonate with a lot of Lewis' philosophy). "I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought" (218).

He connects his idealism with the strand of his thought having to do with Joy. Then, since he is teaching philosophy, he connects all these strands with George Berkeley's idealism and calls the Absolute, "Spirit." He's still trying to make this Spirit impersonal. "There was, I explained, no possibility of bein in a personal relation with Him... He projected us as a dramatist projects His characters, and I could no more 'meet' Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare" (223).

A couple further things then close the loop. First, an impactful conversation on the historicity of the Gospels. An atheist friend comments on the resurrection, "Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once" (224). This really gnawed at Lewis. "I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out."

Then there was the importance of an ethic for Lewis. His "Absolute" demanded nothing. "Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived" (226). But this "Spirit" of his began to demand something of him. The dry bones of Ezekiel began to live. "My Adversary [God] waived the point... He only said, 'I am the Lord'" (227). "Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded" (228).

"A young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully" (226).

7. The final chapter is titled, "the Beginning." The previous events had only brought him to Theism. "I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation" (230). He began to go to church again, not necessarily believing in Christ but because he thought it was important to "fly one's flag" in some way (233). He actually was still turned off by the idea of churchmanship.

An intellectual search was going on. The only two religions that fit with his understanding at that point were Hinduism and Christianity (235). He had become convinced of the authenticity of the Gospels. Still, he resisted Christianity. "I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken" (237).

"When we set out [to Whipsnade] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did" (237). "I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion."

Dale Carnegie II: "Six Ways to Make People Like You"

In honor of what would have been my father's 96 birthday on October 30, my daughter Sophie are reading his second favorite book (after the Bible), Dale Carnegie's, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Here is my post on Part I.

Part II of is titled, Six Ways to Make People Like You.
Chapter 1: "Do This and You'll Be Welcome Anywhere"

• "It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men [and women] who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from such individuals that all human failures spring." Alfred Adler (52-53)
• "We are interested in people who are interested in us." Publilius Syrus (61)
• "Become genuinely interested in other people" (62).

Chapter 2: "A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression"

• "Smile" (70).
• "Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions" (67... reminds me of Victor Frankl)
• "The expression one wears on one's face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one's back" (63).
• "Smile when talking on the phone" (65).
• "Action and feeling go together... by regulating the action... we can indirectly regulate the feeling" (William James). To put it the way one of my students once did, "Motion brings emotion."
• "Nobody needs a smile so much as those who have none left to give" (70). Anon

Chapter 3: "If You Don't Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble"

• The bottom line of this chapter is, "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language" (79).
• It seems like my Dad may have talked to me about this sometime, the importance of remembering people's names. I've certainly absorbed it from somewhere. I'll say that my skills at the big picture carry a price on these sorts of unattached details. I remember things in connection to other things. Nevertheless, it is important and I work hard to remember names. I need to work harder.
• "One of the first lessons a politician learns is this: 'To recall a voter's name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion'" (77).
• You can extend this to the personal touch. I hear that Jim Barnes would sit throughout certain meanings signing letters to donors. I know President Mullen of Houghton sends personal notes to prospective students. Our online advisor sends not only personal notes and tea to each student, but meets with every online student one-on-one and knows their individual names and situations in detail.

Chapter 4: "An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist"

• "Be a good listener" (88).
• "People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves" (88).
• "Listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone" (81).
• "The ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait" Isaac Marcosson

Chapter 5: "How to Interest People"

• "The royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most" (89).

Chapter 6: "How to Make People Like You Instantly"

• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. "Let's obey the Golden Rule" (96).
• "Always make the other person feel important" (95)... "and do it sincerely" (105).
• "The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him [or her] feel important" (98).

C.S. Lewis -- "Weight of Glory"

On Friday, a webinar begins online at Houghton College on C.S. Lewis, with Peter Meilaender as our tour guide. I'm participating, so I'll be reading a lot of Lewis over the next 8 weeks. To be honest, I've only read a little of Lewis. I don't connect with him the way many others do.

But I welcome the opportunity to plow through a bunch of his writings. This week's assignment was Surprised by Joy and "Weight of Glory." I'm quite convinced that Surprised is somewhere in my garage in a box, but a new copy should arrive tomorrow. So today, it's a sermon Lewis preached in 1942 at St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. It had previously been published in 1941 in Theology--"Weight of Glory."

1. I am already picking up that Lewis has some affinities with Augustine, especially the notion of "desire" as fundamental to humanity. I also thought of some of the work of Jamie Smith. I'm not real fond of this framework, but I will try to keep an open mind. I'm more of a "choice" oriented person, seeing humans more as mixtures of competing desires.

Lewis begins by saying that the highest of the Christian virtues is not unselfishness (a negative) but love (a positive). He is surely correct about this. Here's a nice quote: "Our Lord finds our desires not to strong, but too weak" (26).

2. He then embarks on an argument that I don't think works. Our longing for heaven shows that heaven exists. For one, have most humans in history believed in an afterlife, let alone heaven or an afterlife of reward? Lewis should know better as a classicist. For most ancient Greeks and Romans, the afterlife was a mindless existence. The dead Teiresias is a mindless shade until he drinks the blood given him by Odysseus. The Old Testament itself has little conception of a meaningful, personal afterlife.

I fear that I am going to find a bit of the Platonic in Lewis, just as in Augustine. Plato/Anselm/Descartes would say that if I can conceive of it clearly and distinctly, it must exist in some way.

Nevertheless, Lewis (I think) rightly critiques those who would say Christians only are trying to be goody goody so they can get an eternal reward. "The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation" (27). As we eat food in keeping with the goal of satisfying hunger, we live in accordance with a life that fits eternity.

He also mentions a third situation, where a person embarks on a discipline that they only later realize fits hand in glove with its trajectory. I might liken the liberal arts to this (he uses Greek as an example). You don't necessarily see the value of them at first but it can show itself after the spark happens and you find yourself a different person.

On a more profound level, Lewis argues that "a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny" (29). Meilaender has already pointed out the parallel between Lewis and Augustine's Confessions--"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."

So, Lewis argues, "we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy" (32). So Lewis thinks that "my desire for Paradise... is a pretty good indication that such a thing exists" (33). I think this probably betrays a certain cultural and historical myopia on Lewis' part, as I mentioned above. If you've grown up in a cultures that believe in a blissful afterlife, you probably do have this concept built in. Otherwise, probably not.

3. He interestingly suggests that our specific picture of heaven, including that within the Bible, is symbolic. "Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience" (33). He argues that we are bound to find biblical pictures of heaven puzzling or repellent, because "it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know" (34).

I won't deny that possibility. However, we should also keep in mind that biblical imagery is incarnated communication. There may be aspects of revelation's clothing that is ancient clothing and foreign to us for that reason. We don't want to be like those who argued for slavery from the Bible.

Here's another good quote: "He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only" (34).

4. The rest of the sermon talks about glory. He mentions two aspects to the concept of glory. First there is the idea of appreciation by God. Then there is the notion of brightness.

Lewis, as a self-confessed modern (36), wrestles with the idea that God would show us appreciation. "How we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us" (38). I resonate with this statement, especially the early Schenck. However, I will be interested to see if I think Lewis has too little a sense of God's love for humanity. He gets there in the sermon, but it almost seems tacked on, like it doesn't entirely fit the rest of the sermon.

The Bible comes from an honor-shame world, though. Glory is a much bigger part of it than in our western tradition. Lewis though translates it somewhat into our worldview--"glory means good report with God" (41). He suggests that, when we appear before God and have no pretense of our own value, we will be able to receive God's appreciation purely (37).

The brightness part of glory Lewis likens to us being united with the beauty we see (42).

5. The sermon ends with a turn to our neighbor. The "weight or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humanity can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken" (45). Thus the title of the sermon.

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal" (46). "Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses."

Quantum Space chapter 1 -- Special Relativity

Last week I did a post on the Preface of Quantum Space. It tells the story of quantum loop gravity.

Chapter one gives a snapshot of Einstein's theory of special relativity, which he published in 1905. The title is "The Laws of Physics Are the Same for Everyone."

1. The late 1800s left us with two contradictory truths. The first is that the laws of physics are the same in every frame of reference. The second is that the speed of light is the same in every frame of reference. The contradiction comes if space and time are a fixed and absolute background. 

If a duck in a frame of reference is moving and the frame of reference (say the earth) itself is moving relative to an absolute background, then the speed of the duck is its speed plus the speed of the frame of reference. But this doesn't work if the speed of light is the same no matter what. If a spaceship is moving at near the speed of light and someone shines a flashlight from the top forward, Newton would say the speed relative to the absolute background should be spaceship speed + light speed.

But it's not, nearly light speed + light speed = light speed.

2. Einstein suggested that there is no absolute background. Space and time expand or contract as you approach the speed of light. Here's the formula:

As velocity (v) gets closer to the speed of light (c), the apparent length outside a frame of reference gets smaller.

It was also at this time that Einstein formulated his famous E=mc².

3. This was part 1. But Einstein was assuming constant speed here. What happens if a body is accelerating? And what about gravity?

The Black Swan II -- The "Empirical Skeptic"

A few days ago I started reading, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Here is my look at the Prologue.

Today I read chapter 1, which was semi-autobiographical: "The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic." Here are some quotes and notes: 

1. He makes an interesting comment on libraries, one that I will use on my wife to justify the fact that I buy too many books. He refers to Umberto Eco's library. "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones" (1). I think the logic is that you need reference material for the certainly-going-to-come unexpected "black swan" events. You need to be ready to find what you need. You can't necessarily plan for them.

2. Taleb was born in Lebanon. He portrays the story of Lebanon as one that successfully coexisted for thousands of years. Then suddenly in the 70s everything fell apart. He ends the chapter saying the same about 1987 when the stock market crashed. He argues that no one could have predicted it. He considers both of them black swan events.

I'm not sure I totally agree with him. Then again, he's probably exaggerating a bit too. Did you notice that the end of double Republican terms that start with significant economic restructuring can end in stock market crashes? Reagan in the 80s. Bush in the 00s. Don't know about Coolidge/Hoover in the 20s. Would it be that if Trump had a second term and we recovered from COVID, we would see a major market crash at the end of his second term?

3. In any case, Taleb talks about what he calls "the triplet of opacity":

• Data experts think they know what is going on far more than is actually the case. I had a superior in a previous life say, "We are more on top of the data than we've ever been before." Let's just say my internal reaction was, "Right."
• In the rearview mirror, we make unpredictable events seem like they were causally inevitable. Diaries are much more accurate portrayals of history because they aren't retrospective.
• Thinking you know what's going on travels in packs. If a bunch of journalists are staying in the same hotel, they will gravitate toward each other.

Here are some quotes from the last part of the chapter:

• "Our minds are wonderful explanation machines" (10).
• "History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps" (11).
• "We are just a great machine for looking backward, and humans are great at self-delusion" (12).
• "Categorizing is necessary for humans, but if it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive" (15).
• "The great strength of the free-market system is the fact that company executives don't need to know what's going on" (17).

"Sin and the Sovereignty of God in Romans" by Bruce Longenecker

Today we're back to Sin and Its Remedy in Paul, by Nijay Gupta and John Goodrich. Chapter 3 is by my old friend Bruce Longenecker on "Sin and the Sovereignty of God in Romans." Bruce and I overlapped a year at Durham. He was teaching for Cranmer Hall at St. John's College and I was a first year doctoral student. 

1. This chapter functioned, I thought, on a deeper level than just exegesis. Longenecker begins by sketching the basic situation of sin in Romans. At times it reminded me of some of the more existential interpreter-theologians of an earlier day. Paul focuses in the first three chapters of Romans primarily on the "anthropological" dimension of human sinfulness--what in the Wesleyan tradition we have called "sin acts." Then Romans 5-8 shifts to speaking primarily of Sin as a power, the "cosmological dimension of Sin as a discernable and independent entity of some kind" (34). 

Together, Longenecker sees these two "foci" making up the "hamartiological matrix" of Romans. They constitute something like a "two-level drama," "converging in the concrete action of individuals" (35). With regard to the power of Sin, he inclines "toward the view that these powers were objective entities in Paul's mental universe" (37).

2. The precise origins of our sinful situation are seen as vague. We both have a problem of our individual hearts and yet Sin lurks in the cosmological wings. Bruce's chapter catalyzed a parallel that I don't think is unintentional. There is currently a divide, it seems, between those who say the church either should focus on individual sin and responsibility, along with personal salvation OR the church should focus on social justice and the problems of systemic evil.

There is a parallel, it seems to me, in Paul's treatment of sin. Paul is clearly concerned with individual sin--the dominant focus of the first three chapters of Romans. But Paul is also concerned with Sin as an enslaving power over humanity in general (chapters 6-8). Systemic evils like oppressive economic systems or systemic racism are analogous to Sin as a power. Bruce refers to these dynamics as "social Darwinism."

3. The first part of his chapter reaches four conclusions: a) Paul does not give a clear view of sin and Sin's origins, b) nevertheless, Sin has mastery over humanity, c) the power of Sin must be removed, but that is not enough if individual sin is not addressed, and d) human sinfulness must be removed but that is not enough if the power of Sin is not broken.

The chapter ends with some thoughts on God's sovereignty. Satan will be crushed, but Longenecker argues that God does not forcefully crush Satan. Rather, that is the end result. "In the theological discourse of both Jesus and Paul, the modus operandi is self-giving, and the result of that strategy is the conquering of any other strategy and all other power bases" (45). I'm not so sure if this last train of thought fully works with either Jesus or Paul, but it does seem to capture how Jesus and Paul expect us to live in this "in-between" time.

Previous posts

• Nijay Gupta, "Sin in Context: hamartia in Greco-Roman and Jewish Literature"
• Martinus de Boer, "Sin and Soteriology in Romans"