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C.S. Lewis’ ‘Wretched Machine’ Concept

September 20, 2009 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

Before I move away from C.S. Lewis, at least for a time, there is one more thing that he talked about in ‘‘Mere Christianity’ that I’d like to expand upon. Toward the end of the book in his chapter entitled ‘Nice People or New Men’ he goes on in length about the different temperaments and upbringings that different people have and how it affects them in their walk with Christ. He’s trying to point out that you can’t necessarily expect the same Christian response from person “A” and person “B” to the same situations in life because these two people may have entirely different temperaments or life’s circumstances to deal with and that God works with each of us individually.

There was one particular portion of this section that helped me to understand my own struggles particularly well. Lewis says on page 215;

“But if you are a poor creature – poisoned by a wretched upbringing in a some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels – saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion – nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends – do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) He will fling it on the scrap heap and give you a new one. And then you will astonish us all – not least yourself; for you have learned your driving in the hard school. (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last).”

My first car was a 1976 Ford Pinto. It was a real clunker. Leaked oil all the time and I could barely keep the thing running. It was embarrassing for me to let anyone see me in it; I would slink low behind the wheel if I pulled up beside a pretty girl or someone driving a nice sleek Camero. It eventually threw a rod and I left it as a dead heap on the side of a Dallas expressway.

For years I felt that I was driving a very similar spiritual machine. I told myself that there was a very good and justifiable reason that I struggled so much with things of a spiritual nature provided with the upbringing and the personal issues that I had. I would look at those people cruising by me in the “game of life” with their sleek machines and bemoan my “wretched machine.”

I find Lewis’ analogy of a wretched machine very appropriate, but instead of having my machine flung on the scrap heap; it would appear that God is rebuilding it bit by bit. One day I look under the hood and discover that the engine has been replaced. The next day I walk by and notice the new tires. Some parts appear still to be on order, but I know that one day they’ll arrive and eventually I’ll have a fully rebuilt spiritual vehicle that I can be proud to show to anybody and that’ll be a complete joy to drive. It won’t be a perfect vehicle until I see Him “face to face”, but it will surely be good enough to get me to my destination with a degree of comfort and pride (pride in Him who rebuilt it, of course).

I try to no longer compare myself with others. Sure, I definitely haven’t had the same breaks that others have had, but there are many people that I meet on a daily basis that have top-of-the-line Jaguars who have absolutely no idea what their machine is capable of. With God as my Master Mechanic who is rebuilding me in His image on a daily basis, one day I’ll be able to race past those with their underutilized Jaguars and Lamborginis in my God-rebuilt Pinto and their jaws will drop.

One last note about the wretched machine concept that Lewis didn’t really bring out. At the time of writing this, Lewis was unmarried and had no children. God also knows about the passengers in our “wretched machine.” The alcoholic husband, the philandering wife, the disobedient children. It’s bad enough for some of us to not only to have a horrible vehicle to drive around in but to also have a bunch of unruly passengers making our journey all the more difficult. I myself am grateful to have a wonderful Christian wife who drove me around for many years while I was making her life difficult, but many others aren’t as fortunate. God knows all and sees all and can not only fix our wretched machines but the machines of those who are riding along with us as well. And even if they decide not to allow themselves to be rebuilt, He will at least make it so that we can still love them and not be too terribly distracted while they ride with us.

Filed Under: C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis’ Trilemma

September 19, 2009 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

During my early faltering steps in trying to find faith in Jesus Christ, while I was still unsure of who He actually was, I stumbled upon C.S. Lewis’ classic apologetic book “Mere Christianity. It had in all actuality been in my bookshelf for years as my wife had purchased it long ago. The book revealed many things to me that I had never previously considered and in actuality I could probably blog about this book and nothing more for many months. I don’t agree with everything that Lewis said in his various writings, but for the most part I find him to be right on. One of the more thought provoking statements in this little book is what has come to be known as the Lewis Trilemma. It’s found on pages 52-53 of the book and is as follows;

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”

Now, although the Trilemma really isn’t Lewis’ invention and actually goes back much further, he explains it very well in his book. Some of the earliest versions appear to go back to the 1600’s with the Latin dilemma “aut deus aut homo non bonus” which is translated; either He’s God or not a good man. It appears to me that John the Evangelist actually framed it first in John 8:45-58. Lewis simply expanded this old argument in a manner that seemed most logical to him.

The argument has many defenders and detractors, and I’ve seen it hotly debated in a variety of forums, papers and books. Many will claim that it’s actually a quadrelemma or a quintelemma and say that Lewis and others have left out many other possibilities such as that Jesus may be a myth or a legend. Others will claim that Jesus never actually claimed to be God and point out the popular opinion that the Bible is deeply flawed by translation errors and by Bible writers simply wanting to push their agenda. Some of the people in the latter camp like to say that Jesus was some sort of a mystic that had perhaps spent some time in India or the like and had picked up some Hindu-type philosophy. By suggesting that He was some sort of mystic these detractors then believe that it was all right to insinuate that He was God because these Pantheistic mystics believed that God was in everything.

On the myth or legend argument I’ll simply say this. This argument is not for those people that do not believe in the historical Jesus. If you’re questioning whether or not Jesus was an actual real person who lived and walked during the first century in Judea, then this argument is not for you. Go back and research Jesus first and then come back to this argument. There is plenty of historical evidence to prove Jesus was real; I found it and so can you. One of the wonders of the internet age is that you can actually see scanned copies of nearly every bit of the historic writings from even before Jesus’ time until now if you want to search long and hard enough for it. You can now find in a matter of months what would once have taken years of research scouring libraries and universities across the globe

On the second argument, that of Biblical inerrancy, I’ll say this. Sure, there are some obvious shortcomings in the Bible. The first is the translation itself. Greek is a much more descriptive language than is English and there are many ways of translating scripture. On that part, I’ll go back to the research part. Do your homework. If you like, you can find scanned copies of first century texts online. Read them. By a lexicon or do like I have done and use an online one. There is plenty of information to verify that the bulk of our translations are verifiable all the way back to first century texts. There are some obvious discrepancies such as the Johannine Comma and the latter half of the 16th Chapter of Mark, but the bulk of the cannon can be substantiated with a little research.

Some people like to pick apart the scripture piece by piece, argue for the hypothetical Gospel “Q” and try to determine what parts of scripture can actually be attributed to the word of Jesus. I’ll not even go there. I personally believe that the Bible is largely what God intended for us to have and that the words of Jesus that are written in the Bible are simply that; the words of Jesus. Again, the Trilemma is not a question to be posed to someone who does not believe in the veracity of the Bible itself. If you’re still not sure of this, you still have more homework to do before you attack the Trilemma itself.

On the last question, that of Jesus being some sort of a mystic, Lewis addressed that question himself a page back. He states: “Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that sort of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”

Another part of the Trilemma that I don’t think people give enough justice to is Jesus’ claims of being the Messiah. For brevities sake, I’ll not go into the scripture involved with this. If you want to read a detailed argument about Jesus’ claims of being the Messiah, I suggest that you read Pastor Steve Weaver’s article entitled “Did Jesus Claim To Be The Messiah?”

The point about Jesus claiming to be the Messiah that I want to make is this. The Jewish people had been anticipating this Messiah for years. His arrival had been prophesied and the Jewish people were desperately waiting to be delivered from their Roman occupiers so that, as they thought anyway, Israel would be triumphantly restored to her former glory. What “good moral teacher” would so try to deceive these people to believe that He was the Messiah if He wasn’t? It would seem to be a pretty sick joke to play on these oppressed people to let them think that He was the Messiah, if He knew that He wasn’t. It brings you right back to either He was who He said He was or else a madman or just downright evil.

For those people who have done their aforementioned homework and then arrived at the point of the Trilemma, I don’t see any other way than to realize that Jesus is Lord and God. Some will say that the Trilemma shouldn’t be argued because of some of the shortcomings of it. I say that there are no shortcomings. When there is a problem with the Trilemma, it’s simply because you are presenting it to the wrong people. You can’t argue this with someone who hasn’t yet accepted that Jesus really did exist and really did say and do the things that are recorded in the Gospels. It’s like presenting an algebra exam to someone who has not yet mastered simple mathematics. You can’t expect someone to solve for x if they don’t even know how to multiply or divide. However, once you master the essentials and are presented with this problem, you must decide what you are going to do with it. I suppose there are some who can close their eyes and simply walk the other way. I couldn’t.

I could spend much more time on this subject, but I’m not going to. Many much more educated and wiser men than me have treated this subject; I’m just putting my two cents worth in on it. I would however suggest that, if you have the time, visit Victor Reppert’s Dangerous Idea blog. He has dealt with the Trillema numerous times and in many ways. Here is a good link to all of his discussions on the Lewis Trilemma.

Filed Under: Apologetics, C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis, Philip Yancey and John Wesley on Spiritual Dryness

August 28, 2009 By Randy Olds 1 Comment

Although C.S. Lewis and Philip Yancy are two of my favorite Christian authors, there is one subject that they both repeatedly approach in their writings that has consistently troubled me. That is the subject of the necessity of periods of “spiritual dryness” in all Christians walk with God. Both Lewis and Yancey state that there will be “trough periods” where the Lord will leave us on our own, so to speak, and that these times are simply a reality of the Christian faith and are simply unavoidable. This concept has troubled me from the first time that I encountered it in their writings, but until now I had not given it a great deal of consideration.

Lewis first touches on these periods or “troughs” as he calls them in “Mere Christianity” and then goes on in greater detail in “The Screwtape Letters.” In Letters #8 and #9 Lewis’ character Screwtape is instructing his pupil Wormwood on how to take advantage of these troughs where “[God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [the Christians] conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the [Christian] to stand up on its own two legs – to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.” Lewis goes on to state that “[God] relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.”

Lewis also portrays God as occasionally removing Himself from our presence in his fictional portrayal of the Lion “Aslan” in his Narnia books. Toward the end of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, Mr. Beaver laments of Aslan after Aslan pulls one of his vanishing acts; “He’ll be coming and going [...]. One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down–and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild you know. Not like a tame lion.” J.R.R. Tolkien, one of Lewis’ close friends and a person who was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion from atheism to Christianity, was supposedly deeply troubled by this aspect of Aslan, who is supposed to be a Christ-type in Lewis’ Narnia books. There were also other elements of Narnia that Tolkien had issues with, and his dislike for the series created some distance between him and Lewis but that’s another story.

When I first started reading Philip Yancey’s books, I found him also going into great detail about his belief that periods of spiritual dryness are a necessary part of the Christian experience. In “Reaching for the Invisible God”, he devotes a whole chapter entitled “Passion and the Desert” addressing this phenomenon. In “Prayer; Does it Make a Difference?” he states “I take some comfort in the fact that virtually all the masters of spirituality recount a dark night of the soul. Sometimes it passes quickly and sometimes it persists for months, even years. I have yet to find a single witness, though, who does not tell of going through a dry period.”

From near as I can tell this concept of spiritual dryness had its beginnings in the sixteenth century with a number of spiritual writers who held the belief that all Christians following Christ much go through this “dark night of the soul”. This dark night was to be likened to the desert wanderings of Israel in their forty years in the wilderness seeking the Promised Land. Mystics like John of the Cross who penned “The Dark Night of the Soul” and Teresa of Avila promoted these ideas and they gained prominence over the years.

Although I have not experienced an inexplicable “dark night of the soul” period since becoming a Christian, I kind of figured that it must be an inevitability due to what I had read on the subject. I didn’t like the idea and I hadn’t really read anything in scripture affirming that this was part of Gods plan, but simply hoped that if it must come, at least maybe God would have a good reason for it and that I would be spiritually ready for it.

All of this brings me to John Wesley’s published sermon #46 entitled “The Wilderness State”. I read this sermon the other night, and ended up rereading it several times, because in this sermon, Wesley directly refutes the idea that God is going to intentionally lead us into a “wilderness state” for no reason other than to force us to grow spiritually. As with many of my other readings of Wesley, I was forced to rethink the ideas that I had formed on this idea.
While Wesley respected Teresa, John of the Cross and other theologians such as William Law who held this “dark night of the soul” idea, he disagreed about the universal requirement for all Christians to experience such a period. He knew that Christians frequently suffered these dark night periods when externally everything appeared to be going well for them. Wesley attributed these periods to sin, ignorance of scripture or an unrealistic view of the Christian life. He affirms that suffering is promised as a part of being a disciple of Christ, but not that it is a part of Gods design. He acknowledges that the causes of this so-called wilderness state are various but “dares not rank among these the sovereign will of God.”

I’ll not go into the bulk of the sermon where Wesley addresses the various reasons that can bring on the “wilderness state” because I’m more concerned right now with what does not cause it, i.e. the deliberate withdrawal of God’s presence in our lives to promote spiritual growth. Wesley states:

“But is not darkness much more profitable for the soul than light? Is not the work of God in the heart most swiftly and effectually carried on during a state of inward suffering? Is not a believer more swiftly and thoroughly purified by sorrow, than by joy? — by anguish, and pain, and distress, and spiritual martyrdoms, than by continual peace?” So the Mystics teach; so it is written in their books; but not in the oracles of God. The Scripture nowhere says, that the absence of God best perfects his work in the heart! Rather, his presence, and a clear communion with the Father and the Son: A strong consciousness of this will do more an hour, than his absence in an age.

After reading through this sermon several times and then re-reading portions of Lewis and Yancey I decided to read some passages from the Bible again just to affirm what Wesley was saying. I read the end of Matthew where our Lord says, “I am with you always, to the end of the age”, and from Psalms 23 “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” I also read the proof text that Wesley uses for this sermon; “Ye now have sorrow: But I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” John 16:22. I, like Wesley, simply don’t see in scripture where God withdraws from his Children simply to force us to grow.

I don’t believe that my life as a Christian is going to be a sunshiny bowl of cherries all of the time. That is simply completely unrealistic. However, when I do find myself in the troughs or in a wilderness state, I don’t want to believe that this is simply Gods sovereign will. Instead, I want to examine my walk with God and see where I may need to correct my course or pray for God to help me and sustain me.

I still love C.S. Lewis and Philip Yanceys writings and have drawn great strength from both of them and will continue reading them, however with regards to the whole notion of unmerited “dark nights of the soul”, I think that Wesley is probably a whole lot closer to the truth of the matter. Wesley’s arguments seem sound and reflect the little that I have learned about the nature of God and seem a lot more scripturally sound that what others have written on this subject.

Filed Under: C.S. Lewis, John Wesley, Philip Yancey, Spiritual Dryness

Good and Evil at Compound Interest

August 14, 2009 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

I just got finished reading C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” again. It was one of the first books that I read when I was trying to decide if God was real and Christ was really who he said He was. This book prodded me to keep going and was one of the many things that led to my eventual surrender and coming to know Jesus personally.

There are a great many wonderful, thoughtful things that Lewis says in this book, but one of the things that struck me the most during this second time through was from Chapter 9, page 117; “Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”

Our teaching pastor at church recently concluded a sermon series called “Unstuck” which basically echoed the same sentiments. He quoted Newtons First Law of “A body in motion tends to stay in motion” and went on to state how victory in one area of your life can become a momentum that will build to other victories down the line.

I am really beginning to see how this works in my life. Some of the ways that I act and react in my life today are one hundred and eighty degrees out from the way they were from before I started to walk with the Lord, but I can look back now and see how it has been a progression. I didn’t go from being wracked with anxiety about everything in my life to trusting God to take care of my needs overnight…it has been a progression of little victories over time where I chose to trust Him for one small thing and it worked out; over and over again. I didn’t go from being resentful and angry at the world to having peace with my fellow man overnight; I chose to forgive one person for wronging me once and progressed from there.

I still suffer losses, but I regroup, try to see where I went wrong and take up the battle once again. Lewis talks of bridgeheads and railway lines metaphorically because the book was written during and after World War II, but the language is amazingly correct. I am reminded of Pauls words in Ephesians 6:12; “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. ” I am at battle not just against my own flesh, but against the dark forces of the spiritual world, and if I give an inch, the Devil will take a mile. It would appear that good and evil do increase at compound interest, as Lewis says.

With this in mind, I am encouraged to continue to “fight the good fight”, “finish the race”, and “keep the faith” that Paul talks about in II Timothy 4:7. Every small victory increases at compound interest and my faith and walk with God grow stronger every time I commit the “smallest good act” or avoid the “apparently trivial indulgence”.

Filed Under: C.S. Lewis, Christian Living