A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds. He was never failing in his opposition to theological “modernism.” Some of his most acerbic satire is employed against it in both his fiction and his expository works. It is as ridiculous, he declares, to believe that the earth is flat as to believe in the watered-down popular theology of modern England. In The Screwtape Letters a major employment of hell itself is in encouraging theologians to create a new “historical Jesus” in each generation. He repeatedly insists that, contrary to the opinion of many modern theologians, it was less St. Paul than Christ who taught the terrors of hell and other “fierce” doctrines rather than sweetness and vapid love.9
Though Lewis denied the doctrine of total depravity on the grounds that if we were totally depraved we should not know it and because we have the idea of good, the denial is more nearly theoretical than actual in his works. Everywhere we find him representing humanity as a horror to God and a “miserable offender.” In “Religion and Rocketry”10 he says that non-Christians often suppose that the Incarnation implies some special merit in humanity but that it implies “just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity” because “no creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. . . . Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for.”
The most vivid picture of what it means to be saved—and Lewis does not hesitate to use this word—is the transformation of Eustace from a dragon back into a person in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace tells how he remembered that a dragon might be able to cast its skin like a snake and began to work on himself. At first the scales alone came off but as he went deeper he found his whole skin starting to peel off and finally was able to step right out of it altogether. This is the point at which a less orthodox writer might stop, but not Lewis. Eustace started to wash himself, but when he put his foot into the water he saw that it was as hard and rough and scaly as it had been before. So he began again to scratch and finally peeled off another entire dragon skin. But once again he found under it another. At this point Aslan said, “You will have to let me undress you.” Though Eustace was deathly afraid of Aslan's claws, he lay down before him. His fears were justified, for the very first tear made by Aslan was so deep he felt it had gone clear down to his heart. When the skin was at last off, Eustace discovered it “ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been.” Afterward Aslan bathed him and dressed him in new clothes, the symbolism of which is clear enough.
In respect to the church, Lewis teaches that it has no beauty except that given it by Christ and that its primary purpose is to draw men to him, “the true Cure.” The Christian’s vocation, however, is not mainly to spread Christianity but rather to love Christ. The Christian is not so much to follow rules as to possess a Person and to wait upon the Holy Spirit for guidance. The Christian is not called to religion or even good works but to holiness before God. Christianity is not a “safe” vocation, for Christ is to be followed at all hazards.
Lewis believed that prayer must include confession and penitence, adoration, and fellowship with God as well as petition. “Prayer,” he says, “is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.” He believed that where Christianity and other religions differ, Christianity is correct. He held that conversion is necessary and that heaven and hell are final.
If in some of his beliefs Lewis stands somewhat to the left of orthodoxy, there are others in which he moves toward the right, at least as orthodoxy is normally practiced by most Christians. For instance, the speaking in tongues at Pentecost is not only accepted by Lewis but also explained in an ingenious manner that is worth describing. The holy phenomenon of talking in tongues bears the same relationship to the gibberish sometimes taken for it as a miraculous event to a natural one. Looking from below, one will always suppose a thing to be “nothing but” or “merely” this or that. The natural to which one is accustomed will so fill the eye that the supernatural does not appear. One sees clearly the facts but not their meaning. But from above one can see both the fact and the meaning, the supernatural and the natural. The supernatural must be transposed if sinners are to have any notion of it, yet the transposition is bound to be like that of a person required to translate from a language of twenty-two vowels into one of only five vowels—one must give each character more than one value. Hence St. Paul’s admonition that spiritual things must be discerned not naturally but spiritually.
Again, Lewis believes firmly in prayer for the sick. I think he is talking about Mrs. Lewis when he tells of a woman suffering from incurable cancer who was apparently healed by the laying on of hands and prayer. Lewis defends the proposition that the devil is alive and active, and he goes further than most of us in his belief concerning the reality and work of angels. He believes one enters heaven immediately at death. He thinks the Bible teaches clearly the second coming of Christ, and he thinks this may be the next great event in history. Generally Lewis stands with St. Paul in upholding the man as head of the wife, though he does not forget the rest of St. Paul’s analogy. Despite his conception that the early part of Genesis is mythical (in the sense I have described), Lewis’s frequent discussions of the Garden of Eden make it apparent that it means a hundred times more to him as myth than it does to most Christians as history. And we can say also that Lewis’s God is alive, not static and not in the least hazy and far away. Lewis is set apart from most Christians, says Chad Walsh, by the “vividness of the gold in his religious imagination.”11
MIRACLES
Different from the meditative and devotional nature of Reflections on the Psalms, the book called Miracles is closely reasoned. It consists of three parts plus an epilogue and two very interesting appendixes. The first seven chapters, preliminary to the main theme, describe two basic types of thought about the universe. One is that of the Naturalist, one who believes that nature is “the whole show” and that nothing else exists. This person thinks of nature as being like a pond of an infinite depth with nothing but water. The other is the Supernaturalist, who believes that one Thing exists outside time and space and has produced nature. He believes that the pond is not merely water forever but has a bottom—mud, earth, rock, and finally the whole bulk of earth itself.
The Naturalist believes that nothing exists beyond some great process or “becoming,” while the Supernaturalist believes nature may be only one “system” or choice among possibilities chosen by some Primary Thing. If Naturalism is true, then miracles are impossible, yet if Supernaturalism is true, it is still possible to inquire whether God does in fact perform miracles. But Naturalism contains a great self-contradiction: it assumes that the mind itself is also “nature” and hence irrational. It is nonsense when one uses the human mind to prove the irrationality of the human mind. “All arguments about the validity of thought make a tacit, and illegitimate, exception in favor of the bit of thought you are doing at that moment.” Lewis insists that reason exists on its own and that nature is powerless to produce it. Nature can only “keep on keeping on.”
Naturalism for Lewis is also faced with an insurmountable problem in the “oughtness” of things. If nature is all, then conscience is also a product of nature and there is no logical place for the notion that one ought to die for his country or practice any other moral action. Contrariwise, Lewis holds that the practices of conscience are a product of a reason derived from a greater Moral Wisdom which exists absolutely and could not possibly arise out of a theory that supposes blind nature as the basis of life and thought. In fact, human rationality is itself a miracle.
Lewis then proceeds to his main theme and begins with an instance of what he calls chronological snobbery, that is, the idea that people in older times could believe in miracles because they were unacquainted with the laws of nature. Joseph, he points out, was fully as wise as any modern gynecologist on the main point of Mary’s situation—that a virgin birth is contrary to nature. In finally accepting the situation as a miracle, Joseph was affirming not only the miracle but, equally, the law of nature itself as it applies to childbirth. Joseph is by no means an example of a naive or primitive ignoramus but rather of a realist whose head was as hard as anybody’s so far as the regularity of nature is concerned. He saw the exception in Mary’s case only because he had a pristine conviction about the rule.