Tag: cs lewis doodle

CSLewisDoodle: Faith (Faith and Works)

C.S. Lewis broadcast second talks on Faith, entitled ‘The Problem of Faith and Works’.

You can find the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christiani…​

(2:51​) “If you are right with God, you will inevitably be right with all your fellow creatures”. I should point out that ‘right’ here does not necessarily mean ‘at peace’ with all your fellow creatures. Being in a right position to others can mean, at times, you are in a position of war with those against God, e.g. David was in a right position to Goliath in his Holy Spirit-inspired anger “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”.

(5:41​) The story of Bunyan’s conversion: ‘Bunyan says, “I did set the commandments before me for my way to heaven; which commandments I did also strive to keep, &, as I thought, did keep them pretty well sometimes, and thus I should have comfort; yet now and then should break one, and so afflict my conscience; but then I should repent, and say I was sorry for it, and promised God to do better next time, and there get help again; for then I thought I pleased God as well as any man in England. Thus I continued about a year; all which time our neighbors did take me to be a very godly man, a new and religious man, and did marvel much to see such great and famous alteration in my life and manners; and, indeed, so it was, though I knew not Christ, nor grace, nor faith, nor hope.” But one day, after Bunyan had removed to Bedford, as he was passing down the street, he noticed a few poor women in conversation in a doorway. He drew near, and listened a while to their talk. They were speaking of the new birth, and the work of God’s Spirit in their souls, and their personal experiences of the saving power of God’s grace through Christ. He stood amazed, and realized that they possessed something of which he was entirely ignorant. He then began to perceive that salvation is not from anything that comes from man, or that man can do, but that it is from God, and that to possess it he must have to do with God Himself—that it was something new he must possess in his soul which none but God can give, a forgiveness of sins which none but God can administer. These poor women were basking in the sunshine whilst he, with all his doings, was shivering in the cold.” (C. Knapp)

(6:20​) “I think we must introduce into the discussion a distinction between two senses of the word Faith. This may mean (A) a settled intellectual assent. In that sense faith (or ‘belief’) in God hardly differs from faith in the uniformity of Nature [that Nature behaves in the same way from the remotest nebula to the shyest photon] or in the consciousness of other people. This is what, I think, has sometimes been called a ‘notional’ or ‘intellectual’ or ‘carnal’ faith. It may also mean (B) a trust, or confidence, in the God whose existence is thus assented to. This involves an attitude of the will. It is more like our confidence in a friend. It would be generally agreed that Faith in sense A is not a religious state. The devils who ‘believe and tremble’ (Note James 2.19) have Faith-A. A man who curses or ignores God may have Faith-A…”

“I doubt whether religious people have ever supposed that Faith-B follows automatically on the acquisition of Faith-A. It is described as a ‘gift’ (Note: https://biblehub.com/ephesians/2-8.htm​ , https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/12…​ ;). As soon as we have Faith-A in the existence of God, we are instructed to ask from God Himself the gift of Faith-B…” (‘Is Theology Important?’ [i.e. Are Theological Proofs of God Important to Faith?])

(11:02​) “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,’ but you must have it in you before you can work it out.” Trembling” I notice but not “sweating”, i.e. not doing good works in order to be saved.

(12:16​) Similar principle here, in the saying ‘you can give without love, but you cannot love without giving’.

(12:44​) “Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; & if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are ‘done away’ & the rest is a matter of flying (Man and Rabbit).”

The original broadcast had the following words italicised which add to understanding (shown in CAPS): “if one COULD understand it now, it would only do one harm”, “because it MAY be a help”, “I mean REALLY discovered”, “will soon learn to SAY that we have nothing to offer to God that isn’t already His own”, “it MUST follow that you are trying to obey Him”, “wouldn’t BE good actions but only commercial speculations”, “or trust IN HIM, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory ABOUT Him.”SHOW LESS

CS Lewis Doodle: The Poison of Subjectivism

This abridged essay contains the essence of Lewis’ arguments in his fascinating short book ‘The Abolition of Man/Humanity’.
Notes: I have doodled the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX5e6…​
You can buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Man-C…​
‘The Abolition of Man’, a series of three lectures that were published, has been rated as one of top ten non-fiction books of the 20th century, and is a booklet really. (It’s only three chapters long or two hour’s read).
(8:41​) “The union and fellowship of men will be best preserved if each receives from us the more kindness in proportion as he is more closely connected with us.” (Roman. Cicero. De Off. 1. xvi).
(9:00​) Tradition morality is show here as ammunition boxes supplying its critic’s guns. “For no ethical attack on any of the tradition precepts can be made except on the ground of some other traditional precept” (C.S. Lewis, ‘On Ethics’).

CS Lewis Doodle: Hope

In this doodle C.S. Lewis talks about the Christian virtue called ‘Hope’, the continual looking forward to the eternal world (notes below).
During one of the blackest years of WWII, C.S. Lewis wrote a BBC radio talk on ‘Hope & Faith as Virtues’. He originally wrote the radio address for 15 mins, but afterwards the BBC changed the formula & only allowed him 10 mins on “For the [Armed] Forces” radio station. So this talk had the section on ‘Hope’ cut from the broadcast, & it became simply a talk on ‘Faith’. This missing section ended up being printed in the book version of the talks called ‘Christian Behaviour’ (1943) & later became Chapter 10 of Book 3, in the book called ‘Mere Christianity’. This section on ‘Hope’ you are about to hear, was never broadcast by the BBC.
(0:03) This view of the Golden Valley is reputed to be the most beautiful viewpoint in all Britain. It was made famous by the movie ‘Shadowlands’, as Lewis’ childhood picture he thought was a view of heaven (whether or not the picture really existed in his childhood, I do not know). The painting used in the movie is from Symonds Yat Rock & provides a fabulous viewpoint of the River Wye, Herefordshire. Lewis thought our best earthly pleasures are meant to arouse our desire for another world, & our earthly pleasures are only painted copies, or echoes, or mirages of the real joy of Heaven.
(0:47) Alfred the Great, the English King, codified three prior Saxon codes – those of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 602 A.D.), Ine of Wessex (c. 694 A.D.) & Offa of Mercia (c. 786 A.D.) – to which he prefixed the ‘Ten Commandments’ of Moses & also incorporated rules of life from the Mosaic Code & the Christian code of ethics. Alfred the Great is also famous for defeating the Vikings, who had invaded England, & for being magnanimous in his great victory.
(1:53) Lewis on civilisation: “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first. From which it would follow that the question, “What things are first?”, is of concern not only to philosophers but to everyone. It is impossible, in this context, not to inquire what our own civilisation has been putting first for the last thirty years. & the answer is plain. It has been putting itself first. To preserve civilisation has been the great aim; the collapse of civilisation, the great bugbear [obsessive fear]. Peace, a high standard of life, hygiene, transport, science & amusement – all these, which are what we usually mean by civilisation, have been our ends. It will be replied that our concern for civilisation is very natural & very necessary at a time when civilisation is so imperilled [by Nazi invasion]. But how if the shoe is on the other foot – how if civilisation has been imperilled precisely by the fact that we have all made civilisation our summum bonum (highest good)? Perhaps it can’t be preserved in that way. Perhaps civilisation will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.”
“The hypothesis has certain facts to support it. As far as peace (which is one ingredient in our idea of civilisation) is concerned, I think many would now agree that a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war [written in 1942 about Chamberlain’s British policy of ‘peace at all costs’). & was civilisation ever seriously endangered until civilisation became the exclusive aim of human activity? There is much rash idealisation of past ages about, & I do not wish to encourage more of it. Our ancestors were cruel, lecherous, greedy & stupid, like ourselves. But while they cared for other things more than for civilisation – & they cared at different times for all sorts of things, for the will of God, for glory, for personal honour, for doctrinal purity, for justice – was civilisation often in serious danger of disappearing?”
“At least the suggestion is worth a thought. To be sure, if it were true that civilisation will never be safe till it is put second, that immediately raises the question, second to what? What is the first thing? The only reply I can offer here is that if we do not know, then the first, & only truly practical thing, is to set about finding out…” (‘First & Second Things’, June 1942).
(7:16) “…I still maintain that what enraptures & transports is always good. In the mirages, this good thing is not where we suppose it to be, namely, in the book or picture. But it may be good in itself – just as an oasis is a good thing though it exists a hundred miles away & not, as the desert traveller sees it, in the next valley…” (Tastes in Literature). The original broadcast had the following words italicised (shown in CAPS). “You want other things MORE”; “There are all sorts of things in this world that OFFER to give it to you”; “But SOMETHING has evaded us”; “probably earthly pleasures were never MEANT to satisfy it.” See ‘The Problem of Pain’ (Chp.10) & ‘The Weight of Glory’ for more.

CSLewisDoodle: Why I Am Not a Pacifist

On 1 January 1940, Britain called up two million 19- to 27-year-olds for military service. The first half of this lecture presented here contains an introductory section on how we decide what is good and evil, before Lewis goes on to discuss the pacifist question in particular (11:24). Part 2 of the Lecture is here which deals with the fourth element, Authority: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreq3… You can find the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Compelling-Reas… This is the first half of an address to the Oxford Pacifist Society. The exact date of this address has always been unknown except that it was given in 1940, but I notice the lecture does refer to something very topical at the time – the heroic and sacrificial courage of the captain and crew of the ‘Jervis Bay’ (misread in Lewis’ rough handwriting as ‘Terris Bay’). The sinking was only made public in the U.K. on the 12th November 1940 (Daily Mirror https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9Mm…) so that narrows down the delivery date considerably to late 1940. At this time Britain was in the middle of the Blitz and was facing the Nazi threat alone, with the Pacifist President Franklin Roosevelt ‘leading from behind’ and being painfully slow to help arm the last democracy in Europe. As bad as that was, Britain did worse! Britain was facing the same severe stress she had given to Czechoslovakia in 1938 with a public and leader asleep to the gathering storm. This situation would all change within a single year of this lecture, with the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany declaring war on the United States on the 11th December 1941. I’ve added some helps to the captions during Winston Churchill’s address, but the captions need to clicked on by pressing the subtitle button on bottom right of the video.

CSLewisDoodle: Good Infection

Good infection! A third doodle on the Trinity from the pen of C.S. Lewis looking at the Holy Spirit. “God is Love” but this does not mean “Love is God”. It may not mean that all our feelings of love are necessarily godly… This is an illustration of C.S. Lewis’ third talk from his fourth radio series called ‘Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity’. This became Chapter 4 of Book 4 in his book called ‘Mere Christianity’…You can find the book here: http://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christiani…
(0:06) Tuberculosis (also called consumption) is a potentially serious infectious bacterial disease that mainly affects the lungs & caused widespread public concern in the 19th & early 20th centuries as the disease became more common. In 1815 one in four deaths in England was due to “consumption”. In the 1880s the infected poor were “encouraged” to enter sanatoria that resembled prisons.
(4:36) “. . . When people try to get rid of manlike, or, as they are called, ‘anthropomorphic,’ images, they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds. ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force.’ What he has not noticed is that the word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds & tides electricity & gravitation. ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says another, ‘but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves & works through us all’—not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly & royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid. A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as perfect ‘substance.’ In later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity, but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology. For man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous experience” (Lewis, Time magazine, 1947).
(6:53) “At this point we must remind ourselves that Christian theology does not believe God to be a person. It believes Him to be such that in Him a trinity of persons is consistent with a unity of Deity. In that sense it believes Him to be something very different from a person, just as a cube, in which six squares are consistent with unity of the body, is different from a square. (Flatlanders, attempting to imagine a cube, would either imagine the six squares coinciding, & thus destroy their distinctness, or else imagine them set out side by side, & thus destroy the unity. Our difficulties about the Trinity are of much the same kind.) (The Poison of Subjectivism).
(6:01) There are some instances where love of self, love of a friend, love of a child, love of a king & love of family had to be rebuked in Scripture to some degree, & these rebukes can still apply today.
See scriptural rebukes of love:
-God’s rebukes of self-love ( https://biblehub.com/job/32-2.htm , https://biblehub.com/job/40-8.htm )
-God’s rebuke of friendship love ( https://biblehub.com/2_chronicles/19-… ) -A commanders rebuke of parental love ( https://biblehub.com/2_samuel/19-6.htm ) -God’s rebuke of love for a King ( https://biblehub.com/1_samuel/16-1.htm ) -Christ’s rebuke of his mother Mary & brothers ( https://biblehub.com/matthew/12-48.htm , https://biblehub.com/luke/8-21.htm )
More on this in Lewis’ talk on Agape love: https://youtu.be/gaVaGGpeQKM?t=425 (7m 6sec).
More from Lewis on making a god of romantic love also: Eros https://youtu.be/WReLIE08Dnc?t=1393 (7m 5sec)
(12:04) John 1.1-5 “In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God, & the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, & without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, & the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, & the darkness did not comprehend it.” https://biblehub.com/john/1-1.htm
(12:49) Anyone feel like joining a Greek dance line, smashin’ some plates & yelling ‘Opa!/ώπα!’? Music taken from the soundtrack to the ‘The Guns of Navarone’.
The magazine article shows italics as follows (in capitals): “Instead of being ON the table”; “does not come AFTER the cause”; “as if the Father & Son were two THINGS, rather than two persons”; “Love is what one PERSON has for another PERSON…”; “then before the world was made He was NOT love” ; “is a REAL person”; “How could he NOT die…” : “what CAN he do but wither and die?”

CS Lewis Doodle: The Practical Conclusion – Mere Christianity

When this broadcast was made, Nazism was at the Zenith of it power. Freedom & democracy had been wiped from continental Europe due to an agreement between Hitler & Stalin, that divided Poland – the Nazis only remaining enemy in the east. This allowed Hitler to turn on the Western Allies with full force without fear. With the West won, Hitler turned on Stalin. The self-proclaimed “supermen”, Nazis & Communists, were now locked in a life-&-death struggle as to which brand would triumph. This broadcast was made on the ‘For the Forces’ Radio station in the UK, & was the third Lewis broadcast to be heard by the American GI’s who had arrived in Belfast the previous month.
(0:46) For C.S. Lewis’ views on ‘popular evolution’ see this doodle here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GCWG…)
(2:32) In 1942, private vehicle transport was not possible due to petrol rationing with most garaged for much of the war. Ships were slow, less frequent than trains & in constant danger from submarines. Planes were very expensive, & in danger of being shot down.
(4:12) “It is Reason herself which teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, ‘Go & look [or consult persons who have already looked]. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses’. ” (‘Miracles’, “Christianity and ‘Religion’”)
(4:37) In 1066 A.D. the English king died, & his brother-in-law, Harold, was crowned. After Harold’s own brother rebelled & joined a viking invader, Harold traveled north & defeated both armies. Harold then raced back to Hastings to fight a Norman army which had just sailed from Northern France. The Normans, led by William the Conqueror, killed Harold – the last of the English Kings – with a clever combination of arrows timed with infantry advance & took over the kingship but also all the positions of power. In 1588 A.D. the superpower of the time, Catholic Spain, sought to invade the Protestant British Isles. After a series of naval battles, the Spanish Armada lay anchored in Calais, waiting to transport an invasion army across the English channel. The English sent 8 fire ships into the Spanish fleet, & though they all completely failed to inflicted damage on the Armada, most Spanish ships cut their anchor ropes in panic, & very few remained or were able to return for the naval battle. The English won the battle, & the Spanish were forced to sail away & then around Britain to return home. More Spanish ships were lost to storms than to the English fleet, who accredited the victory to God – “God blew his breath & the enemies were scattered.” England now no longer feared invasion.
(6:04) This effort to upkeep what we did not create is mentioned in scripture many times: “This is why I remind you to fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid my hands on you.” (2 Timothy 1:6) https://biblehub.com/2_timothy/1-6.htm “Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it by the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.” (2 Timothy 1:14) https://biblehub.com/2_timothy/1-14.htm “…Work out your own salvation with fear & trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will & to do for His good pleasure.” (Phil. 2.12-13) https://biblehub.com/philippians/2-13…
(8:14) One example – “Smell”: “To one there is given through the Spirit…the distinguishing between spirits.” https://biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthian… “To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death & doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume.” https://biblehub.com/2_corinthians/2-…
(8:32) Romans 10.9-10 (
9:12) “The Good Earth” – A paraphrase of Genesis 1 that the crew of Apollo 8 called the earth in their Christmas Eve Broadcast of 1968, after they saw the earth rise for the first time from the desolate & barren moon, & had read a portion of Genesis 1. See a recreation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbT9j…
(9:46) ‘For there is no difference between Jew & Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all & richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? & how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? & how can they hear without someone preaching to them? & how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” But not all the Israelites accepted the good news. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?”’ (Romans 12:10-15, https://biblehub.com/niv/romans/10.htm)
The problem here was not the lack of preaching of the message of rescue, but the unprepared heart of the hearer. And this is a common problem that Isaiah details about any message from God. See Romans 2.14-16, 1 Pet. 3:19 also.