C. S. Lewis: Is Theology Poetry?

  This is a fascinating–albeit a very difficult–essay.  Lewis poses theology against science as the two systems that purport to offer a satisfying explanation of the nature of reality, and he builds a strong case for the superior credibility of theology.  He presents an utterly unarguable conclusion: that Christianity, as over against Scientism, is true, and the evolutionary tenet that all that is simply happened over an unimaginable length of time, is completely untenable.  

He begins by seemingly putting theology down: it does a poor job of satisfying the imagination.  But that is true of the unbeliever.  For the believer, there is “a special sort of imaginative enjoyment.” He explains:

It is therefore quite true that the Christians do enjoy their world picture, aesthetically, once they have accepted it as true.  Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts, for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an aesthetic stimulus. 

Fallen people see Scientism with its evolutionary hypothesis as the better system because their anti-God bias is pervasive.  It is a system seemingly devised to keep out God.  But it involves a profound contradiction: the whole system is based upon the inferences reason makes (reason is absolute); yet reason itself is seen to be but a result of random becoming.  To have absolute authority, reason would have to be outside the system, but it is very much a part of it.

It is undeniable that there is progress and development in the material world, but is also frightfully true that spiritual evil is increasing and abounding all around us.  The Bible leads us to expect this (cf. The Book of Revelation); the theological view is immensely more satisfying.

Lewis addresses, however, two lines of thought that may lead some to see theology as lacking credibility.  The first is that Christian thought contains elements similar to those already found in pagan religions, such as, for instance, the pattern of the dying and rising god. Lewis’s answer to this is that God sent the ancient pagan world visions that anticipate Christianity (cf. the essay “Myth Became Fact”).  They are in the realm of the imagination; in Christianity, God enters history.  The life, death, and resurrection of Christ are unmistakable historical realities.

The second possible objection is that Christian theology, like ancient pagan thought, has a great deal of metaphorical and symbolic language, and that of Christianity may not seem as imaginatively appealing as that of the ancient myths.  But, as Lewis has already discussed at length in the essay “Transition,” it is unavoidable that spiritual realities be metaphorically expressed in terms of images from the physical world.  We must keep in mind the biblical pronouncement  “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those that love him” ( I Cor.2:9).

DO YOU FIND LEWIS’S THINKING HERE HELPFUL?   ANY QUESTIONS OF OBSERVATIONS?

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