VALidations

Mere Christianity , Book Two What Christians Believe, Chapter 5 The Practical Conclusion "The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man."  I would change the past-tense "was" to present-tense "is" but CS Lewis was the Oxford professor of English, not me!  Jesus is God and He is man.  But the point is that Christians who share in Jesus' surrender and humiliation (admitting that we are imperfect to say the least and must surrender our lives) will also share in His victory over death and have new life.  How is this possible?  How can Christ put His new life into us?  Lewis believes there are three things that "spread the Christ-life to us": baptism, belief, and communion.  This is one point from which the many "denominations" of Christianity disperse.  I personally believe that the only way to receive new life in Christ is by simply believing i...

Not a single soul born on this planet has been spared suffering...not even God's perfect and blameless Son, Jesus.  Thank you, Lord, for sending Jesus to suffer with us on this planet, so that we are never alone. The Hurt and the Healer (Mercy Me) Why? The question that is never far away The healing doesn't come from the explained Jesus please don't let this go in vain You're all I have All that remains So here I am What's left of me Where glory meets my suffering I'm alive Even though a part of me has died You take my heart and breathe it back to life I've fallen into Your arms open wide When the hurt and the healer collide Breathe Sometimes I feel it's all that I can do Pain so deep that I can hardly move Just keep my eyes completely fixed on You Lord take and hold and pull me through So here I am What's left of me Where glory meets my suffering I'm alive Even though a part of me has died You take my heart and b...

Mere Christianity, Book II What Christians Believe, Chapter Four  The Perfect Penitent If Jesus was not a crazy person or a liar, then we are left with only one possibility.  He was in fact who He claimed to be: God in human form.  But why?  When He was alive, He did do a lot of teaching, but Christians will tell you that the main reason He came was to suffer and die, and then be raised from the dead.  Believing this is the foundation of Christianity.  Every Christian, regardless of his or her denomination, believes that Jesus was God, and that He died and rose again, and that this single unimaginable act somehow put us right with God.  That, in a nutshell, is Christianity. Now, there are many different theories out there to explain how  Jesus' death and resurrection put us right with our Creator once again, and defeated death (and the devil) for all time.  But please remember that these theories are not  Christianity.  "The cen...

Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 3, The Shocking Alternative Christians believe that the devil is real, and that he is a fallen angel.  This causes some difficulties.  If God is good, why would something He created go so horribly wrong?  If He is all-powerful, why allow Satan to do any harm, and if He is all-knowing, why create him in the first place?  Lewis proposes that these difficulties are the price to be paid for free will. He responds to the question, "How can anything happen contrary to the will or a being with absolute power?" with this example: "It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, 'I'm not going to go and make you tidy the school-room every night.  You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own.'  Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate.  That is against her will.  She would prefer the children to be tidy.  But on the other hand, ...

Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 2, The Invasion We are actually going to talk about two other ideas about how the universe operates: Christianity-and-water and Dualism.  Please remember I am not a philosophy or world religions expert.  I am just doing my best to follow what Lewis is proposing here.  If he is wrong, I wouldn't know, so please inform me if he is mistaken on his explanation of these philosophies. He ended the last chapter by explaining how atheism is too simple.  He also believes the "Christianity-and-water" view to be overly simple.  This view says that God is good and everything is great, leaving out the stuff nobody likes to hear about sin and hell and the devil (and also, therefore, redemption).  He calls atheism and this idea "boy's philosophies."  Pretty harsh, huh? Lewis then goes on to describe how real things are not simple.  If something is too simple, we are often suspicious of it, are we not?  He gives an ...

As promised, here is the next section of  Mere Christianity.   Book II, Chapter 1, The Rival Conceptions of God In this chapter, CS Lewis explains what he believes are the divisions of humanity as far as what people believe about God.  The first paragraph is one of my favorites, and something I've not heard many Christians say (at least not in this particular way), so I thought I'd include the whole paragraph in this post. "I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe.  If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.  If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.  If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.  When ...

Don't worry, I will be getting back to Mere Christianity  next time, I promise.  But tonight I can't sleep until I write down the things that won't turn off in my brain.  After writing my last two posts, sharing with you my doubts and fears, I feel like I HAVE to share what I've learned.  It wouldn't be right to leave this one hanging.  So, here goes: God is VERY real.  He is more real than ANYTHING.  How have I come to this conclusion?  Well, that is pretty much impossible to put into words, but I suppose I should try.  I guess the process could be described by Jeremiah 29:13 "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."  In my own words, I think God was getting fed up with me doubting Him, and showed me how absurd those thoughts are.  He kind of said, "Seriously?  How can you even say you aren't sure about me?"  I don't think it is wrong to have doubts and that you should just blindly accept ever...

Related to the beginning of my last post, I just wanted to share the lyrics to a song by Nickel Creek, written by Chris Thile, an AMAZING mandolin player. Doubting Thomas what will be left when i've drawn my last breath besides the folks i've met and the folks who know me will i discover a soul cleansing love or just the dirt above and below me i'm a doubting thomas i took a promise but i don't know what's safe oh me of little faith sometimes i pray for a slap in the face then i beg to be spared 'cause i'm a coward if there's a master of death i'll bet he's holding his breath as i show the blind and tell the deaf about his power i'm a doubting thomas i can't keep my promises 'cause i don't know what's safe oh me of little faith can i be used to help others find truth when i'm scared i'll find proof that it's a lie can i be lead down a trail dropping bread crumbs that prove i'm not rea...

Mere Christianity, Book I, Chapter 5, We Have Cause to Be Uneasy Let me start by telling you some of the things that go through my head.  I'm not sure what event it was that started this, but the last year or two, there have been times when I think, "What if there is no God?"  I became a Christian when I was just six years old, and as a child it was so easy to believe in the ideas of God creating the world, and of Jesus being raised from the dead.  Those things just made sense and were easy to accept.  Perhaps this is just my coming of age, and I actually want more explanations for those things, outside of what the Bible says.  I hear all the time that Christians are stupid, and are blind to the reality of the world we live in, even that we are evil.  Is that true?  I wouldn't call myself a stupid or evil person.  So, what's the problem then?  Should someone like me really believe all that stuff about God?  If someone would ask me why ...

Mere Christianity, Book I, Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law In very broad terms, there are two explanations for how our universe came to be.  The first is the idea that the universe is here by chance.  I am not an expert on the subject, but the very basic theory, in layman's terms, is that the big bang happened and since then the universe has been expanding, gases have formed stars, matter has formed planets and moons, and on our own planet, matter has formed over the years into living things with minds, all by chance.  (How is that for a run-on sentence?)  The second idea says that "what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know.  That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another."  This thing like a mind made the universe and made things like itself, things with minds.  I know there are other ideas but most of them fall into one of these two categories. Lewis asks us not ...

Mere Christianity, Book I, Chapter 3: The Reality of the Law In this chapter, Lewis continues to describe the characteristics of the Moral Law we all find pressing on us, specifically, the fact that humans break the Moral Law.  His first illustration concerns rocks and trees.  "If you take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there seems to be no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise."  A stone or a tree could be inconvenient to us at one point, due to it's shape or size, but it would be silly to say that it is "bad" and blame it, for it is simply following the laws of it's nature, just the same as a rock or tree that is convenient to us.  So that rock or tree is obeying the Natural Laws.  If you drop a rock, it will fall to the ground.  This is the Law of Gravity.  But these Natural Laws are not really laws as we usually mean.  "You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under...

Mere Christianity  Book I, Chapter 2  Some Objections In my last post, we discussed the existence of a real Right and Wrong, what Lewis calls the Law of Human Nature (in other words, how humans ought to behave), and we discussed the fact that we all break that law. Lewis writes at the end of chapter one, "These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in."  In chapter two, Lewis firms up that foundation by explaining further what the Law of Human Nature is, and what it is not.  For some reason that I do not know, Lewis refers to the Law of Human Nature as Moral Law in this chapter.  This label makes more sense to me, and is probably what I would have called it all along, but I suppose that is beside the point.  On to the first objection. Some say that Moral Law is simply our herd instinct that has developed just like all our other instincts.  Lewis gives some great examples to show that Moral Law i...

Mere Christianity is divided into four books.  Book One is titled Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe .  Chapter 1 is titled The Law of Human Nature.   Let's start there. "Every one has heard people quarreling."  True enough.  What sorts of things do people say when they are quarreling or arguing?  "She cut in front of me!"  "He took my cookie!"  "I was there first!"  "That is so unfair!"  Just get a group of people together, and you will hear all of these complaints, and an endless list of others.  Lewis elaborates, "Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him.  He is appealing to some kind of standard behavior which he expects the other man to know about."  Hard to disagree with him here.  If two people are having an argument, one person is always trying to point out where the othe...

I have been reading some C. S. Lewis this summer.  I am almost finished with Mere Christianity, and I would like to use this blog to write some of my thoughts as I read or outline things from the book that I find interesting or enlightening (which is nearly every word on the page.)  What brought me to start this endeavor?  As the New York Times Book Review puts it, "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way."  In my own words, "Can you be a Christian and a rationally thinking person at the same time?"  After reading, I hope you will be convinced, as I am, that the answer is YES! In order to start this thing properly, I think I must start with a VERY brief biography of C.S. Lewis, so you can understand a little better who he was and why you should listen to anything he said.  If you are unsatisfied with my account of his life, feel free to do your own re...

I am so excited about this painting! I love it right now and I can't wait to start working on it more. I am thinking of doing a series of moon paintings, experimenting with color. The moon is really fun to paint, by the way.