Marginal Christianity

Good News: Jesus Does Not Want to Make a Difference in Your Life! Jesus does not want to make a difference in your life. I’m not kidding! In all seriousness, Jesus does not want to make a difference in your life. Or mine. Or anyone else’s. Can you believe that? If so you understand the gospel. If not, well, this sermon’s especially for you! If you think or want Jesus to make a difference in your life your gospel is too small! It may be conservative/traditional or progressive/liberal or somewhere in between, but it is not the Bible’s good news. Such a gospel remains wedded to a fundamentally inadequate view of Jesus. What do I mean by that? Just this. A Jesus who only makes a difference in human lives is either a gnostic redeemer figure (for conservative versions) or a figure whose noble life and death inspires in or models for us the way life should be lived (for progressive/liberal versions). Either way, Jesus adjusts, tweaks, recalibrates, or even radically reorients the...

Ransom lands and begins to experience the wonders of Perelandra. As alien and strange in its own way as the ancient planet of Malacandra had been, Ransom felt no fear or discomfort, though, as he had there. In part it was that very experience that helped him deal with his encounter with Perelandra. On Malacandra he had had an adventure. But because of that, on Perelandra he “had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth”(3270). Perhaps even more important, that earlier experience had made him realize “that he was part of a plan. He was no longer unattached, no longer on the outside” (3318). And that’s a good thing he had this sense of enacting a myth too. Because when he meets the Green Lady near the end of the chapter he comes face-to-face with a smorgasbord of mythologies. “Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her port...

On November 1933, on the 450 th  anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth, 20,000 German Christians held a mass rally celebrating four distinctive beliefs. I find parallels to what is happening under Donald Trump (in bolded italics) : ·          Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Protestant Reformation  started by Martin Luther ·          Donald Trump is the Protector of the Christian Faith in America ·          Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church ·          Immigrants are not welcome in our country or churches (“Send them back where they came from” ·          The Old Testament is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures ·          Neither the Old or New Testaments “trump” America’s needs or in...

In perhaps one of the greatest chapters in the book Lewis offers a grand and gorgeous and sensuous description of a place ever penned. The unfallen grandeur of the planet, its virginal character, its unimaginable beauty is so masterfully done by Lewis that it defies my ability to summarize or do justice to. You really need to just read it for yourself. One can only imagine this setting if one imagined oneself sitting in Eden trying to write down what one saw, felt, and experienced. This “warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world” (3092) defies, as I said, my poor ability to summarize Lewis’ description of it. I confine myself to a few brief comments and leave it for you to read and luxuriate in the original. Excess is perhaps the best single word to capture this unfallen reality. Lewis communicates this is many ways in this chapter, only three of which I draw your attention to: 1.             Lewis notes that the reality of Perelandra exceeds...

In this chapter we read of the preparation for and the journey of Ransom to Perelandra and back. For our purposes of Christian reflection two matters stand out. The first is that Ransom is to travel to Perelandra in a coffin-shaped container and that he is to travel naked. To my mind, and I suspect Lewis’ too, this can scarcely be other than his way of speaking about our lives with God in Christ as having the shape of the cross (or cruciform). As Christ died hanging naked on a cross so Ransom “dies” (hence the coffin-shaped container) to his old life and is borne naked into his new one. Candidates for baptism in the early church would strip of their old clothes, signifying their old way of life, descend into the baptismal font naked, and arise from it to receive a white robe signifying their new life. Surely there are echoes of that here as well. Does remembrance of your baptism play any role in your walk with God today? Do you live with the awareness that, in all truth,...

After character Lewis confesses that he had his own encounter with an eldil and has been “drawn in” to Ransom’s adventure, he confesses “Yet here we were both getting more and more involved in what I could only describe as interplanetary politics” (2656). And Ransom later says to character Lewis, “You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr. Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania” (2877). It seems fair, then, to claim that “interplanetary politics” and “powers and principalities” refer to the same thing St. Paul tells us that the church struggles against “principalities and powers” and not flesh and blood (Eph.6:12). ” Principalities and powers” are created good (Col.1:16) to establish and sustain the conditions that make and keep human life human and humane. They somehow fell and rebelled against God and each sought supremacy over the others and humanity. The result is the chaotic and intractable p...

In Part 1 we explored the similarities between the “conversions” of author Lewis and character Lewis and noted the important role witnesses played in both of them. Today we look at the world as author Lewis saw it. A quote from his study The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature summarizes his view: “Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law...

C. S. Lewis stars as himself in this opening chapter to Perelandra . This is more than simply a literary device to hook readers into the story. How CSL describes his approach to his relationship to Elwin Ransom and the rather odd (to say the least) circumstances of his life bear an uncanny likeness to his own coming to faith in God as he wrote it up in his book Surprised by Joy . I think we do well, then, to read this chapter as the confession of faith of one who described his real life turning to God in these words: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now ...

In this series I will offer reflections on each chapter of CSL’s marvelous novel Perelandra , the second story in his science fiction space trilogy. Lewis makes no attempt to hide that this story is his imaginative take on the Adam and Eve story of the Bible. In some ways Perelandra is theological exposition of a Christian version of creation and fall. In other ways, it forms an apologetic for a way of seeing and being in the world largely discounted and dismissed by the modern world Lewis inhabited. In a third way, this story is a profound and searching account of one’s relation to God and Christ (“Maleldil” in the story). Woven together with Lewis’ inimitable skill and immense learning Perelandra is an astonishing achievement. Little wonder it was Lewis’ favorite of all the books he wrote. I will not be referencing all the various literary and mythological allusions in the story. That is not the focus of these posts and beyond my competence at any rate. I intend these as edify...