A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ In the first place, Dr. Pittenger appears to forget that Lewis, as Chad Walsh has well said, is the “apostle to the skeptic.” No one who has read the Bible with any care could possibly be unaware that it teaches the omnipresence of God. God dwells in the heart, but he also dwells in the heavens. It is therefore altogether proper for Lewis to speak of God as being outside his creation. In the second place, throughout the whole of Miracles Lewis makes clear that all his discussion is, of necessity, metaphoric. His effort is to deny the deterministic and deistic conception that God is confined to his creation. Hence his metaphor of “intervention” to the idea of which Dr. Pittenger objects.

      In appendix B to Miracles and elsewhere Lewis makes his metaphoric usage very clear. “If God directs the course of events at all then he directs the movement of every atom at every moment; ‘not one sparrow falls to the ground’ without that direction.” Does this sound as if God is an absentee landlord? Dr. Pittenger’s own list of quotations from St. Augustine and others show that they also spoke metaphorically of miracles. In fact, his quotation from St. Augustine contains the same word—“above”—to which Dr. Pittenger seems to be objecting in Lewis.

      Lewis is also accused of being fifty years behind the times for not knowing that a self-explanatory universe is out of date. No “respectable philosophical writer and no first-rate scientist” during the last half century has held to a deterministic universe, says Dr. Pittenger. Only ignorant people are “naturalists” in Lewis’s sense, and there he has proceeded in his “smart superficiality” to knock down a straw man. To answer Dr. Pittenger on this point it is perhaps sufficient to let the reader think a moment for himself. It is true that at some point in their studies many scientists have acknowledged that they were confronted by a mystery or have even spoken of the whole universe as mysterious, but that is no indication whatever that they have come over to the side of the angels. Admittedly, deistic-type mechanism is passé, but is this all there is to materialism? A great many philosophers and theologians are wrong unless our zeitgeist may properly be described as “naturalistic” in Lewis’s precise meaning. Whatever they may imply or print or state on occasions, men live as if no miracle is possible, and it was this condition to which Lewis was addressing himself—not to a “classical” theory of miracles.

      It might be well to stop for a moment and cite from a couple of reputable science-philosophers who hold to a nonsupernatural view of life. In his William Vaughan Moody lecture at the University of Chicago in 1931, Anton Julius Carlson said, “As I see it, the supernatural has no support in science, it is incompatible with science, it is frequently an active foe of science.” Here, then, is one reputable scholar who can hardly be described as anything other than a “naturalist.” In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, published last year, he says: “There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing and it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken.” Also, a little later, “God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science.” Can this reputable scholar be described as anything other than a “naturalist”?

      Lewis is also accused of writing a book on miracles without looking at the words translated “miracle” in the Old and New Testaments. Isn’t this a little too much? I do not know what sort of Hebrew scholar Lewis is, but I do know that he reads Greek with as much facility as most of us read English. Dr. Pittenger tells us that had Lewis read his Greek New Testament he would have been more fully aware of the Sitz im Leben of the miracles described there, i.e., he would have noted that though they are symbolically accurate they are not necessarily factually so. I suppose it would do little good to quote the New Testament itself against Dr. Pittenger, since he can assume the same symbolistic finality for all situations, but one does not need to be a theological student to notice that thousands swarmed around Christ in his days on earth simply because of what they at least supposed to be miracles—just plain miracles without “classical” or scholarly qualifications.

      NATURALISM IN OUR BONES

      Could it be that Dr. Pittenger’s objection to Miracles arises in part from an unstated criticism? In the last chapter of Miracles Lewis gives an unmistakable warning to his readers: “If . . . you turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with books about it. . . . And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. . . . We all have Naturalism in our bones.”

      In all my reading of Lewis I think one of his very best qualities is his avoidance of technically theological language. It is the very thing that has made him spiritually thrilling to thousands of people around the world. This directness, this “orthodoxy,” is the element Dr. Pittenger appears to dislike most. There is of course a place for theologians and all the fine points of theological discourse. As to C. S. Lewis, I am sure that he would be the first to acknowledge that his works are not flawless. But let not the theologians smother this man who brings into the soul the fresh air of spiritual reality.

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