A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу A Well of Wonder - Clyde S. Kilby страница 14
Название: A Well of Wonder
Автор: Clyde S. Kilby
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
Серия: Mount Tabor Books
isbn: 9781612618913
isbn:
Lewis assures his readers that he believes the Bible to carry the authority of God, and he insists that we must “go back to our Bibles,” even to the very words. The biblical account, says he, often turns out to be more accurate than our lengthy theological interpretations of it. It is all right to leave the words of the Bible for a moment to make some point clear, but you must always return. “Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him.” Lewis believed that some great catastrophe was ahead for man and that the Second Coming may be the next great event in history.
Certain themes run all through Lewis’s books, whether expository or fictional. One is that every living being is destined for everlasting life and that every moment of life is a preparation for that condition. Like Albert Camus, Lewis believed death to be the most significant fact in the interpretation of life: yet, unlike Camus, he was convinced that man is primarily made for eternity. With Socrates, he held that true wisdom is the “practice of death.” Another theme in Lewis is that God is the creator, transformer, and ultimate possessor of common things; that God is the inventor of matter, of sex, of eating and drinking, and of pleasures. Lewis also teaches all through his books that the only way Christians can attain full happiness is to obey God implicitly. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
But perhaps the most persistent theme in Lewis is that of man’s longing for Joy. He calls this longing “the inconsolable secret” that inhabits the soul of every man, a desire that no natural happiness can ever satisfy. It is a lifelong pointer toward heaven, a nostalgia to cross empty spaces and be joined to the true reality from which we now feel cut off. The culmination of this longing in the rhapsodic joy of heaven is, for me at least, the strongest single element in Lewis. In one way or another, it hovers over nearly every one of his books and suggests that Lewis’s apocalyptic vision is perhaps more real than that of anyone since St. John on Patmos.
Until a short time before his death Lewis was the distinguished occupant of the chair of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. He was one of the best literary critics of our time and an expert in philology. Notable among his scholarly writings is The Allegory of Love, which has been called “the best book of literary history written by an Englishman in this century.” At the same time he was a Christian of no uncertain stamp. He managed the difficult feat of successfully integrating his scholarship with his religion. If we add to these things the gifts of a lively imagination, a vigorous and witty mind, and a brilliance of language, we can discover why his books have sold widely and why his readers are steadily on the increase.
Chapter 5
HIS FATE AMONG THEOLOGICAL CRITICS
In 1958 Norman Pittenger, a liberal Anglican theologian, published a severe criticism of C. S. Lewis both as a theologian and as a “Defender of the Faith,” in “A Critique of C. S. Lewis” (Christian Century 75 [1958]). Dr. Kilby wrote this spirited defense, which was published later that year in Christianity Today in December 1958.
Though I am no theologian I venture to disagree with most of W. Norman Pittenger’s recent criticisms of the writings of C. S. Lewis. Dr. Pittenger concedes that Lewis writes charmingly and provocatively in some of his books, particularly those of a fictional character, but he does not believe that Lewis’s writings have much theological value. My own judgment is that Lewis has done more to clear the theological atmosphere of our time and to create a deep interest in Christian things than many theologians together. Lewis’s avoidance of theological jargon (I use the word in no derogatory sense) is a studied avoidance and should not be taken as ignorance. It seems to me that such an assumption of ignorance is the basis of Dr. Pittenger’s wrong critique of Lewis. But to some of the particulars.
THE SENSE OF DECENCY
Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis is crude, even vulgar. As examples, he violates our sense of decency by attempting to explain the Trinity by the figure of a cube which is “six squares while remaining one cube,” and by saying that Christ was either what he claimed to be—the Son of God—or else a madman. I believe that one of Lewis’s greatest contributions to orthodox Christianity is his demonstration that a sanctified imagination is a legitimate tool for any Christian apologist. If Dr. Pittenger thinks a cube may not be used to illustrate the Trinity, what can he say of Jesus’s own invariable use of things close at hand to illustrate holy things—vines, and fig trees, lamps, and bushel baskets, and even vultures? Or what can he say of Paul’s allusions to sounding brass and tinkling cymbals or the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits? Or of St. Augustine’s historic analogies in De Trinitate, confessedly inadequate but nonetheless helpful for pedagogical purposes? In his Weight of Glory Lewis says, “Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.” Can it be that we have a false modesty on spiritual things, a modesty in which the “classical view” (a favorite idea in Dr. Pittenger’s criticism of Lewis) is substituted for a downright eagerness to set forth the reality of Christ?
THE BOOK AND THE TIMES
Again, Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis’s Christianity is often not orthodox. At the same time Lewis is said to hold to an “uncritical traditionalism” and to be dogmatic in his proclamation of it. Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis proceeds in his books by a “smart superficiality” and does not present a “credible theology.” Dr. Pittenger makes fairly clear as he goes along what he believes to be credible theology. He declares that never in the Synoptic Gospels is there either statement or implication that Christ claimed to be the Son of God. He is upset with Lewis for using the Fourth Gospel so uncritically. The validity of our Lord’s unique place, says Dr. Pittenger, does not rest on such “mechanical grounds” as Lewis advances but on “the total consentient witness of all Christians from the apostles’ time.” Lewis is declared to be “too cavalier about the actual historical Jesus,” who is described by Dr. Pittenger as “a Prophet who announced the coming of God’s kingdom and who may even have thought that he himself was to be the Anointed One, or Messiah, who would inaugurate it.” In other words, Dr. Pittenger diminishes the impact of the Fourth Gospel, holds to a “credible theology” based to a considerable extent, apparently on general belief through the ages which he interprets as denying that Christ was the unique Son of God, and at the same time accuses Lewis of unorthodoxy and “uncritical traditionalism.” Lewis’s faith, says Dr. Pittenger, is not a reasoned one. Instead, Dr. Pittenger prefers a faith “open and reasoned . . . built on history, confirmed in experience, checked by reason, and demonstrated in Christian life.” (Note the double emphasis on reason.) He is unhappy with Lewis for his preferring “the Pauline ethic based on man’s sinfulness and helplessness” (Dr. Pittenger’s language) to the Sermon on the Mount. Isn’t Dr. Pittenger himself behind the times here? Does current theology divide Paul’s ethic from Jesus’s?
Furthermore, says Dr. Pittenger, the sophisticate Lewis “pretends to be very simple indeed” by taking what the church has said in the Scriptures “as the last word.” What does Dr. Pittenger put beside this for his own authority? He repeatedly accuses Lewis of failing to take cognizance of recent theological research. Lewis, for instance, confounds “the Fall” (quotations Dr. Pittenger’s) “with an event in history,” and confuses “biblical myth” concerning Adam with “a literal description.”
GOD СКАЧАТЬ