If you follow me here often, then you know I love C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Both were deeply influential in my own faith journey, and I love reading their work to this day. Reading their letters or short essays are as much fun, and enlightening, as reading the longer works for which they are more famous.
C.S. Lewis, to me, most directly approached the question about the human’s place in the world, the quest for understanding what in the world we are doing here and what, then, should we do about it. In the end, for Lewis as for myself, it is a quest for truth. He wrote in one essay “The great difficulty [in sharing one’s faith about Christianity] is to get modern audiences to realize you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort.”
In a different essay, Lewis drove deeper into this point when he addressed a question, a very common one that I have heard, of “can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity.” The follow video is a wonderful retelling of the Lewis’ answer. I started to simply write it all out, but upon finding the video, thought it far more enjoyable. Of course, for someone who does not like Christianity or, more likely, does not like what they see in Christians or the actions/stances of the Christian church, Lewis’ answer perhaps will fall flat. We all do that…decide ahead of time if we will like something or not, and especially when we begin to determine that what we are hearing/reading goes against our preferred views…we begin to dismiss it. All of us do that…Christians included. The challenge of critical thinking is to be willing to hold one’s opinion loosely, loose enough to at least consider the argument.
For Lewis, as I hope you will hear in the video, the end result comes back to truth. That’s where I came. I was born into a Christian family, a pastor’s kid of then three generations. As I laughingly tell people, I didn’t have much of a chance to not be a Christian. Except…that I did have that chance. And, from about 16-20, I explored it some, growing slowly more distant from God…at least, less engaged in His views or ideas. But then, at perhaps the final moment before I launched out fully as an unbeliever, an outsider to the faith, I knew I must at least dig deeply into the claims of this faith. See, this faith, perhaps far more than others, states that it is moving from myth to history, from an idea to an actual historical event that can be investigated.
It was, thus, an issue of truth. Is Christianity true in what it proclaims? NOT—do I like what it says or the ideas that it proposes or the actions to which I should follow?
We’ll perhaps talk more about this in future posts, but for now…just give this a watch.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fR1vSxNEQ]