God in the Dock

EVIL AND GOD
DR JOAD’S ARTICLE ON ‘GOD AND EVIL’ LAST WEEK1 SUGGESTS the interesting conclusion that since neither ‘mechanism’ nor ‘emergent evolution’ will hold water, we must choose in the long run between some monotheistic philosophy, like the Christian, and some such dualism as that of the Zoroastrians. I agree with Dr Joad in rejecting mechanism and emergent evolution. Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge.

Lewis provides: his realism, his moral rectitude, his ability to see beyond the partial perspectives which limit so many existentialists.

The absence of moral values is so acutely felt today that it would seem a pity not to make public whatever help is available to our confused and spiritually-starved world.

His whole vision of life was such that the natural and the supernatural seemed inseparably combined.

Lewis struck me as the most thoroughly converted man I ever met. Christianity was never for him a separate department of life; not what he did with his solitude; ‘not even’, as he says in one essay, ‘what God does with His solitude

The ancient man’, Lewis wrote, ‘approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock.

Lewis maintained that the Faith stripped of its supernatural elements could not conceivably be called Christianity.

Similarly, in his theological works Lewis (who never claimed to be more than a layman writing for other laymen) does not offer ingenious guesses about whether, say, such and such a passage in one of the Gospels was supplied by the early Church long after that Gospel was written, but what the Gospels as we have them do, in fact, say and mean.

Lewis believed that the proper work of a literary critic is to write about the merits and faults of a book, rather than to speculate about the genesis of the book or the author’s private life.

Lewis’s methods are not acceptable to liberal theologians (see, for example, his ‘Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger’), he has probably got more orthodox Christianity into more heads than any religious writer since G. K. Chesterton.