In the Highest Degree: Volume Two

Essays on C. S. Lewis's Philosophical Theology—Method, Content, & Reason

Brazier

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532658907
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The theological and philosophical works of C. S. Lewis were grounded in the argument from reason (being a form of revelation that predates nature and relates to the divine; i.e., the Word of God, Christ the Logos). These essays provide some understanding of the essentials to Lewis's philosophical theology--that is, the essentia, "in the highest degree." Lewis's corpus can seem disparate, but here we find unity in his aims, objectives, and methodology, a consistency that demonstrates the deep roots of his philosophical theology in Scripture, Greek philosophy, patristic and medieval theology, and some of the Reformers, all framed by a reasoned discipline from a perceptive and critical mind: method and form, content and reason, for the glory of God. From an analysis of reason to the evidence of Christ as the light of the world across human endeavors and religions, a doctrine of election, and an understanding of Scripture ("the Philosophy of the Incarnation," as Lewis termed it), in fundamental arguments with various modern/liberal theologians, we find evidence for the actuality of the incarnation: the divinity of Christ.

1

Praeparatio Evangelica: C. S. Lewis as a Catholic Evangelical,Defined by Method, Technique, and Form

SYNOPSIS

As an Anglican C. S. Lewis was at one and the same time intensely evangelical and intensely catholic. The method, technique, and form of his work was likewise catholic-evangelical: his method was defined by the Christ-event, derived from the patristic theologian Vincentius of Lérins (the Scripture-imbued authority of the church: “what has been held always, everywhere, by everybody”) and the Puritan Richard Baxter (from whom he acknowledges the term “mere Christian”—a sheer core to the faith, merus). This paper demonstrates a thread of systematic ground and continuity to Lewis’s writings: a content-led bipartite method and bipartite technique, unified by a universal Platonic principle, realized through the form of the analogia entis–analogia fidei—derived from the Catholic and Puritan traditions, but Evangelical in mission. Lewis’s theological and philosophical writings frame a Christian Weltanschauung: “the creation, the fall, the incarnation, the resurrection, the second coming, and the four last things.” Therefore he defines his work as praeparatio evangelica : preparation for the Holy Spirit. In this, he is neither an Enlightenment-led modernist, nor a disparate and relativistic liberal postmodernist, but an orthodox theologian-philosopher in the patristic tradition, grounding his writings in Scripture. Lewis could therefore be described as a catholic-evangelical.

I. INTRODUCTION

As an apologist and theologian, C. S. Lewis is often considered something of a dilettante who dabbled in theology as a popularizer, whose work demonstrates scant evidence of a system or of any philosophical ground. Was Lewis an occasional theologian who wrote idiosyncratic (and sometimes linguistically quirky) apologetics that certainly captivated his audience, brief theological excursions focused on a particular question but not underpinned by an overarching system that ordered his theological corpus as a whole? The aim of this paper is to show that Lewis did exhibit a system. His method, technique, and form was consistently employed, and was characterized by a deep obligation to primary axioms and propositions, by a coherent thread of evangelical truth, defined by a seam of clarity discernible throughout his work.

Lewis was an Anglican, a communicant member of the Church of England. Evangelicals may not like the way Lewis subscribed to what can be considered a traditional Catholic position on the sacraments and on post mortem purgation. Likewise, Roman Catholics would do well to see how Lewis could get beyond the external structure of religion to appreciate the immediacy of relationship any believer can have with the Lord Jesus, which in some ways by-passes the structures and authority of the church(es). Lewis was, therefore, a catholic-evangelical9 who went to great lengths to exclude the establishment middle ground along with the modernist liberal wings of the Church of England from his works—leaving the (Anglo-) Catholic and Evangelical. Writing to The Church Times in 1952, Lewis commented that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the liberal or modernist is that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists who believe in the biblical witness to salvation history.10

II. BIBLE, TRADITION, AND CREED:HOW SYSTEMATIC WAS LEWIS?

But what do we make of Lewis as a theologian? Was Lewis a systematic theologian? Many patristic theologians started life as trained rhetoricians and philosophers: for example, Justin Martyr. Aquinas’ theology was systematic: coherent and interconnected at multiple levels, based on the application of philosophical analysis. Many theologians, even Schleiermacher, can be seen as systematic. In the twentieth century many of a Reformed, Protestant, and Evangelical persuasion look to Louis Berkhof in the 1930s11 as providing a model for systematic thinking in theology: that is, systematic theology championed (in a Barthian context) by late twentieth-century neo-orthodox theologians such as Colin E. Gunton and Robert Jenson as a relatively unique form of doctrine and teaching. Practitioners of systematic theology both within the church and the academy endeavor to formulate an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the Christian faith, often as a Weltanschauung, often drawing on philosophical techniques within an evidential framework. As such, systematic theology is essentially rooted in the Bible and the creeds (and therefore should be by default evangelical). Such ancient texts form a type of foundation, along with the declared philosophical techniques.12

Nicholas M. Healey distinguishes three types of systematic theology: first, official, generated by the churches; second, ordinary theological reflection produced by virtually all believers; and third, what can be described as professional-academic systematic theology.13 It is the latter that essentially claims a developed method, systematically applied to the individual’s work: coherence and constancy are defining principles. Can this be said of Lewis’s apologetics and seemingly disparate philosophical-theological essays? Is Lewis’s corpus essentially in the first two categories—churches and ordinary believers who attempt to order their doctrine and ethics? Although attempts at defining systematic theology have been disparate and therefore inconclusive, we can, as a working definition, reiterate Colin E. Gunton’s comment that, “systematic theology is what happens when theology engages with philosophy: therefore reason should be discussed theologically.”14 A trained philosopher, a literatus, and Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C. S. Lewis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by the University of St. Andrews in 1946 in recognition of his work in theology and apologetics. Although he had no formal training in theology, his intellect was confirmed in that he received, within four years of study, two B.A. Hons degrees from the University of Oxford (having passed all three required public examinations with first-class honors) in Greats (Greek and Roman literature and classical philosophy) and in English. Lewis’s training in classical philosophy was similar to, and as an apologist places him with, Justin Martyr, and many others in the early church. Lewis was technically an amateur (not a salaried religious professional), yet he had, in effect, erected an elaborate smokescreen to separate himself from a clerical elite in the Church of England and in the academy of his day because he categorized this elite as self-proclaimed modern and/or theologically liberal. Unlike many intellectuals, he made no secret of his conversion and his faith, indeed Lewis was at one and the same time intensely evangelical and intensely catholic. In considering Lewis as a theologian we shall first establish the ground and influence on Lewis as a philosophical theologian and apologist, then extrapolate—essentially from his own words—what the method, technique, and form in his corpus was.

III. THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL GROUND:1. THE POST-WAR ZEITGEIST

The depth, sharpness, and piercing perception of Lewis’s intellect was primarily the result of “The Great Knock,” William T. Kirkpatrick, who tutored Lewis for Oxford. Kirkpatrick, though an atheist, had a passionate love of truth, and veracity was not defined by, or curtailed according to, social etiquette: if your opponent was wrong you had a duty before truth to say so. Writing to his father on hearing of Kirkpatrick’s death in 1921, Lewis wrote: “It is however no sentiment, but the plainest fact to say that I at least owe to him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another. . . . It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty . . . and this I shall be the better for as long as I live.”15 Lewis’s philosophical education had begun in earnest when he was invalided out of the First World War. Wounded in the Battle of Arras, Lewis developed a serious interest in philosophy whilst recovering in Étaples hospital: he read and studied John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.16 Amongst many young students who returned from the trenches, Lewis, in the early 1920s, was part of the parochial Oxford post-war spirit of the age, who modelled themselves on an earlier mid-European pre-WW1 Viennese generation defined by logical positivism. After the First World War, the philosophical establishment at Oxford was still characterized by continental idealism and the English idealist philosopher, advocate of temperance, and political radical T. H. Green, but positivism was taking hold. This affects Lewis and accounts for his realist period, characterized by his atheism. Thus far Lewis was in many ways a product of the post-war spirit of the age: a brutal positivistic logic based on what was immediately perceivable to the senses derived from the concept of closed universe, which was seen as a meaningless, brute fact, not the product of a wise and intelligent creator. But Lewis started to become religious: first a theist, then a Christian. Lewis identified the rejection of the ancient religions generally, and Christianity specifically, by an intellectual elite at Oxford in the 1920s as a chronological-intellectual position. That is, a proposition characterized by “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”17 Seen as an unswerving faith in the modern and contemporary, this chronological-intellectual proposition was expressed thus: if one argues that A implies B, and if A implying B is an old argument from the times when people also believed C, then A implying B is false, because C was found to be untrue; furthermore, Lewis asserted that this argument implied that such propositions are to be mistrusted if they are religious or relate to a religious mind-set, because the modernist (mistakenly) believes that humanity progresses from crude ignorance, year by year. Identifying the arrogance of this flawed modernist argument helped Lewis extricate himself from a plethora of philosophies and belief systems at Oxford in the 1920s. It was, moreover, the inverse of ...