C.S. Lewis, my hero

I just finished a biographical movie of C. S. Lewis. He is, I can say without cliche, one of my heroes. He suffered, and doubted. He was logical, and a man of the pen. He wrote stories, and dreams. He longed for something greater–and found it. His search for that elusive desire was so strong that it finally drew him to the truth. One day while driving to the zoo, he awoke, all of a sudden, to know God’s love. (Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!)

There was a man who was like me, in love for fantasy and writing, in doubt, in clinging to reason yet longing to be consumed by my longing. Lewis’ life strikes in me deep chords of the soul; his words remind me of the sublime thoughts of heaven, perhaps more than the words of any other mere mortal. It seems he took a path near to mine to reach our common hope, Jesus Christ.

There is something in Lewis that stirs me up and onward to follow in his footsteps toward our Lord. Well done, Jack, you have increased the joyous and mysterious sense of God’s glory unfolding, in this fellow of yours, who still walks on this side of the wardrobe.

The new birth and clay

God says we will be born of water and the spirit (John 3). John Piper connects this to the new heart of flesh and God’s spirit, both of which are distictly placed into the believer at the new birth (Ezekiel 36). So is our heart washed, or is God’s heart implanted in us? Both.

Consider this image, from one of Piper’s sermons. A hard lump of clay was softened with water until it became pliable, then it was shaped into a new lump. But the potter’s hand had to be thrust into the very center of the lump to work it into shape. So the ongoing process of sanctification is like a newformed lump of clay with a hand stuck into it. Born of water and the spirit.

Tattoos can be beautiful

One day a man buys a new house, inside which all the walls were white. The man goes to see a modern art museum in France. Intrigued by the deviant new styles, he returns home and paints the walls of his house in periwinkle, black, and orange. In some places he splatters large splotches and streaks of other wild colors. When he is done, the man happily invites his friend to dinner to show him his new work.

When the friend arrives, he is shocked at the radical changes. “What have you done?” the friend says in disgust. “Your white walls used to be beautiful! But now you have changed it from its original form. You have defaced it!”

The man replies, “But I think it has improved. The eye-catching contrasts excite my imagination. These rooms startle me into curiosity. I like it much better than the plain white walls I used to have.”

The friend says to him, “No, you are wrong. You have ruined your house, and I cannot stand to eat in a room with such ugly walls.” The friend leaves the house before dinner is served.

***

Those who say tattoos are immoral object to them by saying, “Tattoos deface the body, God’s temple!” Is changing something from its original form wrong? No, if it is beautiful and artistic, then it can be good to alter something. If this is true, then to say that tattoos “deface” the body is to say that they cannot be beautiful. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps tattoos can be adornments, not defacements, to God’s temple.

“But I do not see any beauty in them at all,” the objectors say. Very well. You are entitled to your own preference and opinion. But to declare that it is wrong is like calling a sculpture evil because you don’t like it. It is true that many tattoos, depending on what they depict and in what attitude they are gotten, can become wrong. But we who follow Christ must no longer say with broad condemnation that “tattoos are sinful.” Release the tattoo from the prison of traditional vilification.

Knowing the infinite

We cannot truly know the infinite because we are finite. Even the word “in-finite” is a negative term, indicating simply “that which is not finite.” We don’t have a positive knowledge of infinity; we can only know that it is there because we look at the finite and see that something is missing.

Absurdity

This strikes with me, from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. (An excerpt from my Philosophy textbook.)

“What I said was absurd, but–”
“That’s just the point that ‘but’!” cried Ivan. “Let me tell you, novice,
that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities,
and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them. We know what we know!”
“What do you know?”
“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on, as though in delirium. “I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact and I have determined to stick to the fact.”

I do not yield to nihilistic absurdity, but there is something mysteriously true about this idea. God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and makes the last first, the meek the inheritors of the earth.

Joseph Fowler’s Stages of Faith

Stage 1 Intuitive-Projective faith
Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith
Stage 3 Synthetic-Conventional faith
Stage 4 Individuative-Reflective faith
Stage 5 Conjunctive faith
Stage 6 is exceedingly rare. The persons best described by it have generated faith compositions in which their felt sense of an ultimate environment is inclusive of all being.

Read about the Stages of Faith. I believe I’m at number 5 (no pun intended).

Post-Hume-ous thoughts

Interesting Comments by Hume in Dialogues on Natural Religion, and my brief Answers.
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Experience alone can point out the true cause of any phenomenon.

No, there is also revelation, though this is another topic altogether.

Stone and mortar and wood, without an architect, never erect a house. But the
ideas in a human mind, we see, by an unknown, inexplicable economy, arrange
themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or house. Experience, therefore,
proves that there is an original principle of order in mind, not in matter.

Yet we observe by an “inexplicable economy” that by the weak and strong gravitational forces, etc., protons, neutrons, and electrons arrange themselves to form atoms. And crystalline structures found in caves that contain wondrous natural beauty, etc., render Hume’s illustration careless.

Observe, I entreat you, with what extreme caution all just reasoners proceed in
the transferring of experiments to similar cases. Unless the cases be exactly
similar, they repose no perfect confidence in applying their past observation on
any particular phenomenon.

Extreme caution is well and good. Yet, the one who defuses a bomb should not despair of his urgent task because it requires meticulous care. Or aren’t parts of the octopus considered exotic delicacy, though they must be extracted from beside poisonous parts? Perfect confidence, with a haughty air, is indeed out of reach of the just and fair reasoner; yet genuine, substantial confidence can be got, in measure enough to move the rational mind.

But can a conclusion, with any propriety, be transferred from parts to the
whole?

We find that, with proper reservation and humility of mind, certain broad conclusions, elusive to reason yet curiously self-evident, can with propriety be transferred to the whole.

When nature has so extremely diversified her manner of operation in this small
globe, can we imagine that she incessantly copies herself throughout so immense
a universe?…The narrow views of a peasant who makes his domestic economy the
rule for the government of kingdoms is in comparison a pardonable sophism.

Yes, but do not certain peasants, when instructing their children by candlelight, evince such quintessential and unadulterated wisdom, as to how kingdoms of every degree should be run, as to cast a sickly pallor on this argument, a symptom that it overlooks a deeper truth?

Dialectic pairs

I have increasingly discovered the existence of balance in one’s views on life, since that which is right, it seems, undulates between two antipodes. I list a few of them here.

Love and Truth
Word and Power
Wisdom and Revelation
Determinism and Free Will
Nature and Nurture
Confidence and Skepticism
Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction
Rebuke and Encouragement
Freedom and Equality
Order and Liberty
Unity and Diversity
Assertion and Submission

(From Relational Dialectics Theory, by Baxter and Montgomery:)

Expression and Nonexpression
Stability and Change
Inclusion and Seclusion

The list is growing…