Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: C.S. Lewis part 1

Preliminary Comments on Lewis Books and the Manuscript

Before I pray, let me just give two preliminary comments about Lewis books and this manuscript. There are some books by Lewis in the bookstore. There shouldn't be any when we shut this bookstore down.

You won't go wrong in buying something from Lewis. So if you see anything there you don't have by Lewis, you should buy it. And with regard to this manuscript that I'm going to be using, David has had a chance to work on it this morning, so it will be on the internet when I'm done here.

So I didn't want him to put it up now because you go there and look at it while I'm talking and that would be intimidating to me. But the best way to listen, I think, is probably not by taking notes since the manuscript will be there with all of its footnotes, but by thinking and praying and pondering and maybe jotting questions down for for tomorrow's panel.

Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for your gift to us of C .S. Lewis. I want to be faithful first to you. Second, I want to be faithful to your word. Third, I want to be faithful to tell the truth about C .S. Lewis and not get him wrong.

And I want to tell the story of his influence on me. And so would you take all of that attempt and make it really profitable for those who hear? So that their faith would be strong and their joy would go deep and their sense of your absolute truth would be unshaken and they would be mightily influential for the glory of Christ in this world.

I ask this in Jesus name. Amen. My approach is going to be personal. I'm going to talk about what Lewis has meant most to me. How he's helped me most. And as I raise that question, as I have many times over the years as to why this man has been so powerful in my life, the backdrop of the question becomes increasingly urgent.

Lewis’s Theological Limitations and Why He Still Matters

Namely, why has he been so significant to me even though he's not reformed and would barely be called an evangelical by typical American uses of that word. He does not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.

He defaults to logical arguments more naturally than to biblical exegesis. He doesn't treat the Reformation with respect, but thinks it could have been avoided and calls aspects of it farcical. He steadfastly refused in public and in letters to explain why he did not go to the Roman Catholic Church, but remained in the Church of England.

He makes room for at least some people to be saved through imperfect representations of Christ in other religions. He made a strong logical, and I think unbiblical, case for free will to explain the existence of suffering.

He speaks of the atonement with respect, but puts little significance on any of the explanations of how the atonement actually saves sinners. In other words, Lewis is not a writer to which we should turn for growth in a careful biblical understanding of Christian doctrine.

His value is not in biblical exegesis. Lewis is not the kind of writer who provides substance for pastor sermons. If a pastor treats Lewis as a substance giver, his sermons will be quickly exhausted.

Of biblical.

Content.

So,.

Why don't I put Lewis in the category, say, with liberal theologians and with the emergent writers? At one level, the mistakes he makes are very similar to the mistakes that emergent writers make. But, there was something about the way he read Scripture that made my own embrace of inerrancy tighter, not looser.

There was something about the way he spoke about the grace of God and the power of God that made me value the particularities of the Reformation more, not less. There's something about the way he portrayed the wonders of the incarnation that makes me more suspicious of his inclusivism, not more accepting of it.

There's something about the way he spoke about doctrine as the necessary roadmap that leads to reality, and the way he esteemed truth and reason and precision of thought that made me cherish more, not less, the historical articulations of the biblical explanations of how the cross saves sinners.

The so-called theories of the atonement. Lewis devoted his whole life to what he called mere Christianity, to defending and adorning the Christian religion, quote, as understood ubique et ab omnibus, as everywhere and by everyone believed.

So he didn't want to write about any denomination or any branch. He wanted to talk about mere Christianity. Now, there's a price to pay when you set yourself that kind of agenda. You will almost certainly omit things essential to the gospel.

Not that you don't believe them. I think he was a Christian, a very profound, deeply.

True.

Christian. But virtually all important doctrines have been disputed from within the church, not from without, but from within the church. And if you make it an effort to only deal with matters about which there is no dispute within the global church, you run the risk of omitting very important things.

And we should have been warned about this because in the New Testament letters, the way Paul, in particular, articulates the truth and defends the truth of the gospel is not by arguing with people outside the church, but by arguing with people inside the church.

All of the New Testament letters come clear to us through intra-church disputation. And therefore, if you try to set your agenda as a pastor to omit things that are not controverted, you will not preach at all.

And so it was a highly dangerous agenda that he set himself. No pastor should follow him in this, namely to ordain, adorn, and defend the truths that all Christians everywhere have believed. He was a professor of English literature from 1924 to 1963 at first Oxford, then Cambridge.

He was not a pastor. He didn't have to open the scriptures week in and week out and feed the same flock for 30 or 40 years and explain to them the meaning of the Bible and give them the riches of the whole counsel of God.

He had the luxury, so to speak, of picking and choosing the things about which he would talk in public about the Christian faith. And he wrote books on science fiction, children's books, poetry, essays, apologetics, and in them all he chose to focus on mere Christianity.

And within that focus, that limited focus, which he would say is infinitely large, he fell short of saying many important things regarding the gospel of Christ.

However,.

If I focus on what he.

Said.

Instead of what he didn't say, even for me who consider some of the doctrines absolutely crucial that he passed over, I find that the blessings of C .S. Lewis in my life are incalculable. And so you can see the problem that I'm facing as I take this up.

Having said all of those misgivings about the way he approached doctrine and the Bible, I find myself in massive debt to him. And so I speak out of that struggle to make plain to you how those two things can be.

How can it be that one whose errors seem so blatant to me be so significant in my life? That's the question I'm posing myself. What was it that helped me so much? And I'll tell you in a sentence what it was, and then we'll spend an hour on unpacking it.

Joy and Objective Truth in C. S. Lewis

I think the answer lies in the way that Lewis brought the experience of joy—it's a technical term for him that we'll get at—the experience of joy together with a defense of absolute objective truth that puts him in another world from the emergent writers, the world where I love to be.

It is a world I feel totally at home in when he talks about it. The way Lewis deals with these two things, joy and truth, joy and truth, is so radically different from liberal theology or from the postmodern slipperiness of emergent writers that he is in another universe.

And I have found myself in that universe with him for 30 years or so, 40 years or so, awakened over and over again, made more alive, more perceptive, more responsive, more earnest, more hopeful, more amazed, more passionate for the glory of God every time I turn to see S. Lewis.

It's this combination of experiencing the stab of God-shaped joy and defending objective absolute truth because of the absolute reality of God that sets Lewis apart as unparalleled in the modern world as far as I can see.

To my knowledge, there is no one else who puts these two things together the way Lewis does.

So,.

Let me unpack for you then what I mean by his experience of joy and his defense of.

Absolute,.

Objective, ultimate truth and how these two relate to each other in the way that is so explosive for me.

Lewis’s Definition of Joy in Surprised by Joy

First,.

Lewis's experience of joy.

Lewis wrote an autobiography.

That covers the first 30 years of his life called Surprised by Joy. He wrote it 20 years after that and so it bears the marks of his ripe assessment of what God was doing in his first 30 years. He tells of three instances as a child when there was awakened in him something that he has now chosen at a distance of about 50 years to call Joy with a capital J.

This term in Lewis is not synonymous with pleasure or happiness according to him. The experience of this joy is the most important theme of his life. So, in other words, in my telling you about what has been personally most powerful for me, I'm not picking something marginal.

By Lewis's own testimony, by Clyde Kilby's testimony, by Alan Jacob's testimony, what I'm talking to you about right now was the central issue for his life and and heart. He said this of the experience of joy, quote, in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else, close quote.

Here's the closest thing he gives to a definition of joy. It is the experience, quote, of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction, close quote. This is why he chose to call it joy and not desire or longing or the German Sehnsucht when writing his autobiography because those words do not convey the desirability of the longing itself.

The desirability of the unsatisfied nature of the desire, quote, I call it joy which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from happiness and from pleasure. Joy in my sense has indeed one characteristic and one only in common with them.

The fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality it might almost equally be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief, but then it is the kind we want.

I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. Alan Jacobs is right.

That's the biography that I read in getting ready for this other biography I read ages ago, and I recommend it highly. The Narnian it's called. Alan Jacobs biography. He's right to say nothing was closer to the core of his being than this experience.

And perhaps what sealed its significance for Lewis is that it brought him to Christ. He was an atheist in his 20s, but relentlessly God was pursuing him through the experience of what he called sometimes joy and sometimes an inconsolable longing that he loved to experience and had no control over.

And he was increasingly finding in his literary studies that it was the Christian writers from centuries ago where it happened most often. One decisive influence as he was coming to the Lord was J. R. R. Tolkien, the writer of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien argued, and Lewis picked up the argument and repeated it over and over again the rest of his life.

When this joy,.

Tolkien was trying to explain to this atheist, when this joy, this stab of inconsolable longing is awakened by certain powerful myths or stories, it is evidence that behind these myths there is a true myth with a capital M.

There's a true story with a capital S.

That really exists.

The reason for the joy that it's desirable is because it's real and the reason it's inconsolable is because where you're getting it isn't the true one. The true myth and the real joy is the original shout, so to speak.

And the stories and the myths that you're reading every day in your career.

Are echoes.

Tolkien pressed and.

Lewis later.

Used this analogy of what was moving in him. A man's physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread. He may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic, but surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes from a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.

Or, to put it another way, quote, if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. God overcame his atheism in the spring term of 1929.

He was 30 years old.

Who, this is Lewis,.

Who can duly adore.

That love.

Which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking and.

Struggling,.

Resentful, darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape. Now that was not the end of the struggle because he wasn't a Christian yet. He just became a.

Theist in the spring term of.

1929. Gave up protesting against a divine being as the source of the inconsolable longing. He didn't know Christ yet. He wasn't submitted to Jesus.

October 1st,.

1931, two years later, he wrote a letter to Arthur Greaves, his friend. I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ, in Christianity. Lewis now began to look back on these 30-plus years and all of his experiences of joy in his reading and in the stories and in the myths and in the attic of his old childhood home and in the walks in the woods, wherever it would be stabbing him.

He began to look back and now things began to look different. It was still inconsolable. It was still pleasant. But now it was a desire for God and it was evidence that he was made for God.

Quote,.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them. It only came through them. For they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have not found.

The echo of the tune we have not heard. The news from a country we have never yet.

Visited.

All Lewis life, he said, quote, an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just above the grasp of my consciousness. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty comes from.

But when he was born again, to see the glory of God in Christ, he never said that again, ever. Now he knew where it all came from. He knew where the joy was pointing. On the last page of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, I recommend it, at least if you're a literary type.

On the last page of his autobiography, he explained the difference between the joy now and the joy then. While that.

Other,.

That other was in doubt, when he didn't know what it was all pointing to, while it was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter.

He who first sees it cries, look! The whole party gathers around and stares at the sign. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us, and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up, but we shall not stop and stare, or not much.

Love it. Not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold,.

We would be at Jerusalem.

So Lewis stopped turning joy into an idol when he found by grace that it was a pointer to something.

Other,.

Namely to God.

Lewis’s Philosophy, Faith, and the Road to Christ

Now.

We make a turn. How did this experience of joy relate to Lewis's defense of objective, absolute.

Truth?

How did the two come together? The first thing he taught, by the way, at Oxford was philosophy. He did his first BA in philosophy. Then he did his second BA in literature. Just taught philosophy for a year, shifted over, and his imagination awoke.

He almost died as a philosopher. Intellectually, mentally, imagination. But he never lost the tools of philosophy, the tools of God.