Marginal Christianity

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,...

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 ...

21  But now God’s righteousness has been revealed apart from the Law, which is confirmed by the Law and the Prophets. 22  God’s righteousness comes through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who have faith in him. There’s no distinction. 23  All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, 24  but all are treated as righteous freely by his grace because of a ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus. 25  Through his faithfulness, God displayed Jesus as the place of sacrifice where mercy is found by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness in passing over sins that happened before, 26  during the time of God’s patient tolerance. He also did this to demonstrate that he is righteous in the present time, and to treat the one who has faith in Jesus as righteous. 27  What happens to our bragging? It’s thrown out. With which law? With what we have accomplished under the Law? 28  No, not at all, but through the law of faith...