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For People Who Have Been There

Steve Brown quotes J’s former pastor:

My friend Lea Clower says that religion is for people who want to stay out of hell, and Christianity is for people who have been there.

-Steve Brown, Approaching God: Accepting the Invitation to Stand in the Presence of God, p. 85

Of course the good news of this, as his been said by others many times, is that this life is the closest to hell the Christian will ever face (and the closest to heaven the non-believer will ever experience).

Does the statement need defending? Maybe.

C.S. Lewis describes hell as a “ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self.” In another places, he says, “We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where every has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” If you’ve tasted those things in your own life, you’ve tasted some of the poison that makes hell what it is. You’ve touched the edge of the flame. And it’s when you realize that that’s what it is – poison, flame – you’re just on the cusp of being ready to escape.

How do you escape? Realize that there’s already somebody there to whom you can scream for help. (See the previous post for an explanation on that one).

 

The Mark of Hell

Milton’s devils, by their grandeur and high poetry, have done great harm, and his angels owe too much to Homer and Raphael. But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of hell. The humorous, civilized, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

-C.S. Lewis, from the original preface to The Screwtape Letters

And that’s as good a definition of pride as I’ve seen: “…the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self…”

Aiming for Truth with the Imagination

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and mode. The person who aims after art in his work aims after truth, in an imaginative sense, no more and no less. St. Thomas said that the artist is concerned with the good of that which is made…

-Flannery O’Connor, The Nature and Aim of Fiction, from Mystery and Manners, p.65

This is pretty much in line with C.S. Lewis’ famous line that the imagination is the ‘organ of meaning.’ The imagination seeks to grasp for, and embody, truth through metaphors and story. The good stories still deal with the age-old issues relating to the truth of reality. This is a good quote to keep right next to Lewis.’

Are you cultivating an imagination bent on grappling with truth? Are you a metaphor-maker? Are you content to live with abstractions? The word, says Dorothy Sayers, always needs to become flesh.

Depart from Me

In The Great Divorce, Lewis has those famous lines: ‘There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.’

Long before Lewis penned those words, Ralph Venning (1621-1673) wrote,

What is sin but a departure from God? And what is the doom of sinners but departure from God? It is as if God should say to them, You liked departing while you lived; now depart from me. You would none of me while you lived; now I will none of you or yours.

-Ralph Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin, p. 71

 

On Killing Adjectives and Thought Verbs

After listening to one of my sermons, a good friend pointed me to an article by Chuck Palahniuk on Thought Verbs (hence my current binging on Palahniuk’s books). The application to my own preaching was clear.

For example, Palahniuk writes,

Thinking is abstract.  Knowing and believing are intangible.  Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing.  And loving and hating.

Don’t tell your reader:  “Lisa hated Tom.”

Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail.  Present each piece of evidence.  For example:

“During role call, in the breath after the teacher said Tom’s name, in that moment before he could answer, right then, Lisa would whisper-shout: ‘Butt Wipe,” just as Tom was saying, ‘Here’.”

Another example:

From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs.  These include:  Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.

The list should also include:  Loves and Hates.

And it should include:  Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.

Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write:  Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”

Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like:  “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave.  Never his.”

Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them.  Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.

All this reminded me of something I had read from C.S. Lewis regarding adjectives. Lewis writes,

Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.” (Letters to Children, p. 64)

The application is simple for the writer and the preacher. Stop simply telling and start showing.

In a college literature class I got into a (friendly) kerfuffle with a professor over Jonathan Edwards’ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He said it was graphic to the point of being unhelpful. I said Edwards was doing precisely what Lewis and Palahniuk are talking about. That was a great part of the effectiveness of Edwards’ preaching. He was relentlessly imaginative and descriptive. The two go hand in hand after all. Palahniuk gives examples for the writer, let me share a few for the preacher.

Instead of saying, ‘God is sovereign,’ say something like, ‘all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”‘

Instead of saying, as I’ve heard so many preachers say, ‘The correct response is faith,’ say, ‘Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.’

I heard a preacher dealing with Exodus say, ‘You cannot be a Christian and live like an Egyptian.’ Wouldn’t it be better to show us what an Egyptian looks like rather than simply making the assertion? Thomas Watson described them this way: ‘The Egyptians were not a warlike but a womanish people, imbecilic and weak, yet these were too hard for Israel and made a spoil of her.’ That says a lot more about what we are not to be.

One of my great problems as a preacher and a writer is that I tend to unpack the things that don’t need unpacking while failing to unpack the things that actually need it. If you have similar issues, perhaps it’s time to work on killing thought-verbs and adjectives.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on C.S. Lewis

A commenter on the blog brought an interesting quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones to my attention (one that I had never heard). In his first sermon in his famous series called Revival, the doctor said this:

Do you remember the vogue of CS Lewis? You don’t hear much about him now, but why all the excitement? Ah, here is a philosopher. And it indicates our pathetic faith and belief in these methods, which are nothing but apologetics. As exactly in the beginning of the 18th century they were pinning their faith to Bishop Butler and his great Analogy of Religion…

The doctor is nothing if not irenic! (or not). Interestingly, that comment about C.S. Lewis was edited out of the sermon when it came to be published in book form. I checked again tonight. It’s simply not there. But you can find it at the 39 minute mark of the original recording HERE. This sermon was preached, it appears, in 1959, just four years before Lewis’ death. ‘You don’t hear much about him now…’ would certainly not apply in 2015.

Here is another anecdote about MLJ and Lewis I’ve come across. In The Fight of Faith, the second volume of Iain Murray’s biography of Lloyd-Jones, he records a letter written by the Doctor in 1941 to his wife, which says,

There is nothing special on Thursday but meetings in different colleges. On Friday I am due to have breakfast with William Riddle’s son – a second edition of his father. Then I will go with him to a lecture given by C.S. Lewis (author of The Problem of Pain) an I am to have lunch with Lewis…

In the footnote, Murray writes,

Lewis is said to have valued ML-J’s appreciation and encouragement when the early edition of his Pilgrim’s Regress was not selling well. Vincent Lloyd-Jones [MLJ’s brother] and Lewis knew each other well, being contemporaries at Oxford. ML-J met the author again and they had a long conversation when they both found themselves on the same boat to Ireland in 1953. On that later occasion, to the question, ‘When are you going to write another book?, Lewis replied, ‘When I understand the meaning of prayer’ (p. 52).

Another interesting tidbit was a line from MLJ in Christianity Today in 1963, shortly after the death of Lewis:

C. S. Lewis had a defective view of salvation and was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal view of the atonement.

The purpose of the post is simply to document these statements, so I will end here without further comment.

Update 8/22/17: I found another one:

This comes from a sermon Lloyd-Jones gave right after the death of C.S. Lewis. From Lloyd-Jones’ sermon on Romans 10:9-10 (audio can be found HERE, at around the 15:00 mark). ML-J compares Lewis’ teaching to a dry sort of intellectualism that doesn’t involve the heart, specifically comparing it to Sandemanianism. He summarized that teaching in this way: “if you accepted the teaching [i.e. Christianity or the doctrines of the gospel] with your mind, and were prepared to say so…that was sufficient, even though you felt nothing at all…If you accepted the teaching and were prepared to say so, that saved you, in the absence of any feelings whatsoever.”

There are certain tendencies in this direction even in our own day and generation. I had already purposed to say this before I read in the press last weekend, or heard on the wireless, of the passing of Professor C.S. Lewis. I regret to say this, but that was more or less his teaching also. He believed that you could reason yourself into the Christian faith. The first book he ever published was a book called The Pilgrim’s Regress. And the whole point of that book is to say that by clear thinking, you can think yourself from a rationalist or atheistical position into the Christian position. And he actually, at one time, founded in Oxford what he called the Socratic Club, which used to meet on Monday nights, in which he used to try to show people how to reason themselves into Christianity. ‘With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.’ You cannot do it merely by a process of intellectual reasoning.