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Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 3 (“Time and beyond time”)

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Book-4

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

1. Some people struggle with the idea of prayer

(a) It relates to how God hears prayer

“A man put it to me by saying ‘I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.'” 

(b) Specifically, how God can hear prayers at the same time

“Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time”

2. Our trouble stems from how we experience life in time

“Our life comes to us moment by moment One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like”

(a) They assume that God experiences things in the same way

We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the Theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now some of the scientists are doing the same.

(b) However, God is not in Time

“His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him”

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PWJ: S3E19 – Bonus – “Cupid & Psyche: The Myth Told”

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This Season we’ve been reading Till We Have Faces, which is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche Myth. However, what was the original myth like? In this episode, I read a version of the original story…

S3E19: “Cupid & Psyche: The Myth Told” (Download)

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or any place where good podcasts can be found (iTunes, Google Play, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn and Overcast), as well as on YouTube.

If you’d like to support us and get fantastic gifts, please join us on Patreon.

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Chalking the doors

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epiphany

Tomorrow is the celebration of Epiphany, the day in the Church’s calendar when we remember the visitation of the Wise Men to the infant Christ.

A couple of years ago I was at visiting a parish in Los Angeles for Epiphany and I encountered a tradition with which I was not familiar. As the priest entered the nave of the church, he ascended some portable steps and scribbled something in chalk above the doorway. This tradition is apparently quite common in other parts of the globe, but less common in the United States and I don’t ever recall coming across it in England.

The text

So what did the priest write above the doorway? Well, tomorrow you may see a priest write the following:

20 + C + M + B + 17

The 20 at the beginning and the 17 at the end refer to the new year, 2017. The C, M and B have a two-fold meaning:

1. The Initials of the Wise Men
CMB refers to the first letter of each of the traditional names for the Wise Men: Caspar, Malchior, and Balthazar.

2. Latin Abbreviation
It is also short for “Christus Mansionem Benedicat”, which means “Christ bless this home”.

The crosses between each of the letters naturally refer to the cross of Christ.

Not just on church doors…

In countries where the tradition is more prevalent, this doesn’t just take place at church, but it also happens in every home. All it takes is some chalk and a prayer.

This tradition represents another wonderful way in which to bring the Liturgy that we experience in church back into the home. It also provides a wonderful teaching opportunity for children. I think that, as a boy, I’d have been extremely excited at the possibility of writing on the walls outside the house without fear of repercussions!

“Uncle John” RIP

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Last week John Stott fell asleep in Christ.

Dr. Stott was born in England in 1921. As a teenager, he came to faith in Christ through the Anglican church. He would go on to dedicate his life to serving Christ for the next seventy years.

As well as being Curate and Rector of All Souls Langham Place for thirty years, he was a superb scholar, authoring over fifty books, including “Basic Christianity”. He lived a modest life and the royalties of his books were poured back into missionary work and leadership training overseas. Even after retiring, he continued to work tirelessly for the Kingdom and continued to inspire the new generation of Bible teachers. All of this earned him something of a household name among evangelicals.

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The Bogwash Epistles: Epistle #1

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Music: Moonlight Hall Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

My dear Bogwash,

It is indeed an interesting twist of fate, that on the eve of being assigned your human, the Patient makes a decision to embrace with renewed vigor his dormant childhood faith. It is standard policy here at the Training College to assign to our undergraduates (due to their inexperience) those humans who are generally weak in faith, so this recent development is indeed unfortunate.

But while you received the misfortune to be assigned this particular Patient, you have also been extremely fortunate to receive me as your Tutor. We have been rather short-staffed at the College recently and, as such, I have been told to instruct some of you undergraduates personally. This task is, quite frankly, beneath me…but you and I both know that Our Father Below is unaccustomed to being denied. Regardless, if you follow my expert tutelage, we will swiftly crush your Patient’s newfound devotion to the Enemy. If you do as I say and handle him rightly, we will soon have him returning to his former trajectory towards Our Father’s House Below.

In these preliminary stages of temptation you must concentrate your efforts on coming to understand the Patient. What kind of man is he? What are his weaknesses? And more importantly, is he aware of these weaknesses? The less he knows of them the better! I expect a full report in your next letter.

Although the situation is of some concern, we should not panic. Many Catholics have, at some point, renewed the practice of their faith, but ultimately lasted only for but a brief season.

Your Patient has woken up.  It is your job to gently lull him back to sleep.

Your affectionate mentor,

Professor Slubgob.

The Fiery Imagery of Purgatory

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Recently, a listener to our C.S. Lewis podcast reached out to us. She had just begun RCIA with her family and they were quite taken aback when the priest described Purgatory in the following way:

“Purgatory is a place of fire and burning. However, there will be hope there because you will know you’re getting out someday.”

RCIA Class

It seemed to her that this would make the work of Christ incomplete. After the class, her daughter exclaimed:

“How do they expect anyone to convert if you’re still going to Hell? Because that’s exactly what Purgatory sounds like!”

When they got home, they did some googling and found several other sources that said Purgatory would be the same fire of hell, but with the hope of one day escaping.

Since my co-host and I had spoken about Purgatory on the podcast, she sent us a message expressing her consternation. I too once balked at the fire imagery I saw in some artistic depictions of Purgatory (such as in the altarpiece above), so I thought it would be a good idea to turn my answer into a blog post…

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Speaking of suffering

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Yesterday I shared a quotation on the subject of suffering from a book I recently finished, Jesus Among Other gods by Ravi Zacharias.

In that post, we saw that even to talk about good and evil we need an objective moral law, something which is rather difficult to explain while denying the existence of an eternal, transcendent God.

Today I’d like to offer a few more quotations from Zacharias’ book. For those of us who are involved in apologetics (which is, of course, every Christian!), he reminds us of a truth which we must keep forever at the front of our mind when speaking about the very difficult subject of pain and suffering.

How does a good God allow so much suffering? Immediately we enter into a very serious dilemma. How do you respond to the intellectual side of the question without losing the existential side of it? How do you answer…[those who are suffering] without drowning it all in philosophy?

– Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other gods

Suffering is not simply a theoretical idea or only a subject for clever philosophical arguments, it is a very real reality with which people must live and it is a topic which is deeply emotionally charged.

Those who feel the pain… often shudder at how theoretical philosophical answers are. We do not like to work through the intellectual side of the question because we do not see where logic and philosophy fit into the problem of pain. If you have just buried a son or a daughter, or have witnessed brutality firsthand, this portion of the argument may bring more anger than comfort. Who wants logic when the heart is broken? Who wants a physiological treatise on the calcium component of the bone when the shoulder has come out of its socket? At such a time we are looking for comfort. We want a painkiller.

– Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other gods

The solution to this problem is to balance delicately the intellectual and the emotional, speaking to both and neglecting neither:

We must not allow the anguish of the heart to bypass the reason of the mind. The explanation [of pain] must meet both the intellectual and the emotion demands of the question. Answering the questions of the mind while ignoring shredded emotions seems heartless. Binding the emotional wounds while ignoring the struggle of the intellect seems mindless. 

– Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other gods

When my Dad died earlier this year, I didn’t want a dry philosophy lesson. I wanted people to grieve with me, but who were ready to talk when the time came to grapple intellectually and spiritually with what had happened.

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