Tag: featured

Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 10 (“Nice People Or New Men?”)

2 comments

Book-4

Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…

1. If Christianity is true, why are all Christians not obviously nicer than all non-Christians?

(a) Part of this question is very reasonable

“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions… I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary…”

(i) Jesus told us to judge by results

“Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up… Christ told us to judge by results”

(ii) When we fail to live up to our calling, we make Christianity harder to believe for others

“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world… Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself”

(b) Part of this question is very unreasonable

But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world may be quite illogical…. they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps -Christian and non-Christian – and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second.

There are several flaws with this kind of thinking…

Read more

Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 11 (“The New Men”)

Leave a comment

Book-4

At last we come to the final chapter of “Mere Christianity” completing my notes for the book.

1. Christ came to transform

“…Christ’s work…is not mere improvement but Transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how Evolution worked”

(a) We are used to transformation through evolution

“…Everyone now knows about Evolution (though, of course, some educated people disbelieve it): everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder ‘What is the next step? When is the thing beyond man going to appear?'”

(b) People have constantly been incorrectly predicting the next step

“…I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. It would hardly be worth calling a New Step unless it did. I should expect not merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change but a new method of producing the change…. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening”

(c) The Next Step is here

“Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction – a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago”

This step has some differences in relation to the past…

“And in fact this New Step differs from all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature but in several other ways as well”

Read more

Restless Heart: 12 – “Memento Mori”

Leave a comment

Dad

Nessa and I could not meet up this week, so I recorded a solo where I talked about meeting Christ in my Father’s death.

Please subscribe to this podcast using iTunes, Google Play or Podbean. If you have any feedback or would like to pose a question for an upcoming episode, you can send us a message from the website or tweet us at @davidandnessa.

Episode 12: Memento Mori (Download)

 

— Show Notes —

* “Memento Mori” is a phrase in Latin which means “Remember Death”

* If you were wondering where Whidbey Island is, it’s here.

* The book I referenced was “Something Other Than God” by Jennifer Fulwiler:

“The Catechism explained that praying for the souls of the dead is a tradition going back to the first Christians and to the Jews before them… The living sent their love for the deceased into the spiritual world, like adding water to a stream that would eventually float their lost friends home“

* Don’t believe me about the ninja boots? Here they are.

* The Psalm I quoted was Psalm 84:6

Blessed are the men whose strength is in [the Lord]… As they go through the Valley of Baca [weeping] they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.

* The poem I quoted at the end was “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manly Hopkins:

…for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

* A written version of what I said in this podcast is available on my blog.

PWJ: S1E7 – MC B1C5 – “We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”

2 comments

We finally come to the last chapter of Book I of “Mere Christianity”! The chapter bears the ominous title “We have cause to be uneasy”. Thus far, C.S. Lewis has demonstrated that there is a Moral Law which we did not create and that we violate this Law continually. Now Jack explains why this should give us cause for concern…

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or through a service like iTunes, Google Play or Podbean. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.

Episode 7: “We have cause to be uneasy” (Download)

Read more

The Four Loves – Chapter 1 (“Introduction”)

Leave a comment

Four Loves 1

Our San Diego C.S. Lewis Reading Group will starting a new book this week, The Four Loves.

Once again I will be providing an outline of the arguments presented in each chapter, together with quotations and explanatory notes. The chapters in this book are generally a good bit longer than our previous book (Mere Christianity), so I may well experiment with the format of these posts as I work through each chapter.

Notes and Quotes

1. Lewis thought that St. John’s statement that “God is love” would provide a clear plan for this book

“‘God is love,’ says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I thought
that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the
whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved
to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is
God”

2. He therefore divided love into two types:

(a) Gift-love

“The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing”

(b) Need-love

“…that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms”

3. These types of love reflect both divinity and humanity

(a) Divine Love

“Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too”

(b) Relation to God

“…what…can be less like anything we believe of God’s life than Need-love? He lacks nothing… We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves”

3. Lewis thought he could just praise Gift-love and disparage Need-love

“I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the first
sort of love and disparagements of the second… But I would not now deny the name love to Need-love… The reality is more complicated than I supposed”

In this section, Jack uses the term “panegyrics” which refers to a speech in which something is praised. He also refers to his “master, MacDonald” was an author and minister he greatly admired, George MacDonald.

Read more

The Four Loves – Chapter 2 (“Likings And Loves For The Sub-Human”)

Leave a comment

Four Loves 2

Continuing my notes on The Four Loves, in this chapter Jack examines the likings/loves we have for things things which are not human (which he calls “subhuman”). In particular, he focuses in on love of nature and love of country. We will not deal with these in this post. Due to the length of the chapter, these will be dealt with in subsequent posts.

Notes and Quotes

1. Before we get to loves, we need to look at likes, which means we need to look at pleasures

…there is a continuity between our elementary likings for things and our loves for people. Since “the highest does not stand without the lowest”* we had better begin at the bottom, with mere likings; and, since to “like” anything means to take some sort of pleasure in it, we must begin with pleasure.

* This is a quotation from “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis

2. We may divide pleasures into two kinds

Now it is a very old discovery that pleasures can be divided into two classes…

(a) Need Pleasures

…those [pleasures] which would not be pleasures at all unless they were preceded by desire… An example… would be a drink of water. This is a pleasure if you are thirsty and a great one if you are very thirsty. But probably no one in the world… ever poured himself out a glass of water and drank it just for the fun of the thing.

(b) Appreciative Pleasures

…[the other kind are] those which are pleasures in their own right and need no such preparation [of desire]. An example… would be the unsought and unexpected pleasures of smell – the breath from a bean-field or a row of sweet-peas meeting you on your morning walk. You were in want of nothing, completely contented, before it; the pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift.

3. There can be complications with dividing up pleasures in this way

(a) You can have both pleasures at the same time

If you are given a coffee or beer where you expect (and would have been satisfied with) water, then of course you get a pleasure of the first kind (allaying of thirst) and one of the second (a nice taste) at the same time.

(b) Addiction can turn pleasure from appreciative-pleasure to need-pleasure

For the temperate man an occasional glass of wine is a treat like the smell of the bean-field. But to the alcoholic…no liquor gives any pleasure except that of relief from an unbearable craving. 

Read more

PWJ: S1E8 – MC B2C1 – “The Rival Conceptions Of God”

Leave a comment

Jesus

With Book I of “Mere Christianity” complete, we now move on to Book II! Having concluded that the Moral Law points to God, C.S. Lewis now examines the “Rival Conceptions of God”.

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or through a service like iTunes, Google Play or Podbean. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.

Episode 8: “Rival Conceptions of God” (Download)

Read more

1 … 117 118 119 120 121 … 171