Read Online Christian Reflections Executed By C.S. Lewis Paperback

is always a joy, Real sharp thinking in this one about numerous cultural, philosophical, and theological subjects, Especially, 'Christianity and Culture', 'The Poison of Subjectivism', 'Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism' and 'The Seeing Eye',

His essay on the psalms is horrendous though, CS Lewis always writes thoughtprovoking pieces and this collection of essays is no exceptions, While there were other points that I'll reflect on over time, there are two takeaways that immediately stuck out to me:

Evolution does not mean improvement, In a biological sense, evolution means change and more often than not even in that context that means degeneration and decay rather than progress, Yet, partly based on an idea of biological evolution as improvement, our whole society has created a Myth that our achievements far exceed our ancestors because we are cleverer and better than they were.
As Lewis points out nothing is further than the truth, For example superficially "modern art" may be technically more accomplished than prehistoric cave paintings, but it took a blinding flash of genius for that first cave dweller to realise that he could make two dimensional marks on the wall to represent the real world around him an achievement that far exceeds any artist who appropriated his concept in the generations that followed.


Faith is a virtue it is the act of continuing to believe something you think is true until presented with evidence to suggest it isn't, It's holding onto your opinions continuously and steadfastly and not allowing peer pressure to push you into giving up on something you believe without a valid argument, The magnificent collection of works by C, S. Lewis.
First of all, I would like to highlight his essay "The Funeral of a Great Myth",
Unfortunately, it is little known,
This essay MUST be studied in schools and universities! Lewis is simply brilliant,

Although these essays are a bit disconnected, and he frequently quotes contemporaries who I am not familiar with and often throws in a phrase from take your pick Latin, Greek, or German, still, he shines.


Christian Reflections is a series of essays by C, S. Lewis. Some were published in his lifetime others were not, Lewis reflects as a Christian on a number of issues, ranging from church music, culture, literature, subjectivism, and much more,

Lewis' writings are always a brain workout, and some of these were a little harder to grasp than Mere Christianity was which was written for the general population.
But others were fairly easy to follow, and even the harder ones yielded good food for thought,

I touched on each of the essays on my blog here: sitelink com/ . I came across this little volume in my church library, I had not seen it before so I borrowed it, It was first published inLewis died inand contains essays and talks that range from the late's to the early's, There is no unifying theme and I found the quality of the chapters to vary quite a bit, but unsurprisingly there are some real gems in here that are more than worth the effort.


There arechapters, but the ones that stood out to me the most were:

, Christianity and Culture
. Religion: Reality or Substitute
, The Poison of Subjectivism
, The Funeral of a Great Myth
, Historicism
. Fernseed and Elephants

Christianity and Culture is part of some debate Lewis was having with other believers, There is one portion of the chapter that was a revelation for me, Forgive the long quote, but here it is:

It was noticed above that the values assumed in literature were seldom those of Christianity, Some of the principal values actually implicit in European literature were described as a honour, b sexual love, c material prosperity, d pantheistic contemplation of nature, e Sehnsucht awakened by the past, the remote, or the imagined supernatural, f liberation of impulses.
These were called "subChristian. " This is a term of disapproval if we are comparing them with Christian values: but if we take" subChristian" to mean "immediately subChristian" i, e. , the highest level of merely natural value lying immediately below the lowest level of spiritual value it may be a term of relative approval, Some of the six values I have enumerated may be subChristian in this relatively good sense, For c and f I can make no defence whenever they are accepted by the reader with anything more than a " willing suspension of disbelief" they must make him worse.
But the other four are all twoedged, I may symbolize what I think of them all by the aphorism " Any road out of Jerusalem must also be a road into Jerusalem, "

Thus: a To the perfected Christian the ideal of honour is simply a temptation, His courage has a better root, and, being learned in Gethsemane, may have no honour about it, But to the man coming up from below, the ideal of knighthood may prove a schoolmaster to the ideal of martyrdom, Galahad is the son of Launcelot,

b The road described by Dante and Patmore is a dangerous one, But mere animalism, however disguised as "honesty," "frankness," or the like, is not dangerous, but fatal, And not all are qualified to be, even in sentiment, eunuchs for the Kingdom's sake, For some souls romantic love also has proved a schoolmaster,

d There is an easy transition from Theism to Pantheism but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction, For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence.
To return to Pantheistic errors about the nature of this something would, for a Christian, be very bad, But once again, for "the man coming up from below" the Wordsworthian experience is an advance, Even if he goes no further he has escaped the worst arrogance of materialism: if he goes on he will be converted,

e The dangers of romantic Sehnsucht are very great, Eroticism and even occultism lie in wait for it, On this subject I can only give my own experience for what it is worth, When we are first converted I suppose we think mostly of our recent sins but as we go on, more and more of the terrible past comes under review.
In this process I have not or not yet reached a point at which I can honestly repent of my early experience of romantic Sehnsucht, That they were occasions to much that I do repent, is clear but I still cannot help thinking that this was my abuse of them, and that the experiences themselves contained, from the very first, a wholly good element.
Without them my conversion would have been more difficult,

I have dwelt chiefly on certain kinds of literature, not because I think them the only elements in culture that have this value as schoolmasters, but because I know them best and on literature rather than art and knowledge for the same reason.
My general case may be stated in Ricardian termsthat culture is a storehouse of the best subChristian values, These values are in themselves of the soul, not the spirit, But God created the soul, Its values may be expected, therefore, to contain some reflection or antepast of the spiritual values, They will save no man, They resemble the regenerate life only as affection resembles charity, or honour resembles virtue, or the moon the sun, But though "like is not the same," it is better than unlike, Imitation may pass into initiation, For some it is a good beginning, For others it is not culture is not everyone's road into Jerusalem, and for some it is a road out,

There is another way in which it may predispose to conversion, The difficulty of converting an uneducated man nowadays lies in his complacency, Popularized science, the conventions or "unconventions" of his immediate circle, party programmes, etc, enclose him in a tiny windowless universe which he mistakes for the only possible universe, There are no distant horizons, no mysteries, He thinks everything has been settled, A cultured person, on the other hand, is almost compelled to be aware that reality is very odd and that the ultimate truth, whatever it may be, must have the characteristics of strangenessmust be something that would seem remote and fantastic to the uncultured.
Thus some obstacles to faith have been removed already, On these grounds I conclude that culture has a distinct part to play in bringing certain souls to Christ, Not all souls there is a shorter, and safer, way which has always been followed by thousands of simple affectional natures who begin, where we hope to end, with devotion to the person of Christ.


That is just brilliant,

The other chapter I'll comment on is the one called Fernseed and Elephants, where he is apparently speaking to a class of Anglican priests in seminary, He spends the whole time dismantling the entire apparatus of higher criticism on which was based all of liberal Christianity, Having just read Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, it was interesting to see the contrasts and similarities, Ultimately, I think they are complimentary arguments, Machen is far more suited for those already leery of and opposed to liberalism, He will clarify and arm the believer for combat, Lewis' chapter is addressed to those already in that world and so is a bit more winsome, but I think he sees the issue almost as clearly as Machen does.
Consider these quotes:

"What you the liberal offer him the ordinary Christian he will not recognize as Christianity, If he holds to what he calls Christianity he will leave a Church in which it is no longer taught and look for one where it is, If he agrees with your version he will no longer call himself a Christian and no longer come to church, In his crude, coarse way, he would respect you much more if you did the same, "

Speaking of Bultmann a very influential liberal German theologian: "Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see"

"These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts the evidence is their obvious inability to read in any sense worth discussing the lines themselves.
They claim to see fernseed and cant see an elephant ten yards way in broad daylight, "

"The idea that any man Christ or writer should be opaque misunderstood to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those modern liberal theologians who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous.
There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance"

"The canon If miraculous, then unhistorical is one they modern liberal theologians bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it.
If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing, On this they speak simply as men men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in, "

"For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching, I do not wish to reduce the sceptical elements in your minds, I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds, Try doubting something else. Such scepticism might, I think, begin at the very beginning with the thought which underlies the whole demythology of our time, "

And then lastly, if not prophetically, this closing paragraph:
"Such are the reactions of one bleating layman to Modern Theology, It is right that you should hear them, You will not perhaps hear them very often again, Your parishioners will not often speak to you quite frankly, Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the vicar now he tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more.
Missionary to the priests of ones own church is an embarrassing role though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.
".