XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books   
   From: fwbrown@bellsouth.net   
      
   In alt.books.cs-lewis Catherine Jefferson  wrote:   
   > On 2/16/2015 5:55 PM, Wayne Brown wrote:> In alt.books.cs-lewis   
   > Catherine Jefferson  wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>> I have run into conservative Restorationists who disapproved of C. S.   
   >>> Lewis, though.  They would have agreed with the fundamentalists about   
   >>> "The Last Battle", but in general the reasons they gave for disliking   
   >>> Lewis amounted to his being too liberal for them.  I think that they   
   >>> meant that he was unwilling to judge others as harshly as they thought   
   >>> God had taught in the Scriptures.   
   >>   
   >> I'm one of those you call "conservative Restorationists" (though from   
   >> the independent Christian Churches side of the aisle rather than the   
   >> non-instrumental Churches of Christ camp) and I've been an admirer   
   >> of C.S. Lewis since my late teens/early twenties in the early-to-mid   
   >> 1970s.  Much of my personal theology has been shaped (or at least heavily   
   >> influenced) by Lewis, especially his "Abolition of Man," "Problem of Pain"   
   >> and "Mere Christianity."  My Restorationist friends tend to admire his   
   >> work also, though perhaps not quite to the extent I do.   
   >   
   >   No, you're a restorationist from my POV, definitely, but not   
   > what I meant by a "conservative restorationist", which was somebody in   
   > the non-institutional churches of Christ.  For those who are unfamiliar   
   > with the Restorationist churches, these are people many of whom who   
   > doubt whether church buildings are legitimate because they didn't exist   
   > in the First century, reject paying preachers as unBiblical because St.   
   > Paul worked as a tentmaker to support himself, and argue incessantly   
   > about a number of other small issues. Their mindsets tend to be   
   > sufficiently rigid that these few thousand people (in total) are split   
   > up into more than a dozen quarreling camps.  (BTW, Wayne knows this   
   > story at least as well as I do; I added it so that the rest of you could   
   > understand what I was talking about.)   
   >   
   > They'd consider you wildly liberal, Wayne, to the point of not   
   > Christian.  Me, they'd be quite certain about.   
      
   One of the characteristics of churches that grew out of the Restoration   
   Movement is that they can vary widely from one congregation to another,   
   not so much on central New Testament doctrines as in what they consider   
   essential and what is a matter of opinion.  I have a good friend who grew   
   up in the Church of Christ.  When he decided to move to the Christian   
   Church his family disowned him and consider him to have abandoned   
   his faith.  I had another friend in my teens who was from a Charismatic   
   background and who went to college at Lipscomb.  She had no problems with   
   some students but many questioned whether she really was a Christian.   
   Yet I know of a non-instrumental Church of Christ whose members reached   
   out to their Christian Church brethren to the point of holding joint   
   services with them on several occasions.  And when I was attending a   
   small Christian Church-sponsored Bible college (Mid-South Christian   
   College, located at the time just outside Senatobia, Mississippi but   
   now in Memphis, Tennessee) one of my classmates regularly attended a   
   non-instrumental church down the road where she was made to feel welcome.   
      
   >   
   > Most of the people I knew during my time in the churches of Christ   
   > (mainstream) were like you. To the extent that they knew about C. S.   
   > Lewis, they loved his work. Those who had been to Bible college or   
   > studied theology tended to know it better and loved it more, not   
   > surprisingly.   
   >   
   >> I read "Till We have Faces" around 1974 and wasn't too impressed,   
   >> largely because I wasn't really ready to appreciate it.  After Bible   
   >> college and grad school (working on an MA in Classics) I was far more   
   >> familiar with the Classical world and had more knowledge of the Bible and   
   >> Western philosophical traditions. I also had a much clearer idea of what   
   >> I believe and why I believe it, and came to value "Till We Have Faces"   
   >> much more highly than on my first reading.   
   >   
   > I read "Til We have Faces" during my freshman year at Reed College, a   
   > small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon (US).  All freshmen at   
   > Reed take a core humanities class during their freshman year.  I was   
   > reading Homer, then Hesiod, then Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and   
   > Aristophanes, simultaneously with TWHF.  Fortunately my roommate's   
   > edition of Lewis's book had a decent introduction, so I knew that it was   
   > based on the Greek myth of Psyche and could go find the original.   
   >   
   > The thing is, my roommate was also a freshman, taking that same class.   
   > She wasn't stupid; nobody there was stupid.  But she didn't see the   
   > connections, and she certainly didn't feel them.  She wasn't Calvinist;   
   > her upbringing was in a Pentecostal Holiness church.  Her mindset when   
   > it came to theology was similarly rigid, though: a pagan myth was to her   
   > a pagan myth and had nothing to do with Christianity and nothing to   
   > teach Christians.  This mindset was familiar to me from my time in the   
   > churches of Christ: the more conservative members of that church thought   
   > in very much this same way.   
      
   My college roommate (who was from a Christian Church background) also   
   was put off by the mythic connections in Lewis's writing (and even more   
   so with Tolkien) and I was unable to get him to see past that and enjoy   
   their fictional work, though he did have some appreciation for Lewis's   
   non-fiction.  He didn't think it was necessarily wrong for me to enjoy it,   
   but he did think I was wasting time that could be more profitably spent   
   on reading more important things.  I especially remember him asking why I   
   was wasting my time with "A Preface to Paradise Lost" since he had read   
   "Paradise Lost" itself in high school and saw no value in it, let alone   
   in a scholarly analysis of it.  In spite of our difference of opinion   
   on things like this we were close friends.   
      
   >   
   > Lewis was quite conservative in his theology and views, but not rigid.   
   > He could see connections between pagan myths and Christian beliefs.  He   
   > could write a brilliant and thoroughly Christian story based on a pagan   
   > myth.  I won't go further because I don't want to spoil the book for   
   > anybody who is blessed enough not to read it and who can therefore read   
   > it now for the first time.   
      
   I appreciate Lewis's view of pagan myths as what he called "good dreams,"   
   containing flashes of eternal truth that were glimpsed through God's   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)