Current Issues Bible Study s4

C. S. Lewis

TABLE OF CONTENTS Click on the study title or article you’d like to see:

Study 1: Does Conversion Change Your Personality? Article 1: The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian Article 1b: Two Cultural Giants

Study 2: HOW LITERATURE LEADS US TO GOD Article 2: The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens

Study 3: FINDING PEACE IN A TIME OF WAR Article 3: Wisdom in a Time of War LEADER’S GUIDE - STUDY 1 Does Conversion Change Your Personality? In the realm of mental balance and personal peace, Sigmund Freud had nothing on C.S. Lewis.

You wouldn’t think C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud had much in common, but they did. Yet, when one of them came to faith in Christ, that changed dramatically, reveals CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor David Neff, who reviewed The Question of God and interviewed its author, Armand Nicholi, Jr.

In this study, we will consider the “before and after” aspects of conversion as we examine the lives of Lewis and Freud and the conversion of Paul.

Lesson #1

Scripture: Acts 9:1-30; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Based on: “The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 62 “The Cultural Giants,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 64 LEADER’S GUIDE Does Conversion Change Your Personality? Page 2

PART 1 Identify the Current Issue

Note to leader: Prior to meeting, provide for each person the article “The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian” from CHRISTIANITY TODAY magazine, included at the end of this study.

Prior to this class, you may also wish to ask participants to watch the film Shadowlands (1994) starring Anthony Hopkins. Also, you may encourage members who know Lewis’s work well to bring short portions of his writings to share with the group. Ask them to focus on the “before and after” aspects of Lewis’s life: before and after conversion, and before and after his marriage to Joy Davidman.

You may also wish to ask any members who have some background in psychology to talk about how Freud’s work continues to inform the study of human behavior, and the ways in which it complements and conflicts with a Christian perspective on human behavior. Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis each made a mark on history—Freud in the area of human psychology and Lewis on Christianity. By comparing their life journeys, Harvard professor Armand Nicholi, Jr., has found that the men entered adulthood with similar worldviews and attitudes toward matters of faith, but ended their lives at opposite ends.

Discussion starters:

[Q] From your reading of Neff’s articles and from your understanding of these scholars, what do you think Freud and Lewis had in common prior to Lewis’s conversion?

[Q] Read aloud the paragraphs in David Neff’s review on the childhoods of both Lewis and Freud. How did each man respond to his childhood circumstances?  How does Lewis’s conversion mark a change in his ability to form and nurture relationships?

[Q] Lewis was described as sexually promiscuous in his early adulthood, celibate after his conversion, and then is reported to have enjoyed his sexual relationship with his wife, Joy Davidman, whom he married later in life. Freud, by contrast, was sexually restrained his whole life. Is either of these scenarios what you would have expected of these men?  What might account for Lewis’s and Freud’s attitudes toward sexuality?

[Q] Do you think Freud was happy?  How about Lewis?

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE Does Conversion Change Your Personality? Page 3 PART 2 Discover the Eternal Principles

Teaching point one: True love comes solely from its only source, God. Freud died in 1939 in exile, almost friendless and largely unmourned. By then, half his children had turned away from him, as had most of his teachers, colleagues, and disciples. Freud was known for repeatedly and bitterly breaking relationships. Although Lewis’s death in 1963 was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy one day earlier, Lewis was deeply mourned by his many admirers, especially in his native England. Now, almost 40 years later, Lewis’s popularity is still growing, his work is respected, and his character and faith journey are studied both academically and as a source of inspiration. Let’s look at how each man wrestled with the issue of love. Consider these quotes from Nicholi’s book, The Question of God (Free Press, 2002):

Freud and Lewis both write about one aspect of love with considerable intensity. This form of human love, referred to in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, involves a basic precept of the spiritual worldview that Freud attacks: “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Freud realized the existence of a form of human love that didn’t quite fit his classification. Some people committed their entire lives to serving others with no obvious selfish motivation…. Freud asserts that the difficulty with this kind of “universal love” is that “not all men are worthy of love.”

Indeed for Freud, the whole idea…is absurd…. He simply cannot understand it. He asks, “Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it?”

[Q] How would you answer Freud’s questions? Consider this quote from Nicholi on Lewis’s attitude toward people and love, before and after his conversion:

(Lewis’s) diary provides ample evidence that he was critical, proud, cynical, cruel, and arrogant…. He referred to a visitor as the “woman with the false eyebrows who tells lies”; to another as “overeducated, affected, vain, flippant, and insufferable.”…After a Catholic church service “we were royally bored and…the priest…was the nastiest little man I had ever seen.”…In short, before his conversion, Lewis preferred to be alone, embracing the arrogance and snobbery inculcated in him by the British boarding school system and possessing none of the kinds of love he would write about extensively and demonstrate in his relationships later.

After the [conversion], Lewis turned outward….

Newly convinced that “there are no ordinary people,” Lewis carried on regular correspondence with scores of people.

He said, when almost 60 years old, that all of his life he had been looking for friends who would not exploit or betray him. Before his conversion, Lewis shared this cautious, defensive approach to people. Afterward, Lewis thought that every human being deserved to be treated with love and

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE Does Conversion Change Your Personality? Page 4 respect…. Lewis’s concept of love clearly enriched his life…. It certainly made him a better person than he had been.

[Q] How do you account for Lewis’s conversion, not only to faith in God, but also to loving people whom he had once deemed worthless and repugnant?

[Q] Has your faith empowered you to love your neighbor as yourself?

Optional Activity If time allows, ask group members to share some of their favorite readings from Lewis that give insight into how his faith changed him and his relationships. Ask someone who watched Shadowlands to describe the effect of romance on the elderly scholar. Douglas Gresham, one of Joy Davidman’s sons, has written about having Lewis as a stepfather. Apparently, Lewis took quite an interest in Douglas, even after the boy’s mother died. Lewis, certainly a curmudgeon prior to conversion and, less so, before marriage, became a delightful soul. Even his wife’s death from cancer, which severely tested Lewis, could not crush his faith in Christ. (A reading from A Grief Observed would be appropriate here.)

Teaching point two: The Holy Spirit makes real change possible. Scripture is replete with before-and-after stories. The presence of the living Christ changes people. It’s that simple. Although the transformation may take a lifetime to complete, its effect can be seen throughout one’s life. Ask participants to name people from Scripture whose lives can be told in this before- and-after fashion. One of the greatest stories of transformation is that of Paul. Saul, the affluent, zealous enemy of Christians, became Paul the apostle after his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. He traded a soaring career track for a prison cell. And he did it willingly, and joyously. Let’s read the account of Paul’s conversion as told by Luke, and then Paul’s perspective on what happened to him when he came to Christ. Read Acts 9:1-30 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-21.

[Q] Nicholi reported that Lewis turned outward after his conversion. He stopped being self-absorbed. He even stopped writing in his journal. How is that change borne out in Paul’s story and summarized succinctly in this passage from 2 Corinthians?  How did Saul change after he met Jesus?

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE Does Conversion Change Your Personality? Page 5 PART 3 Apply Your Findings

Discuss:

[Q] How has your conversion changed you—your personality, your beliefs, your relationships? Give us examples.

[Q] In what area do you feel the greatest tension between a biblical worldview (as represented by Lewis) and a naturalist worldview (as represented by Freud)?

[Q] How has your faith changed your thinking on the following subjects? Choose one that has changed the most and tell us how that has changed.  Love  Relationships  Sex  the value of other people  your personal sense of worth  moral absolutes  pain  death  life after death

—Study prepared by LEADERSHIP journal managing editor Eric Reed.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om A HANDOUT FOR FURTHER STUDY Does Conversion Change Your Personality? In the realm of mental balance and personal peace, Sigmund Freud had nothing on C.S. Lewis.

Two Worlds, Two Views We live in two worlds, and we are influenced by two worldviews. Sigmund Freud represents the naturalist (or materialist, secular) worldview. C.S. Lewis represents the Christian worldview. Make a chart that summarizes your understanding of the two perspectives. 1. Make a two-column chart: Naturalist worldview/Christian worldview. 2. List the following topics in the left margin: love, relationships, sex, the value of other people, your personal sense of worth, moral absolutes, pain, death, life after death. 3. Then, in the first column, write two or three sentences that summarize the naturalist worldview. What are its strengths and problem areas? What questions does it leave unanswered? 4. In the second column, write two or three sentences summarizing the Christian worldview. What are its strengths and problem areas? What questions does it leave unanswered? 5. When you have finished the chart, highlight the problem areas and questions you have about the two viewpoints. Pray over them and determine to learn more about these aspects of Christian and secular worldviews.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian In the realm of mental balance and personal peace, Sigmund Freud had nothing on C.S. Lewis.

By David Neff, for the study, “Does Conversion Change Your Personality?”

Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis probably never met— though there is evidence that an unnamed Oxford professor called on Freud during the 15 months he lived in England before his death in 1939. If that professor was Lewis, Freud would have been 82 or 83 and Lewis 40 or 41. Lewis would by then have been a Christian for about a decade. His most important apologetic works were still in the future, but he had already begun to express his faith in symbol and metaphor (The Pilgrim’s Regress and Out of the Silent Planet). Freud’s major works were all behind him and his cultural legacy was already created. If these two intellectual giants had met, their contrasting views—of God, religion, morality, truth, love, sex, suffering, and death—would have been revealed in stark contrast to each other. Though it is doubtful such a conversation ever took place, we do now have a thoughtful book that places Lewis’s and Freud’s fundamental ideas next to each other: Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God. Nicholi has been teaching Harvard students (both undergraduates and medical students) about Freud’s thought for over 30 years. Students have given his course, “Sigmund Freud & C. S. Lewis: Two Contrasting World Views,” excellent ratings in a guide published by Harvard’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). To quote from the CUE Guide for 1993–94, “Calling the course one of the best at Harvard, and helpful in expanding one’s understanding of one’s self and one’s personal life, nearly all of those polled recommended [it] without hesitation.” As one of the great explainers of the modern era, Freud was to human behavior what Marx was to economics and Darwin was to biology. You simply weren’t educated unless you knew the thought of these three architects of modernity. But Nicholi’s students found that reading Freud’s philosophical works meant enduring a sustained attack on a spiritual worldview. They asked for balance. Nicholi searched for some other thinker who had the intellectual credibility to stand up to Freud’s arguments. He discovered that C. S. Lewis was the perfect foil for Freud. “When Lewis was an atheist,” Nicholi told me in an interview, “he read Freud’s works…and used his philosophical works as a defense of his atheism. After Lewis’s conversion, many of the arguments that he answered were those very

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian Page 2 arguments raised by Freud and used by Lewis himself when he was an atheist.” A book like this could be bloodless, abstract, and easily reduced to a series of PowerPoint slides: Freud’s arguments for regarding God as an illusion listed opposite Lewis’s argument for the reality of God; Freud’s reduction of all love to sex opposite Lewis’s elaboration of the richly interconnected varieties of love; and so forth. But Nicholi joins the world of ideas to flesh-and-blood biography. As a psychiatrist, Nicholi is sensitive to the ways life experiences shape the ways we perceive the world—and great minds are no exception. Thus Nicholi begins with beginnings: Sigismund Schlomo Freud was an Orthodox Jewish boy raised by a stern but loving Catholic nanny—until she was ripped from him at a tender age. At age 10 he learned about his father’s experience of anti-Semitism in a largely Catholic society. He began to think of his father as a coward. As an impressionable teenager, he read Ludwig Feuerbach’s argument that religion “is simply the projection of human need, a fulfillment of deep-seated wishes.” He spent the rest of his life working out his troubled relation with his father and the implications of Feuerbach’s views.

Childhood Trauma Jacksie Lewis was an Irish boy, embarrassed by his grandfather’s highly emotional and frequently weepy sermons. When he was 9, his mother died, and shortly thereafter his unhappy father sent him and his brother to a boarding school run by a sadistic headmaster. When he was a young man, he saw the horrors of trench warfare and had his dearest friend ripped from him by World War I. These early life experiences seem to explain why Lewis, like Freud, turned away from belief and toward aggressive atheism. Yet late in life, Lewis was content, fundamentally happy, and a believer. Lewis was offered an Order of the British Empire, one of Britain’s highest civilian honors, and (unlike his friend J.R.R. Tolkien) turned it down. This is the picture of self- confidence. Freud was bitter and had made enemies of his onetime disciples. And despite his enormous influence, he was angry that he hadn’t received greater recognition. He believed he was due a Nobel Prize. This is the picture of depression. Nicholi’s book proceeds in an orderly fashion: from biographical introduction to topical comparisons of Freud and Lewis on a variety of issues of belief and behavior. Is there a Creator? Is there a universal moral law? What is the source of happiness? The meaning of love? Of sex? Of suffering? Of death?

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Dour Analyst and the Joyous Christian Page 3 Yet in these topical investigations, Nicholi never lets go of the biographical thread, but weaves it through every chapter. He is thoroughly conversant with his subjects’ personal papers and letters. From this familiarity emerges an intimate understanding of how belief and biography are entwined. Freud, who fought religion as an illusion, emerges as a disappointed soul on a never-ending search for acceptance and meaning, but never quite seeing the full picture. Lewis, who wrote fantasy stories from childhood on, emerges as a realist, with tremendous insight into his own psyche. He wrote of a character in one of his adolescent tragedies: It was “a projection of myself; he voiced that sense of priggish superiority whereby I was, unfortunately, beginning to compensate myself for my unhappiness.” Amazingly, Lewis got such insight into himself without the help of Freud.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002 • Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 62

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE 2 Two Cultural Giants Both Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis were emotionally wounded as boys and struggled with depression as men. But a worldview can make a tremendous difference.

An Interview with Dr. Armand Nicholi, Jr.

By David Neff

Many schools of psychology have come and gone since Freud died. And yet he has a cultural legacy. What is that legacy? Nicholi: The most important part of Freud’s legacy is his influence on our language. We use terms—ego, repression, projection, neurosis, sibling rivalry, and Freudian slip— without realizing their source. In addition, his theories influence how we interpret human behavior—in history, literary criticism, biography, sociology, medicine, education, and ethics. We now take for granted that early life experiences influence how we think and feel and behave as adults. For example, before Freud, we had little awareness of the traumatic effects of child sexual abuse. Now we read of such cases every day. His influence is so profound, historians refer to the 20th century as “the century of Freud.”

Would Lewis have agreed that childhood experiences influence us? Yes. He was acutely aware of the influence of his early childhood, especially his mother’s death when he was 9 years old. Lewis never fully recovered. In his autobiography, he writes extensively about both the positive and negative early experiences that shaped his life.

You write that “the early life experiences show striking parallelism.” If those experiences of love and loss were so similar, why did these men turn out so different? Until Lewis came to a personal faith, they were very much alike—gifted intellectually, introspective, highly critical and wary of others, clinically depressed, pessimistic, gloomy and hostile toward their fathers and toward all authority—especially to the notion of an Ultimate Authority, etc. Then, in his early 30s, Lewis had a conversion experience that transformed his life.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE 2 Two Cultural Giants Page 2 You’ve done empirical research on the religious conversions of university students. What did you learn from comparing the students’ conversions with Lewis’s? Both Lewis and the students observed in believers some quality that was missing in their own lives. Lewis observed this in other Oxford faculty members and in the lives of some of the great writers he admired. The students observed this in some of their peers who possessed a strong faith. Both Lewis and the students made a conscious effort to open their minds and look at the evidence. Lewis began reading the New Testament in Greek and the students attended Bible study groups on campus. Both Lewis and the students came to faith in the context of a modern, liberal university where the climate tends to be hostile. The spiritual worldview is often thought to be only for the ignorant masses, a psychological crutch that never works. Some consider it, as did Freud, an expression of pathology.

But Lewis turned out to be better adjusted as a result. Both Lewis and the students functioned more effectively after their conversion experience. The students who underwent what they called a “religious conversion” reported a radical change in lifestyle—an abrupt halt in the use of drugs, an enhanced self-image, a more forgiving spirit toward others and toward themselves, better control of impulses, an increased capacity for establishing “close, satisfying relationships,” a marked change in their mood or affect, and a lessening of what they referred to as “existential despair.” Friends who knew Lewis before and after his conversion noted many of the same changes in him. The quality of his relationships changed. He became more outgoing. He said his conversion was the beginning of his turning outward. He had a new evaluation of people—he realized every human being would live forever, long after our institutions, governments, and nations are long gone—and therefore are of infinitely more value.

You devote a chapter to Freud and Lewis on sex. Who was better adjusted sexually? Though we think of Freud as the father of the new sexuality, he lived a rather restricted sexual life. His letters and his biographers indicate he lived the traditional sexual code of sex within marriage with complete fidelity or abstinence. Because of his long medical training he could not afford to marry until about 30 years old. During a long, four-year engagement, most biographers agree, he did not have sexual relations with his fiancée. Freud’s official biographer noted that Freud remained faithful throughout his marriage. His sexual life during marriage appeared to be quite restricted—he wrote to a friend when 37 years old that “we are now living in abstinence.”

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE 2 Two Cultural Giants Page 3 Scholars give various reasons for this abstinence. Lewis gives us few details of his sexual life before his conversion. When in the army, he avoided visiting prostitutes—perhaps out of fear of disease. He describes a robust sexual desire that he became aware of in his early teens. Before his conversion, he speaks of trying to live a moral life but finding that he continually failed in the areas of “lust and anger.” And when he began to look at his life seriously, he wrote that he was “appalled” by the “zoo of lusts” within him. When he finally married in his 50s, he had a very fulfilling sexual life. He wrote later that he and his wife “feasted on love; every mode of it….No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.” His wife wrote: “You’d think we were a honeymoon couple in our early 20s.”

Freud famously asked, “What do women want?” Lewis, on the other hand, carried on a tremendous correspondence with women. Did either man ever come to understand the opposite sex? Freud acknowledged that he had difficulty understanding women. He referred to the sexuality of women as a “Dark Continent.” Many of his theories have outraged feminists, and he is often accused of being prejudiced against women. Yet he had many women followers, and many of the first psychoanalysts were women with whom he had a good working relationship. Lewis also had many women friends whom he admired and with whom he corresponded. He appeared to have an unusual understanding of women, perhaps not only from the great literature, but also from living with his surrogate mother, Mrs. Moore, and her daughter. His scholarly work The Allegory of Love focused on the love between a man and a woman, and his popular writings on modern marriage and the family contain a great deal of clinical insight and understanding.

Freud is known for saying that the well-adjusted adult needs the ability to love and to work. How would you compare Freud’s and Lewis’s understanding of work? Both worked hard at their professions, both wrote prolifically. Freud and Lewis, before his conversion, were driven by a strong desire to be famous. When Freud was 17 years old he advised a friend to save his [Freud’s] letters because someday he would be famous. During his self-analysis, he related his desire to be famous to a story told him as a child that an old peasant woman prophesied that his mother had given birth to a great man. When in his 50s, he said that “in view of the inevitable ingratitude of humanity…I certainly do not work because of the expectation of any reward or fame.” Yet his diary and his letters indicate the desire remained.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE 2 Two Cultural Giants Page 4 Before his conversion, C. S. Lewis had “dreams of success and fame.” After his conversion, Lewis considered his desire to be famous as a writer to be a serious flaw. The desire to be better known than others fostered pride. When he concentrated on writing well and forgot about becoming famous, he both wrote well and became recognized for it—perhaps reinforcing his oft-repeated principle that when first things are put first, second things don’t decrease; they increase.

Could you compare Lewis and Freud on the subject of happiness? Both men suffered from clinical depression. Lewis also showed signs of clinical depression before his conversion. In his diary and letters, he appears irritable, pessimistic, gloomy, and hopeless. He says his atheism was based on his “very pessimistic view of existence.” After his conversion, all of this changed. He said joy was “the central story of my life.” His friends then described him as cheerful and outgoing. Lewis found happiness in his newly established relationship with the Creator. Lewis said that God cannot give us “happiness apart from Himself, because it is not there, there is no such thing.” His new faith helped him overcome his depression. Recent medical research has shed considerable light on the positive effects of faith on treating depression. Freud, on the other hand, used cocaine when in his 20s for a period of time to lift his depression. He equated happiness with pleasure, and in his mind the greatest source of pleasure is instinctual gratification, sexual pleasure. And because that occurs only periodically, he thinks that it’s not in the cards for human beings to be happy.

Lewis was certainly no foe of pleasure. Lewis divides happiness into many categories, but he says they all come from the same source. He knew the pleasure of just watching a sunset or listening to great music or taking a hot bath. He seemed to have the capacity to enjoy the little pleasures in life. And he said that half of all happiness comes from friendships. Freud, on the other hand, seemed to have a limited capacity to enjoy the ordinary pleasures. And he didn’t express much happiness in his letters. He obviously found happiness with his children and his family, but most of his writings indicate that life is not a particularly happy experience.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002 • Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 64

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE - STUDY 2 How Literature Leads Us to God When the road to faith is paved with great literature.

Mark Storer says his road to faith was paved with great literature. He is so convinced of the power of great reading to change one’s life that he says, “Reading led me to Christ.” Great writers, older and contemporary, secular and Christian, in their honest vision and with their gift of words, keep taking him back to the Bible and to Christ. In this study we’ll consider if God’s truth can be found in literature, even the secular kind.

Lesson #2

Scripture: Proverbs 8:1-12; Luke 18; Acts 17

Based on: “The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 72 LEADER’S GUIDE How Literature Leads Us to God Page 2

Note to leader: Prior to meeting, provide for each person the article “The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens” from CHRISTIANITY TODAY magazine, included at the end of this study..

[Q] How do you respond to Storer’s convictions? Can literature play that important a role in the Christian’s experience?

[Q] Is it possible for fiction—something made up by a writer’s imagination—to bring knowledge of truth and to affect lives?

[Q] How do you define truth?  Do you think it’s possible for truth to be found in places that are not explicitly Christian?  Is it helpful to learn about life, even about Christian principles, from those who do not profess faith in Jesus Christ? Can you give examples?

[Q] How would you define great literature? What do you think marks the kind of great reading Storer describes?  Which books have taught you something valuable?  Have you known anyone who shares Storer’s road to faith?

PART 2 Discover the Eternal Principles

While the Bible does not contain an explicit mandate to read literature, it is more literary than didactic. It does not present theological outlines. In fact, some critics note that Christianity is the most literary religion in the world. In addition to the Bible’s varied and colorful stories about nations and individuals, it also contains poetry, drama, visions, and letters. The parables of Jesus—stories that convey truths about God and people and life—grip its readers in ways facts and principles told directly would not.

Teaching point one: God chose to portray his truth not only through explicit facts but also through narrative and stories. Read Luke 18:1-8. In this vivid passage, Jesus wants his disciples to clearly understand that “they should always pray and not give up.” In order to “show” instead of just telling, he follows with a story about a widow and a judge, dramatizing the principle. Jesus is also providing a model for teaching and learning: Spiritual concepts are best remembered when placed in the context of human drama.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE How Literature Leads Us to God Page 3 [Q] Compare the principle in verse one to the teaching that follows Jesus’ illustration. What’s the difference between the two in terms of influence?

[Q] When is it most appropriate to teach didactically, by listing principles?  When is it more appropriate to teach with a story or poem? Our lives are full of moral and spiritual choices, the drama of which constitutes great writing. In his article, Storer shows how great stories, well told, bring us back to the Bible. Dickens’s knowledge of human nature leads the reader repeatedly to recognition of evil, the need for compassion, and the hope and reality of redemption. Instead of pointing a finger at us and saying, “You should do this and that,” Dickens introduces us to Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol, and we see for ourselves the consequences of selfishness and experience the hope of change.

[Q] Can you feel the difference between being on the receiving end of a pointing finger versus a story? Explain.

Teaching point two: Truth is always from God—wherever it is found. Although we are fallen, God’s image remains in us, providing the basis for our creative gifts and vision. God’s saving grace touches the world through the influence of Christian beliefs and values. The ability to write vividly and eloquently is a function of the creative imagination. Even those who do not profess faith in Christ may keenly observe the world if they are endowed with the common grace of powerful imagination. They, too, may create three-dimensional characters who show us something about ourselves, others, and God. Since those gifts—imagination, perception, keen intellect—are given by God, we can enjoy them and learn from them. Read Acts 17: 22-31. In his sermon delivered on the Areopagus (Greek for Mars Hill) in Athens, Paul shows he understands his audience and his culture, including its best writers, poets, and philosophers (Epicureans and Stoics in particular). Areopagus was the name of both the hill and the court that met on it. The court was very likely exclusive, commentators say. It was made up of only 30 members who dealt with cases of homicide and with the supervision of public morals. There Paul was called upon to state his faith. He spoke compellingly. Referring to secular poets to support his contention that we are created by God, he quotes from the poets twice in one verse: “For in him we live and move and have our being,” and, “We too are his offspring” (v. 28).

[Q] How important do you think it is to understand the culture around you?  How do you go about understanding your culture?  Can you think of a novel or poem you’ve read that was full of truth, which you could have used to make a Christian point to a non-Christian friend? As Storer notes, Shakespeare’s insights into the soul are unforgettable. Othello understands too late the deception of jealousy; Hamlet’s indecision leads to rash action; Lear’s regret over his emotional blindness is heart-rending. The reader, swept up in the scope of the story, can see what has gone wrong and choose a different way.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE How Literature Leads Us to God Page 4 Teaching point three: Christians must obtain wisdom, understanding, and insight in order to better reach others. Read Proverbs 8:1-12.

[Q] Make a list of adjectives describing wisdom in this passage.  In what places is wisdom found?  To whom is it offered?  What does discernment mean?  What kind of advantage does discernment give you in dealing with a secular world? The wisdom of God shown here and in other passages in Proverbs is shrewd and resourceful, available to anyone. The implication is that we should take advantage of it. The best writers are sensitive observers of people and faithful to human experience. They present us with a range of worldviews. Through reading classic stories and essays, we are exposed to many kinds of people, conflicts, joys, and perspectives—knowledge that would otherwise remain outside our understanding. Storer names several authors who broaden our awareness. In Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson takes us into the heart of suffering incurred by the Japanese in the World War II internment camps. In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard works out her confusion over a God who would allow a tiny child to have her face burned off in a plane accident. Readers can empathize and struggle as they read, developing insight into the complexity of history, personality, the nature of God, and their own experiences.

PART 3 Apply Your Findings

Issue One: Reading well

[Q] How important is reading to you?  In comparison to watching television or movies, how much time do you spend reading?  What do you read?  Does it challenge your thinking, or is it simply what many people call “a quick read”?  How do the writers you read use language?  How do they deal with the hard questions of life?  Does your reading build links to the greatest book of all? Culture today is largely visual; words have become secondary to pictures. The language many of us use has become largely careless and predictable, unlike the language of the writers Storer lists, writers who write profoundly, with grace, and who are honest in exploring the deeper questions that inevitably crop up in life.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE How Literature Leads Us to God Page 5 Issue Two: Thinking well; thinking imaginatively.

[Q] What do you think of when you hear the word imagination?  What is the difference between the often-confused terms imaginative and imaginary?  What part do you think imagination plays in Christianity’s expression and practice?  How can imagination help us think well?  What are possible problems with imagination? In his essay “The Value of a Sanctified Imagination,” A. W. Tozer points out that the Pharisees’ great problem was their lack of imagination and their refusal to let it be part of religion. They wanted to keep the text carefully guarded in theological constructs, to see nothing beyond it. Perhaps they were afraid of the potential evil of something that is also a wonderful gift when used well. But, as Tozer points out, Christ “could see the soul of the text while the Pharisee could see only the body.” The imagination is both practical and spiritual. It helps one to see beyond the limits of the senses to the soul of things. When one knows the truth and grasps it in the living color of the imagination, one moves from duty to delight. And delight is infectious.

[Q] What is your tendency—to think of Christianity as delightful or dutiful?

[Q] Do you think good reading could incorporate more delight into your faith? Why or why not?

Issue Three: Growing in faith. C. S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia to catch his readers off guard and bring them back to the great accounts and doctrines of the Bible, among them the Creation, the Fall, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Good literature can take us back to the old, old story, to read it in a new way with a new voice, with which we can, in turn, surprise others.

[Q] What are the advantages and disadvantages of Lewis’s approach?

[Q] Have you ever felt as though you’ve heard it all before? Have you sat in church and Bible studies feeling numb from the familiarity of the things you’re listening to and even saying? Have you even read the Bible and found it too familiar? What do you think is the problem? You or the method? What might revitalize you?

Study prepared by Rosalie de Rosset, professor of English, literature, and homiletics at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om A HANDOUT FOR FURTHER STUDY How Literature Leads Us to God When the road to faith is paved with great literature.

In the classic, old cowboy story called Shane, sometimes dubbed the Western Good News, author Jack Schaefer paints a vivid picture of the title character as a Christ-type. Into a troubled Wyoming valley where cattle barons threaten homesteaders, rides Shane out of the east. In a short time, he assesses the trouble, exchanges his garments for farmer’s clothes, helps a farm family, and saves the farmers from exploitation and destruction. Along the way, he takes the female character seriously, helps several men to be better men, and inspires the young boy narrator to become good, true, and strong. Like C. S. Lewis’s character Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, Shane is not safe but always good. The novel, while simple in plot and language, harkens back to the Christ of the New Testament. Read Shane, perhaps with some other Bible study group members, and see how that story takes you back to the Gospels so that you can read them with new eyes. Then, step out into the world of literature for more of these discoveries.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens My road to faith was paved with great literature.

By Mark Storer, for the study, “How Literature Leads Us to God.”

“It does sometimes seem a shame that Noah and his party did not miss the boat,” quips Mark Twain as his sharp tongue aims at the heart of humanity. My favorite thing that Mark Twain satirically advocated, however, was to bring home missionaries from China. He wanted them to “sivilize” Southern white men who had sworn allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan. “You (missionaries) convert roughly one Chinaman per missionary per annum. That is an uphill fight against 33,000 pagans born every day.” At such moments, Twain makes me think about Jesus. But he isn’t the only one. In fact, reading led me to Christ. I did not have a conversion experience. No drugs or alcohol sank me to rock bottom. I had no one mentor to lead me to church and ultimately to Christ. The Lord did not call me in a dream or speak in my ear. My faith in Jesus grew over time. I don’t think I ever didn’t believe in God. From the time I was born, I was brought up in the Protestant church, and while various of my family members traveled far and wide on spiritual journeys, I never did. But I read. I read a great deal. After a short stint working in radio, I became a teacher and a writer. Soon the books I taught my students began to take hold of me—books I’d known since the time I was in high school were now my own personal Bible of sorts. I taught John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and found that I looked forward to it almost as much as my students loathed it. Reading a book of 500-plus pages is usually not an event anticipated with glee. But as a teacher, I did find joy in it, and what’s more, I found God in it.

Steinbeck’s ‘Jesus’ Steinbeck, who was not known for devout Christian faith, wrote about it all the time. In The Grapes of Wrath, the secondary character, Jim Casy (note the initials J. C., I always tell my students), is an itinerant preacher who has fallen away from the mainstream church. “Just Jim Casy now. Ain’t got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears—but they seem kinda sensible.” Casy is confused and in his confusion he says, “I went off alone and sat and figured. The sperit’s strong in me, on’y it ain’t the same. I ain’t

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens Page 2 so sure of a lot of things.” The tension between human mind and spirit—our desire to do what pleases God and upon trying, our inability to do so—is laid bare here. Casy’s death is even more allegorical than his life. In an attempt to stop farm owners from driving down wages, he leads some of the migrant workers on a strike and tries to force a settlement. It doesn’t work, of course, and in a moment of violence remarkable for its sparse telling, Casy is killed. He is standing in a stream of clear water as a flashlight from one of the men chasing him falls on his face. He turns to the man and says, “Listen…You fellas don’ know what you’re doin’. You’re helpin’ to starve kids.” And with that the man, armed with a pick handle, hammers across Casy’s cheek and brow. He lays in the stream, lifeless, the flashlight beaming on him. Steinbeck merely dramatized what the Bible has said all along: God is on the side of the downtrodden. Perhaps no one “secular” author has contributed so much to the Christian faith as Charles Dickens. His novella, A Christmas Carol, is perhaps single-handedly responsible for making Christmas a household celebration, as well as a pagan celebration. But in light of his stories of redemption, salvation, and grace, he can be forgiven and perhaps even lauded for bringing Christmas out of the basement of the Western conscience and moving it into the living room. It is not Ebenezer Scrooge who fascinated me most, though. It is Sydney Carton, the debauched, drunken, and brilliant lawyer from A Tale of Two Cities who finds that his sacrifice will redeem him and save his dear friends. It is Carton who, though morose and depressed, drunk and slovenly, gives his life in the uncanny twist of events that lead him to the guillotine in revolutionary Paris. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Sydney keeps hearing over and over again. As his captors prepare to execute him, in the midst of his own sacrifice, he comforts another, a young lady, accused by the “Citizens” of France of treason. Sydney tells her to keep her eyes on him. He remains a constant and steady source of hope and inspiration for her. Yet the ridiculous events that lead these two innocents to be executed are not the focus of Dickens’s attention. He does not write, in his extraordinary verbosity, about the injustice of the system. Rather, he writes about compassion, healing, understanding, justice, and ultimately faith. An aside: in the high school where I teach, A Tale of Two Cities is core literature for the ninth grade. I am always puzzled when I hear cries about how God has been kicked out of our classrooms. Have those leveling this charge looked at the reading list of their local high schools recently? In any event, Dickens, more than most classic authors, brought me to Christ. Though not my favorite writer, Dickens unabashedly writes about

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens Page 3 humanity in a way that would embarrass a 21st-century psychologist. As Harvard professor Robert Coles has said, “And Dickens, oh my, what Dickens knew about human nature!” I am inclined to agree. In Soul Survivor, Philip Yancey writes of Coles being drawn to great authors—including Dickens, Flannery O’Connor, Leo Tolstoy, Simone Weil, and William Carlos Williams—while he was a student at Harvard. Like Coles, I have found that these authors are simply retelling the Bible, albeit sometimes in a way that makes some Christians angry. But Coles never blinks. He explains to Yancey that the Bible has all along steadfastly preached that we have both sides in us. We have the ability to be evil and ignorant, and we have the ability to behave with grace and compassion. All of us have those tendencies, and the authors that moved Coles merely repeat that refrain and seek ways for the most despicable of people to be redeemed.

Beauty, Grace, power In the dying days of winter, I teach a book by Zora Neale Hurston called Their Eyes Were Watching God. The main character, Janie, is constantly in the spring of her life. Through a series of failed marriages and abusive situations, Janie does not shrink from her circumstances. Rather, she embraces them and lives joyously in God’s shadow. “Ev’rybody got to go to God for theyselves,” says Janie, speaking from experience. Never cowed or demeaned by her situation, she is an indomitable woman and ultimately finds her own soul. As one of my students wrote in a paper about the book, “Spring is the soul-chasing season.” What a tribute to Hurston: She reaches into the black experience in America, and rather than coming out discouraged, as she has every right to do, she finds reason for joy and love. One line reads, “Dawn and doom were in the branches.” Hurston also knew that human beings have the potential for both. Dawn and doom exist in each one of us, and it is up to us to choose which one will succeed. Perhaps this is the ultimate expression of free will that we are given. This is the free will that allows human beings to suffer or alleviate suffering, to love or to hate, to choose spirit over ignorance, compassion over mistrust, and finally to accept and share what there is of living. In that vein, I have continued to teach. I teach not because I know how to reach students. I teach because they reach me. In the depths of all that is rampant in a high school—drugs, abuse, sexual promiscuity, ignorance, hatred—literature also exists, and with it, God. Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks to students about self-reliance and the power of nature. He speaks to them about losing yourself in order to find yourself. Shakespeare provides such profound glimpses into the human heart that many doubt he could have written them on his own. The beauty of his words, the grace with which

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens Page 4 he writes, and the power of the human soul and spirit they convey are unmatched in the English language. Tolkein, Lewis, Frost, and even more contemporary authors like David Guterson, Charles Frasier, Annie Dillard, and Anne Lamott are what led me back to the Bible and to Christ. In their writings is the constant search, and an acceptance of sorts, that while we all sin and fall short of the glory of God, we must strive toward that glory while giving love and compassion to those around us. This is not an epiphany or a moment of clarity. This is a lifetime of struggling with answers that belie their questions. It is a terrible honesty and, finally, a hope that God will indeed dwell within us. What a dreadful and wonderful lesson to learn.

Mark Storer is a writer and teacher in Camarillo, California.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 22, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5, Page 72

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE - STUDY 3 Finding Peace in a Time of War What we can learn from Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis about the long battle with terrorism.

Although we, as Christians, know that wars will only cease when the Prince of Peace comes, we must “if it is possible, as far as it depends on [us], live at peace with everyone” (Rom. 12:18). Those who have lived long enough to see many wars also know the high cost of peace we’ve enjoyed. Now once again, we find ourselves fighting an enemy —this time, a worldwide network of terrorists intent on causing our complete destruction.

We know that, indeed, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:…a time for war and a time for peace” (Eccles. 3:1, 8b). But knowing that doesn’t make living through a time of war easy.

In this time of war, God calls us to another kind of “time” as well—a time to think and live as citizens of heaven.

Lesson #3

Scripture: Psalm 27:3; Isaiah 55:6-8; Matthew 6:27-29; Philippians 4:6-8; 2 Timothy 4:5

Based on: “Wisdom in a Time of War.” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 7, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1, Page 44 LEADER’S GUIDE Finding Peace in a Time of War Page 2

Note to leader: Prior to meeting, provide for each student the article, “Wisdom in a Time of War” from CHRISTIANITY TODAY magazine, included at the end of this study. First we watched in disbelief as terrorists purposely crashed into the World Trade Center. Then we fell to our knees as buildings collapsed to the ground, crushing thousands of our nation’s finest and brightest. We heard about the attack on the Pentagon and about the ultimate sacrifice of fellow citizens in a rural Pennsylvania field. Deep down, we knew the world must respond. But how?

[Q] Did you find wisdom in J.I. Packer’s article? Which paragraphs, sentences, or phrases compelled you the most? Why?

[Q] Lewis and Chambers “took people in perplexity of need as their subject….War was only discussed as one of life’s incidentals (granted, a huge one) with which we must learn to deal.” How have you learned to cope with war? What changes have you made in your lifestyle?

[Q] Chambers and Lewis, though from different church backgrounds, share many things in common, including “a similar approach to the nitty-gritty of living through a war.” Name some of the similarities that come through to you. With which do you agree or disagree?

[Q] To what extent has your peace of mind been shattered during this time of terrorism and war?  How have you responded to the new threats to your personal security?  What are some ways that you are, nevertheless, learning to cope?

PART 2 Discover the Eternal Principles

Teaching point one: War is a time to think-about your life and about war. Have the group members form small groups or pairs. Ask them to read Isaiah 55:6– 8; 2 Timothy 4:5; and Philippians 4:6–8 in order to respond to this question: “What overall biblical principles can we affirm when it comes to facing wartime as believers?” Give each group a sheet of paper and a pen to record their answers. Come back together as a large group and ask for the groups’ insights. (Also ask whether other passages of Scripture came to mind during the small-group discussions.)

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE Finding Peace in a Time of War Page 3 Move into a brief discussion of Packer’s third point—thinking about war. Focus, in particular, on the problem of worrying. Tell your group how you reacted upon first reading Lewis’s comments about worry, and talk a little bit about a time when you’ve worried.

[Q] How does that experience compare to the potential for worry during a time of war?

[Q] J.I. Packer says, “Terrorism begins as a mindset,” and he calls it “a self- justifying heart-sickness.” Can you relate to this process? Identify a time when you were tempted to take matters of injustice into your own hands.  Why would this have been wrong?

[Q] Do you agree that trying to control your future without considering God’s will is sin?  How does this relate to your mindset when faced with terrorism?” “Christians are called not to understand everything God is doing, but to be faithful to him.” Christians will disagree on their understandings of what war means theologically, but they must never let their differing views disrupt their foundational unity in Christ.

Teaching point two: War is a time to fear God alone. Read Psalm 27:3, Philippians 4:6–7, and Matthew 6:27–29 We Christians know that our bodies are just as vulnerable to harm by bullets, bombs, or biological weapons as the bodies of non-believers. We wonder about our children’s future, the effect of war on our personal wealth, and whether we truly have what it takes to get through this trying season. At times like these, we may be tempted to give in to our fears. However, Oswald Chambers said, “The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.”

[Q] What does it mean to fear God?

[Q] Is this different than being afraid of God?

[Q] Is it really possible to love and trust God while we fear him?

[Q] Do you know any examples of fearing someone you also love and trust?  Is this what it means to fear God? Why or why not?

[Q] Has anyone in the group found Chambers’s paradox to be true for them? Explain. Optional Activity: Ask the group to form pairs. Give each pair a note card displaying at least two of the following Scripture passages. Invite the partners to read the passages and discuss how they relate to “learning to fear God alone.” Let them know that they will be asked to present an insight or two to the whole group.

[Q] David speaks of his confidence and courage in time of war. Why is he so confident, even though he could not predict the outcome of any given battle? Philippians 4:6–7

[Q] Name some of the things you’ve been anxious about in light of recent events. Have you addressed them in prayer? If so, did it help? Matthew 6:27–29

[Q] When has worry been the most destructive in your life? What is the most effective method you’ve used to overcome worry? Consider this statement by C.S. Lewis: “‘Give us our daily bread’ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.”

[Q] Does this mean we shouldn’t plan our lives months or years in advance?  In what ways is that wise?  When might it become unhealthy?  What does it mean, practically speaking, to live daily?  Has terrorism “helped” you to do that?

PART 3 Apply Your Findings

Although we can have the peace of God in our hearts during wartime, we must not become complacent. Direct your students to this quotation in the article: “’One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless [during war],’ moaned Screwtape.” Point out that if “contented worldliness” needs to go (since we are primarily citizens of heaven), we must become active in certain ways. Packer says that Lewis and Chambers suggest some ways for believers to take action during war. Review the ideas that appear at the very end of the article (before the quote by Isaac Watts). Spend the remaining minutes of your class brainstorming some lists, which you will jot on chalkboard or newsprint. Take the first three suggestions and brainstorm specific, practical actions that would apply them in our day and time.

[Q] How have we been called upon to “accept tightened security”? What might this mean for you in a typical week at home or at work?

[Q] How should we “take reasonable precautions”? What actions could this require of you in the coming days or months?

[Q] How, specifically, could we “keep watch” and “be careful”? What are some practical ways of doing this in our families and neighborhoods?

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om LEADER’S GUIDE Finding Peace in a Time of War Page 5 [Q] Is anyone is planning to take a first step in implementing one or more of these suggestions? Remember that God is in charge, and pray for the courage to cope.

[Q] What do you try to remember in order to stay aware of God’s sovereignty and abiding presence every day? Action Point: Pray for specific concerns and requests. Close your session by reading Psalm 27:3 aloud as your benediction.

Study prepared by Carol McLean Wilde, author of numerous issue- based Bible studies for teens and adults.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om A HANDOUT FOR FURTHER STUDY Finding Peace in a Time of War What we can learn from Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis about the long battle with terrorism.

This exercise may be done before the meeting, either at home or as the participants arrive. They may pair off. Read Psalm 91 and answer the following questions: 1. When have you been in the most “trouble”? How close—or far—did God seem at the time? What did you learn from your experience? 2. What does it mean for you to “dwell” in the shelter of the Most High? 3. How does the modern-day threat of terrorism—and the possibility of ongoing war—affect your reading of this psalm? What verse speaks most powerfully to you these days? 4. How would you answer someone who says: “I’ve known Christians who suffered all of the bad things God says he’ll protect them against, so, obviously, Christianity is a big scam”? 5. What, in practical terms, is our role in fulfilling the promise of verse 14: “’Because he loves me,’ says the LORD, ‘I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name’”?

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE Wisdom in a Time of War What Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism.

By J.I. Packer, for the study “Finding Peace in a Time of War.”

So we are at war. The United States leads a loose international coalition pledged to destroy the worldwide terrorist networks, which produced the 19 young men who on September 11 randomly killed thousands of civilians and destroyed billions of dollars worth of flagship property. America’s war aim is not just retributive justice (though it certainly is that, as far as the terrorists are concerned). It is primarily to prevent such attacks in the future by eliminating their source. War is always evil, but in our nightmare scenario, where more terrorism as a follow-up is confidently promised, a war of suppression appears to most as the lesser evil. However burdensome, it is surely the best and only rational course. We need to be clear that terrorism, whether religiously, politically, or ideologically motivated, begins as a mindset—what the Bible calls a thought of the heart. In this case, alienated persons are driven by bitterness at real or fancied wrongs, by some form of racial or class hatred, and by utopian dreams of better things after the present order has been smashed. This is an explosive mix. Terrorists think of themselves as both victims and avenging angels. They act out their self-justifying heartsickness in a way that matches Cain killing Abel. They see themselves as clever heroes, outsmarting their inferiors by concealing their real purpose and by overthrowing things they say are contemptible. So their morale is high, and conscience does not trouble them. Gleeful triumphalism drives terrorists on; they are sure they cannot lose. This is what the anti-terrorism coalition is up against. It is only realistic to anticipate that ridding the world of terrorism will be a long job. Terrorism is something countries like Ireland and Israel know all about, having lived with local forms of it for decades, and now America must face it too. It would be silly to deny that the prospect is daunting, indeed traumatic. Jesus spoke of a day when men’s hearts would faint with fear and foreboding of what was about to come on the world (Luke 21:26). Such a day may not be far off. Here and there, it seems a measure of panic has already begun to appear.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE Wisdom in a Time of War Page 2 Where may we find godly wisdom to face days like these? One source is the teaching of two 20th-century British veterans of the Cross. One was a Baptist minister, Oswald Chambers, who died in 1917 at age 43 of complications following an appendectomy. At the time, he was serving as a YMCA chaplain with the British Commonwealth forces in Egypt. The other was an Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, who was in the trenches during the first World War and who, during World War II, taught basic Christianity to the troops, to Oxford undergraduates, and to the whole English nation by a series of books, broadcasts, and addresses. He died of kidney failure in 1963 at age 64. Chambers, little known in his own lifetime, became a Christian icon only when his widow compiled and published My Utmost for His Highest in 1927; Lewis gained that status with the success of The Problem of Pain, published in 1940. Chambers and Lewis might seem an odd couple to pair up, but they had much in common. As their admirers already know, each had a brilliant mind, a stout faith, an uncannily empathetic and perceptive imagination, and a masterful way with words. Each was a teacher by instinct and gift. Each was spiritually honest and down-to-earth to an almost frightening degree. Each was well versed in the Western theological heritage, and in Western philosophy, literature, and history. Each adored the Lord Jesus Christ unstintingly as his Savior and Master. And each had a similar approach to the nitty-gritty of living through a war. To be sure, Lewis, the Anglo-Catholic, would not have endorsed Chambers’s acceptance of the Wesleyan belief in entire sanctification; and Chambers, the evangelical, would have felt that Lewis’s treatments of biblical inspiration and the Atonement were a bit loose. But that is irrelevant here. The two men shared a full belief in the triune God, original sin, redemption, and regeneration through Jesus Christ, and in the reality of God’s sovereign control of all that happens. Against this background, the convergence of their thinking about spiritual life when surrounded by war is less surprising. For any who wish to verify what I am about to report, the main evidence on Chambers is in the volume of his Complete Works, published in 2000, and in David McCasland’s Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God (1993). Lewis’s thoughts are most clearly focused in The Screwtape Letters (1942) and his Oxford sermon, “Learning in War-time,” which he preached in October 1939. The war itself was never the subject of what Lewis and Chambers said, only part of the predicate. As neither politicians nor prophets but Christian nurturers, they took people in perplexity of need as their subject. They discussed war, with its unforeseeable outcomes and certain distresses, as only one of life’s incidentals (granted, a huge one) with which we must learn to deal.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE Wisdom in a Time of War Page 3 What, then, did they have to say about living with war? Basically, it was the same as they regularly said to help people live for God in this fallen world. It can be set out thus: First, we must think. It is no surprise that Lewis, a university teacher, should have cast all he said as a Christian spokesman and apologist as an argument. (See Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and God in the Dock for starters.) Demanding critical thought for the developing of discernment is, after all, what Oxbridge education was (and still is) all about. It is more surprising that Chambers, long the chief speaker for the League of Prayer, a body promoting a second-blessing experience, should have stressed so constantly the need to grapple with life’s big questions and urged so strongly that thinking was vital for spiritual growth and maturity. The truth is that Chambers and Lewis were teachers to their fingertips. They knew that the unthinking—professed Christians no less than others— live perforce on prejudices, moods, and knee-jerk reactions that keep them from wisdom. They believed that informed thought is integral to the process of discipleship. And so Chambers’s word to a man who read only the Bible and books about it, and who felt stuck and inarticulate, was: “The trouble is you have allowed part of your brain to stagnate for want of use.” The man later wrote, “There and then, [Chambers] gave me a list of over 50 books, philosophical, psychological, theological, covering almost every phase of modern thought,” leading to “a revolution which can only be described as a mental new birth”—just as Chambers had hoped. Conversely, Lewis’s didactic devil Screwtape warns his naïve nephew and protégé, Wormwood, that humans must at all costs be distracted from pursuing truth by active thought. “The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground….By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?” Serious thinking about life’s basic questions is never ultimately on the devil’s side; Lewis knows this and makes Screwtape acknowledge it. Second, we must think about our own lives. Both teachers agreed that:  God gives us life to live for his glory.  Since the Fall, tragedy, distortion, frustration, and waste have been the regular marks of life in this world.  Reason (with a capital R) cannot save us, as its secular worshipers thought it could.  Knowing and serving Jesus Christ the Redeemer and his Father, who through Christ is now our Father, is the only thing that gives life meaning.  “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice” (Lewis), sometimes with danger to the body and always with danger to the spirit.  Death is inescapable, and wisdom requires us to remember this and live our lives accordingly.

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE Wisdom in a Time of War Page 4  While God protects his people against spiritual shipwreck, he often puts them through pain for their spiritual progress and sometimes permits and uses war to that end.  Christians are called not to understand everything God is doing but to be faithful to him. All of this, to be sure, is mere mainstream Christianity, but it is worth underlining that Chambers the Baptist and Lewis the Anglican were at one in stressing it all. Third, we must think directly about war. “War is the most damnably bad thing,” Chambers said in Egypt three months before his death. “Because God overrules a thing and brings good out of it does not mean that the thing itself is a good thing….[However,] if the war has made me reconcile myself with the fact that there is sin in human beings, I shall no longer go with my head in the clouds, or buried in the sand like an ostrich, but I shall be wishing to face facts as they are.” And that will be a good thing, for “it is not being reconciled to the fact of sin that produces all the disasters in life.” Lewis’s Screwtape knows this to be true. He tells Wormwood not to hope for too much from the war, for it will not destroy the faith of real believers and will under God produce a measure of realism about life, death, and the issues of eternity that was not there before. “One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless,” moaned Screwtape. “In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.” “War,” said Lewis the preacher, “makes death real to us; and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past.” Then he told his audience of undergraduates that they were at Oxford to study, that the values of being educated were not affected by the fact of war, and so they should get on with their academic work. Thus they would glorify God. For trusting God for the future, and attending to present daily duties and tasks, is the way to honor God in wartime, as at all other times. Lewis sharply denies that the experience of war in any form changes everything, as some have been saying that September 11 did. Writing half a century ago of nuclear war, he risked sounding unfeeling in order to enforce the way of wisdom:

Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented; and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways….It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty….Let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking

© 2007 • C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D A Y I N T E R N A T I O N A L Visit Smal lG roup s.c om and ChristianB ibl eStudies.c om ARTICLE Wisdom in a Time of War Page 5 about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

In other words, despite the threat of war, let life—God-given life—go on. What then of America’s present fears—of more targeted destructions and random explosions, of germ and chemical warfare, and of other science- fiction fantasies becoming grim fact? Many feel panic at this moment, and it is clear, I think, what our teachers would have said to us had they foreseen such things. Here is Chambers on fear:

It is the most natural thing in the world to be scared, and the clearest evidence that God’s grace is at work in our hearts is when we do not get into panics….The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else.

And Lewis wrote:

You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t—see the scene in Gethsemane. How thankful I am that when God became man he did not choose to become a man of iron nerves….Especially don’t worry about being brave over merely possible evils in the future….If and when a horror turns up you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. “Give us our daily bread” (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.

In light of all this, I guess that Chambers and Lewis, were they back with us, would direct us as follows: Accept tightened security. Take all precautions that are responsibly certified as reasonable and desirable. While keeping watch and being careful, always remember that God is in charge and Romans 8:28 is true—he is working for the good of all those who love him. And, finally, pray for courage to cope with whatever comes, in the confidence that Isaac Watts was right when he wrote:

Should all the hosts of death And powers of hell unknown Put their most dreadful forms Of rage and malice on, I shall be safe, for Christ displays Superior power and guardian grace.

Here, surely, is the wisdom and comfort we all need today.

J.I. Packer is an executive editor of CT, Board of Governors professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, and General Editor of the new English Standard Version Bible from Crossway Books.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 7, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1, Page 44