C.S. Lewis—A man who smoked and drank alcohol

Guest blogger: Dr. Matt Farlow

Dr. Farlow and his family reside in Folsom, CA where he currently serves as the Director and Pastor of Inreach Ministries for Lakeside church. Matt completed a Ph.D. in Theology and Literature at The University of St Andrews. Matt’s doctoral research focused on humanity’s participation in God’s drama of reconciliation. His project investigated God’s imaginative performance in order to make further attempts in realizing the relationship between personhood (being) and how our identity helps to define our role and mission upon the world’s stage.

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              C.S. Lewis—A man enmeshed in the scandalous nature of       

                                           the Cross

Alcohol, suffering, pain, imagination, theology, tobacco, commitment, hell and the like…All the aforementioned have been discussed with regards to who this man is we know as C.S. Lewis. Each of the previous posts have brilliantly painted the portrait of the man called Jack (by his friends), a man who has arguably had one of the most profound and significant influences on Christianity, and in particular my own studies and faith.

Like all of us, Lewis wrestled with the question of who he is. At the age of 15 he claimed to be an atheist, even amidst growing up in a church-going family. Through his work, Lewis continued to wrestle with the question of “who am I?” – and it is my belief that Lewis knew each one of us wrestles with this question. The profundity of Lewis’ work is that he understood and embedded the reality that the question of who I am must be answered in light of who I say Jesus is. I can only be true to myself if indeed I know who I am.

Thus, Jesus’ question “Who do you say I am?” (Mat 16.15; Mar 8.29; Lk 9.20) is the great quenching question. It silences all others, for it is itself the answer to everything. Like Lewis, who as a child was angry with God, we all think we have the right to make certain demands of Almighty God. We are quite ready to place God in the dock so as to question Him, to question His ways. We approach Him with many questions, questions with a touch of complaint in them, with a note of self-excuse, with more than a hint of self-satisfaction. Yet, God is ready with His answer: “What do you think about the Christ?”

So many refuse to accept the person of Christ in His deity because of His scandalous nature. They cannot reply to the great question of who Christ is with “My Lord and my God” (John 20.28). They remain utterly silent not realising that God is here and He is not silent. This Christ who began by appealing to our heart ends by compelling our attention. Instead of giving attention to the scandalous nature of Christ, many desire for Him simply to be safe, but as Lewis wrote in The Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus (Aslan) is not safe, but He is good. Thus, the question remains, “Who do you say I am?”

Jesus Christ is Lord because He is God. In this vein, Lewis’ point made about the deity of Christ in his classic, Mere Christianity, must be stated:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come away with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." 

Christianity is rooted in the act and love of the Trinity. It is a faith rooted in the performance of Christ such that through the Holy Spirit we (humanity) might come to participate in the on-going transformative and redemptive drama of the Godhead. In some sense, it is faith in the absurd. The whole of our faith is focused on the appalling end of Jesus, of the Cross, as having been brought about pro nobis, (for us); Paul even says: for each one of us, thus, for me.

The foundation of Christianity is scandalous and, as theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar points out, this scandal cannot “be removed by further theoretical discussion but only by praxis. . . . God shows his truth to us through acting, and the Christian (including the anonymous Christian, the Samaritan) likewise shows that he is following in Christ’s footsteps by acting in love towards his fellow men.” Faith in Christ is an act that supersedes all others, because as an act that participates in Christ’s drama of salvation, it defines and answers the question of “who I am.”

However, in modern times, faith has been weakened in meaning so that some people use it to mean self-confidence. But in the Bible, true faith is confidence in, and surrender to, the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, not to oneself. Lewis wrote that “We must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up a subjective state which, if we succeeded, we should describe “faith,” with the idea that this will somehow insure the granting of our prayer…The state of mind in which desperate desire working on a strong imagination can manufacture is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat of psychological gymnastics.”

Thanks to giants such as C.S. Lewis we can confidently come to realize that while we are called to live by faith, we must know that we are not left alone in this call, as God is with us and we are with God. We participate in God’s eternal act of love (Christ’s salvific act) through our willingness to step into and live out the scandalous reality of the cross – a reality that transformed a 15 year old Irish atheist into one of the most profoundly influential Christian authors and thinkers of our time.

For more from Dr. Matt Farlow, check it out his blog http://lakesidechurch.com/godtalk or you can follow him at https://twitter.com/drmatthewfarlow .