Reading CS Lewis: "Why I Am Not a Pacifist"

I have a new item on my bucket list: I want to read the works of CS Lewis. I've always enjoyed reading Lewis. His gift for the perfect analogy is, I suppose, one of the reasons he is so clear and compelling and why he still has such appeal so many decades after his death in 1963.

Some of his works I know well from frequent exposure. I teach a class on Lewis in my high school, so I read Mere Christianity and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with my students every year. But I've never really read all the way through his essays, stories, and sermons, collected in works such as The World's Last Night, God in the Dock, and Of Other Worlds.

And his letters! Lewis made it a point to respond personally to every letter he ever received from a reader, either in a hand-written note or dictated to his brother Warnie, who typed. It is estimated that he wrote some 10,000 letters. There are three collections that I am aware of, and with that many letters sent to that many fans, I suppose Lewis letters will continue to surface from time to time.

So this is the first of my posts on my readings in the book A Year with CS Lewis, from his essay "Why I am Not a Pacifist."

Lewis argues against pacifism on two grounds:

1. Jesus' admonition to "turn the other cheek" is not to be taken absolutely, to apply in all circumstances (e.g., a student striking a teacher, a criminal attacking an officer) but is rather concerned with inter-personal relationships. This is a distinction I have heard before and which seems reasonable.

Except that the actual pacifism demonstrated by Jesus (and commended later by Peter in his first epistle) did not have anything to do with personal relationships. He was abused by strangers, by representatives of the religious authority and the State. Nothing personal about those attacks, yet Jesus, who had every reason to retaliate, to protect Himself, submitted meekly to those torments.

2. Pacifism is politically impractical. In the end, the strictly observant pacifist is dominated by the bully, whether in the schoolyard or in international relations. In a fallen world, pacifism works well only as a theory, not in real life.

Except that "in the end" the unspeakable suffering of Jesus did prevail -- as did the suffering of the protesters in India and the civil rights activists in the American South. Given enough time, it would appear that it is pacifism, not militarism, that is ultimately triumphant.


This isn't, of course, mere theory. All of us have to make daily decisions about how we will respond to abuse and threats. "Turn the other cheek" and "love your enemy" are what Christ taught and what He exemplified.

And it's not just a personal matter. The Newtown shootings have thrust the gun debate back into the national spotlight. I have yet to hear a Christian argue for the right to bear arms along the lines of WWJD. It seems that whenever a Christian argues for the right to protect and defend with deadly force, the teachings of Jesus must be set aside.

I am no pacifist, but I cannot argue against the biblical soundness of the position.


 

Why I Still Teach

I’m one of those rare people who actually enjoys his work. I don’t drag myself to work, even on Mondays. 

Why? I get to work with kids in their late teens, at that crucial point in their intellectual and spiritual formation when they’re working out their own answers to the most important questions they’ll ever consider.

“What should I do with my life?” 

“I know what I’ve been taught, but what do I actually believe?” 

“What really matters and should claim my attention, and what is inconsequential and can safely be ignored?”

I can’t answer all those questions for my students. I can’t find God’s call for their lives or tell them what they believe, but in our time together in my Bible classes I try to help them understand what kind of God has called them and how He’s spoken through His Word. 

Sometimes I like to take my seniors on an on-campus “field trip.” We walk down to the hallway where the class composites line the walls, and they can see my “trophy case,” the images of those hundreds of students who have sat where they sit now, in my classroom. They’re not only looking at their future, they’re looking at what I’ve done with the last 35 years of my life.

I know that most men my age who began in the classroom have moved on to other things by now: administration, industry, the corporate world. But 35 years after I started out with sophomore English and eighth grade Bible classes at the old Homewood campus, I’m still herding the kittens every weekday. 

And (most days) loving it.

I'm beginning to think more and more that teaching is a young man's game. So why have I stayed in it for such a long time? There are several reasons. Here are some:

3. There’s a buzz in a room full of teenagers. Sure, there are days when teens are annoying (I try not to show it), but most days I love the sheer energy of teen life. It both keeps me young and ages me prematurely, I’m sure.

2. As a Christian parent, my wife and I have appreciated all the help we have received in raising our three sons and one daughter. As a teacher, I am grateful for the opportunity to help Christian parents in that vital task that God has assigned to them, passing on their faith.  

1. And the Number One Reason: I’m pretty sure I have the best job in the world. I get to invest my professional energies in the two things that will survive the planet: people and God’s Word. A zillion years from now, when the universe has burned up and vanished, the results of what we did in that building on Washington Church Road will endure. The people who sat in those chairs will be thriving in God’s New Heaven and Earth. 

And I get to play a role in their intellectual and spiritual formation? 

Astonishing!

The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common Faith

By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Published by Zondervan

I hadn’t heard of Wilson-Hartgrove before, but the Zondervan imprint, the forward by Shane Claiborne and endorsements by Eugene Peterson, Phyllis Tickle and Tony Campolo made it clear that the book would be intriguing.  I wasn’t disappointed.

Awakening of Hope, says Claiborne, “reminds us of the holy habits that have marked Christians for centuries.” It is a sort of primer on “the new monasticism” that is attracting a growing number of young Christians. Broken into digestible chapters that explain the rationale for Christian communal living, the book outlines a compelling vision of Christian community:

“Why We Eat Together”

“Why We Fast”

“Why We Make Promises”

“Why It Matters Where We Live”

“Why We Would Rather Die Than Kill”

“Why We Share Good News”

The aim of these monastic communities is to live out Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. The book introduces the reader not only to the disciplines themselves but also to biblical and church history background behind them, as well as contemporary examples of the disciplines as they are lived out in Christian monastic communities all across the country.

The accompanying DVD provides interviews and face-time with not only Wilson-Hartgrove but also with others who are living in these Christian communities.

The title is significant: Wilson-Hartgrove and Claiborne and their ilk see these communities as a harbinger of a new thing God is doing in His church. There is a kind of revival feel to the language, as if these people believe monastic communities could breathe new life into a stagnant American Christianity.

They may be right. The book reminded me a little of Gabe Lyon’s Next Christians, which outlines the profile of the new, young, socially-conscious believers who will carry the mantle of leadership as the post-war generation of leaders and visionaries passes off the scene.   

I do have one misgiving about the message of Awakening. If the new monasticism is understood as the new normal for serious Christians – which Wilson-Hartgrove suggests but does not explicitly state – then they may have missed the point. While it’s true that the earliest days of the church practiced communal living, by the time Paul wrote his letter to Timothy, pastor of the church in Ephesus, responsibility for helping needy Christians had fallen primarily to families, with the church providing a secondary, supportive role (see 1 Timothy 5). The nuclear family, after all, is God’s original design for community. Communes and monasteries are innovation. 

I don’t think Wilson-Hartgrove is trying to suggest that all Christians who live in nuclear families, scattered throughout the neighborhoods, should all abandon their houses and move into Christian compounds. That kind of isolationism has its own obvious drawbacks. But he does a good job of explaining, as he says, why some Christians have – at least for awhile – stepped out of the typical American lifestyle to embrace something wholly different and radical.

Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common Faith is a fascinating read. The thinking the book explores could make a positive impact on the American church. Eating together, making and keeping covenants, being conscious of the environmental impact of our lifestyle, choosing non-violence when we can – all of these are valuable insights and practices for believers, whether we live in nuclear families, with roommates, or in Christian communes.     

While the Prodigal Is Away

Prodigals. We all know one. A family member wandering far away. A spouse who wants out of the marriage you want to save. A rebellious son breaking his mother's heart.

We all wonder what we can do to bring them home.

How we can reach out.

If we should reach out.

Jesus' three stories of lost things found, recounted as single "parable" in Luke 15, feature three lost things found -- a sheep, a valuable coin and a much-loved son.

In the first two stories, Jesus tells of the enormous effort of the shepherd and the woman as they persevered until they found what they were looking for and called for friends and neighbors to celebrate with them. "In the same way," said Jesus, "the angels in heaven rejoice when one sinner repents."

But the third story is different. It too involves a lost thing, but not an animal or an inanimate object: it is a son. And unlike the shepherd or the woman, the father doesn't go searching for his lost son. He waits for him to return and welcomes him enthusiastically.


It may be that the prodigal's father provides us the clearest example of how what to do about the prodigal.

1. What the father didn't do is counterintuitive. After two stories of strenuous effort to find and rescue what was lost, Jesus features what may look like a passive father: he didn't go after his lost son. Not knowing how the story would end, the father declined to pursue his wayward son and instead waited patiently for his return.

We can only speculate what might have happened if the father had put together a posse to go fetch the boy. But we've seen enough interventions on reality TV to know how angry and self-deceiving the prodigal can be when confronted with the truth about himself.

No, Dad never went after his errant son. He wasn't there when the son came to the humiliating end of himself, when he composed the apology speech he would give to his father. This was a realization he had to come to on his own. And his father could do nothing to bring about that awful moment.


2. But just because Dad didn't chase the boy doesn't mean that Dad was idle. Jesus tells us that he saw his son "while he was still a long way off." I know, it could have been a coincidence. The father might have just been glancing up at that moment and just happened to catch sight of his son. But I've always thought that this father was anything but passive. I think he had been looking for his son to return since the day he left. I've imagined that Dad never just glanced at the horizon, he studied it long, he studied it longingly.

And as soon as he saw his son, he ran. Dignity and retribution never crossed his mind. At that moment, the fact that his son had disgraced him in the community, the fact that a third of his estate had been wasted on prostitutes and liquor... none of that mattered. All that mattered at that moment, when he saw his son, was that his son was home again.

What did it take for Dad to maintain that kind of emotional equilibrium the whole time his son was gone? The waiting soul is fertile ground for bad seed. Cynicism and bitterness had sprung up to contaminate the brother's soul, but Dad's heart was still open to forgive and restore. There were no "I told you so" speeches, no demand for restitution; he didn't even let his son finish his apology. There were no mixed feelings here, only grace and rejoicing love.


So what do we do for our prodigals? Do we reach out to them? In our hyper-connected world we have that capability: the Facebook message, the text message, the email. Perhaps we do reach out, but we never coerce or pester. We never try to do the work that God's Spirit alone can do -- change a heart.  

So what do we do?

1. We pray that they can come to the end of themselves soon and without life-destroying consequences.

2. We trust God to do His work in His time in the hearts of people He loves even more than we do.

3. We guard our hearts against bitterness. We stifle the impulse to compose angry "I told you so" speeches.

And we keep the party supplies on hand. No one knows when we might get the chance to use them.

Review: Water from an Ancient Well

I have always been interested in Celtic Christianity. Perhaps it's my family’s Irish roots, my fondness for Irish and Celtic folk music, my fascination with the lush Irish countryside. So when I saw this new book Water from an Ancient Well: Celtic Spirituality for Modern Life (Kenneth McIntosh, Anamchara Books) and realized it explores early Celtic Christianity, I wanted to take a closer look.

In many ways I wasn't disappointed. I learned a great deal about those early days of the Christian faith on the British Isles. I learned, for instance, that the "Gal" in "Galatians" is really a reference to the Gallic (Celtic) peoples who had migrated to the region Paul addressed in his letter to the churches there. I learned more about the amazing ministry of Patrick, who managed to convert the entire island from paganism to Christianity. I learned that Celtic Christianity, while it held fast to basic Christian doctrine -- the Trinity and the Apostles Creed, for instance -- developed its own unique and diverse Christian art forms. 

But I was disappointed in the volume in other respects. This looked like a book that needed an editor's sure hand. For one thing (and this is a small thing) I didn't like the font used in the quotations at the end and beginning of each chapter, italicized Papyrus, not the kind of thing that a professional typesetter would have done, I think.

The writing was uneven, sometimes light and even a little juvenile in the stories that opened the chapters, as if it were aimed at a young adult audience, sometimes in a scholarly, almost pedantic tone when it discussed historical and theological details. It was as if McIntosh couldn’t decide what kind of audience he wanted to reach. The lack of focus extended to its content: sometimes focused on ancient Celtic spirituality, sometimes jumping forward to modern church outreach. I think McIntosh tried to do too much with too little focus.  

There is a good index, always useful in a book crammed as this one is with information. But there are no footnotes or endnotes or bibliography. And for a book that contains as much fascinating historical information as it does, source information would have been helpful.

I think the book was a good idea, but it wasn’t rendered well. I give Water from an Ancient Well two stars (out of four). 

Review: A New Evangelical Manifesto

This collection of essays by notables such as Brian McLaren, Richard Cizik, and David Gushee hopes to lay out a new vision for the evangelical movement. At first glance, the title made me wonder the essays would simply rehearse familiar emergent church themes. And when I saw that Brian McLaren, patriarch and chief spokesman for emergent, had written the opening essay, my first thought was that I was right.

But as I read, I realized I was only half right. Whereas emergent is primarily concerned with theology and ecclesiology, A New Evangelical Manifesto expands on emergent’s concern for social justice. In that sense, its contents are predictable: against the death penalty, against nuclear energy, concerned about global warming, human trafficking, healthcare, race, abortion, nuclear weapons, war and global poverty – themes that will certainly resonate with younger evangelicals.

There is no question that we are witnessing a seismic shift in the American church, a shift we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Young Christians -- hyper-connected, socially concerned and cynical about polarizing ideological squabbles -- are either leaving the church (ala Gabe Lyon’s unChristian) or leaving the faith altogether (“spiritual but not religious”).  What we are seeing in response to this exodus of the young is a whole slate of bold new initiatives, including not only the emergent church movement but also the backlash of the “young, Reformed and restless.” 

McLaren’s introductory essay, “The Church in America Today,” outlines the cultural shift we are witnessing, and he correctly identifies the problem. The old intramural debates that used to occupy the church -- sequence of end-times events, role of sign gifts in the contemporary church -- those debates are simply irrelevant to the young evangelicals. Those old doctrinal questions have been supplanted by more basic questions of apologetics, soteriology and evangelism. They want to know how it is possible to insist on the uniqueness of Jesus in a multicultural environment and how Christians can insist on salvation through Christ when Muslims and Buddhists are not just exotic characters in movies but devout and kind-hearted next door neighbors. “The question isn’t, ‘Are we saved by faith alone or by faith plus works?,’ says McLaren. “The question is, ‘What is salvation in the first place? What are we being saved from and for?’” 

I have seen the same transformation in the students in my Christian high school classroom over the past three decades. Time was when students would get into heated arguments at lunch over sign gifts or eternal security and come steaming into my classroom needing mediation. Now they scarcely even know what their churches teach about such doctrinal niceties and care even less.

McLaren labels the old evangelicalism “nostalgic,” “nativist” and “negative.” Although his summary applies only to the worst of evangelicalism, it is true that this is largely the perception of the many young Christians fading from our churches. And the cliche is true: perception is reality. The new evangelicalism, says McLaren, is characterized by “hope,” “diversity” and “creative collaboration.” He paints a rosy picture of the alternative to the straw man, and it is an attractive vision for many young Christians looking for something to believe in.

Richard Cizik, formerly Vice President for the National Association of Evangelicals, offers a fascinating story of his forced resignation from the organization in his essay "My Journey toward the 'New Evangelicalism.'" His understanding is that he lost his post because of pressure from the Religious Right. In essence, he says, the NAE told him that they will do whatever it takes to avoid criticism from politically connected conservative groups.

Some readers will be provoked and disturbed by Scott Claybrook's essay, "The Dying," which explores euthanasia and medically assisted suicide. In language that might be channeling the Hemlock's Society's Derek Humphry, Claybrook suggests that "uncritical rejections of assisted suicide and euthanasia for the terminally ill fail to accurately comprehend the multilayered experience of pain and suffering as one with a terminal illness begins the walk toward death."

Other essays, “Where the Church Went Wrong” by Steve Martin and “A Disenchanted Text: Where Evangelicals Went Wrong with the Bible” by Cheryl Bridge Johns, take aim at weaknesses in the evangelical subculture. 

While I understand their critique, I do wonder: If they are talking about the old models of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, they are right. Those movements have seen their better days, and there were problems in their perspective and methods. (I never did understand, for example, what support for the B1 Bomber had to do with a Christian/moral political stance.)

But I don't believe these same criticisms could be made of the resurgent new voices leading evangelicalism today: John Piper, Tim Keller and Albert Mohler, for instance. An evangelicalism that follows their lead would look very different from McLaren's vision for our future. And therein lies our choice.

The deeply entrenched ideological debate we see today is nothing new. Protestantism has been divided for decades, ever since the Great Divide of the 1920s, when the modernists and fundamentalists went their separate ways, and the social justice v. doctrinal purity wars were born. Those wars have scarcely let up over the past nine decades. A New Evangelical Manifesto proposes to point the way out of these paralyzing debates, but it looks to many as if the new evangelicalism is not, as it claims to be, more faithful to the entire biblical witness. It seems instead to merely compromise biblical truth in order to pursue a more robust social justice.

So what does the future of evangelicalism look like? Does this manifesto describe the third way forward, or does it merely rehash old liberal diatribes against the right? Or perhaps Mohler, Keller, et al provide the new way forward for evangelicalism? Both movements are robust, both are more thoughtful and more socially engaged than the old evangelicalism, but both cannot lead us forward. They are not going in the same direction. 

It's clear enough that we are witnessing in American evangelicalism the death of something old and the birth of something new. What that new thing looks like remains to be seen. A New Evangelical Manifesto does provide a clear articulation of one possible future for the American church. This reviewer would love to see a comprehensive response from the other version of the new evangelicalism.

Viral Jesus by Ross Rohde

I serve as an elder at my church, so I occasionally read books on church and church leadership. The title of Viral Jesus caught my eye. It’s hip and catchy. And it raised questions for me right away.

The title made me think of an emergent church approach to evangelism and doing church, low on hierarchy (I was right there) big on cultural relevance (not so much). But as I read, I realized Rohde’s approach was far more familiar to me than I could have guessed.

Rohde’s thesis is that the church has borrowed too heavily from Roman Catholic and early Reformer ecclesiology. As a result, we are hide-bound and traditionalistic, and we hinder rather than cooperate with the movement of God’s Spirit in the world. We’re too cautious, we’re too hesitant to embrace the supernatural, we’re too dependent on organization and technique and not sensitive enough to the leading of God’s Spirit to see the kind of wild-fire (“viral”) growth that the early church saw. Rohde even finds fault with the way the church is growing in Latin America and Korea. (China, he says, is a different story. They’re following the first-century model more closely.)

This is all familiar to me because I grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the old Pentecostal denominations that traces its roots back to the Azuza Street revivals of the early twentieth century. The AG long resisted any self-identification as a “denomination,” with all those overtones of hierarchy and structure, but the charismatic and Jesus People movements of the 1970s recast the AG in the role of counterbalance. With its decades of organizational experience and its growing scholarly reputation, the AG and other classic Pentecostal denominations provided a stabilizing influence in those heady days.

So Rohde’s themes were familiar to me. Viral Jesus read like a defense of AG doctrine, almost like a YWAM handbook: be open to the supernatural, listen for the leading of God’s Spirit, expect the unexpected. 

And he’s right. We evangelicals are too fond of organizational models (which may be, as our emergent critics say, more due to our affinity for corporate hierarchy than traditional ecclesiology), we are far too cautious (almost certainly the business background there) and we get spooked by the mystical and the supernatural, both of which clearly have their place in God’s work.  

But this AG boy got his seminary training at Dallas Theological Seminary, so I am familiar also with the opposing view. At Dallas I was exposed to the heavy emphasis on the study of Scripture and theology, a cautious if not prohibitive stance on the supernatural in Christian ministry and opposition to women serving in official church leadership over men. 

So there was another part of me that said Rohde had gone too far: he didn’t say much about the study of Scripture, except to cite examples of the model he recommends. (He says Luke 10, where Jesus sends the disciples out, is the paradigm for ministry.) As he would have it, study of Scripture, theology and church history are really not essential for a Christian leader. Really?

Rohde argues that church hierarchy was far simpler in the early church and that over the centuries it became the “old wineskin” that we see today. Again, I think he goes too far. Paul wrote three pastoral letters, and in two of them he discussed at length the kind of organization and structure he wanted to see in the churches. Peter certainly had a hierarchy in mind when he wrote about elders, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews urged readers to submit to those in authority in the church. No, authority and submission were part of the church from the beginning.

I remember a fellow Dallas grad telling me once that he wished the church had the mind of Dallas Seminary and the fire of the charismatic movement. Rohde recommends the fire part. His book is not intended to be a balanced treatment of church-planting ministry philosophy, but it provides a needed voice in the discussion of what evangelism, discipleship and church planting should look like.