Why Theologians Ignore Lewis and Chesterton

I've been an avid reader of C. S. Lewis' non-fiction since my high school days; and although I didn't discover G. K. Chesterton until after seminary, I've consumed thousands of pages of his writings in the years since. (And still have thousands left to go: Chesterton was astonishingly prolific.) My faith has been profoundly influenced by both thinkers, and I've read and reread their major works many times. Although they have very different writing styles, didn't know each other personally, and belonged to different theological traditions (Lewis was an Anglican, Chesterton a Roman Catholic), I tend to think of them together, and they were in fact similar in many ways. Lewis was influenced to a great degree by Chesterton, their most influential works were written for a "popular" rather than an academic audience, and both of them produced a wide range of writings, including philosophy, history, literary criticism, apologetics, and fantasy.

Periodically, I've run into the claim that Lewis and Chesterton are "folk theologians", with the implication that they're not writers "real theologians" need to study. This has always bothered me, especially when I see them simply ignored. Hendrikus Berkhof's Two Hundred Years of Theology has not one reference to either Lewis or Chesterton. In The Story of Christian Theology, Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson spend some four hundred pages on 20^th century theology, again, without a single reference. To pick a more specialized example, Miroslav Volf's Work in the Spirit quotes from some 276 authors (by my count) in his theological critique of the debate between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, without once mentioning Chesterton's innovative (and deeply Christian) "distributivist" alternative. Of course, a cottage industry has recently grown up around Lewis and Chesterton, with new books on Lewis especially being introduced on a regular basis. But these studies are somewhat specialized and, in my limited experience, continue to be ignored by the mainstream of academic theology.

I think there are several reasons why Lewis and Chesterton are so often ignored by professional theologians.

The first reason is that neither made the sort of substantial and substantially new contributions to the Church's self-understanding that are a part of the heritage of, say, Augustine, Aquinas or Luther. No church body has ever modified their creed because of Chesterton's careful analysis of the doctrine of the Trinity. Nobody ever founded a new denomination because of Lewis' shattering insights into divine grace. That said, neither Moltmann nor Pannenberg (to pick two influential 20^th century academic theologians) could pass the "have you started a new denomination or launched a new creed" test either. And I certainly wouldn't claim that Lewis and Chesterton are at the level of Augustine or Luther: I think they're important, but they're not that important.

A second and perhaps more germane reason is that most of Chesterton and Lewis' original contributions are outside the traditional loci of theology: what they have to say doesn't fit well into a textbook on systematic theology. Although Chesterton and Lewis do touch on traditional theological topics, such as the doctrine of the Trinity or ecclesiology, when they do so, they make it clear that they are representing and defending the tradition, and not so much trying to contribute to it. Even so, I do believe that they make substantial contributions to Christian thought, broadly understood. I don't have time to go into a detailed defense of this position right here, but suffice to say that Chesterton's "military loyalty to the world" and Lewis' insistence that "to see through everything is the same as not to see" are largely original, compelling and deeply Christian.

A third reason I've heard to explain this neglect is that neither Lewis nor Chesterton interacts extensively with other theologians: they don't contribute to the conversation. This is partly true, if you limit yourself to purely academic theologians. But it's simply not true that Lewis and Chesterton don't interact extensively with a wide and impressive array of thinkers. Their books can easily be read as an extended dialogue with the whole of the Western philosophical, theological and literary tradition. Chesterton's work on Aquinas ("The Dumb Ox") and St. Francis are true classics, not to mention his literary biographies of Chaucer, Blake, Dickens and others, or his treatment of world history in The Everlasting Man. Lewis' explanation of the Trinity in Mere Christianity owes a great deal to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. The Pilgrim's Regress is an entertaining and enlightening Christian critique of late 19^th and early 20^th century British and continental philosophy. Anything more than a casual reading of either author will show that they are in conversation with hundreds of philosophers, theologians, historians, poets and novelists, and that their contribution to these conversations is extensive and substantial. Of course, these contributions are not always specifically theological, but if the old view of theology as the queen of the sciences has any validity whatsoever, that should hardly be held against them.

A fourth reason reveals a bit more cynicism on my part; take it for what it's worth. Lewis and Chesterton don't talk the language of modern, professional, academic theologians. You know the language I'm talking about:

"Toulmin is not guilty, as Scheibe is, of failing to recognize the possibility that a new theory in science may not be reconcilable with its predecessor in such a way that the latter is included in or interpreted by the former."

Or:

"Bonhoeffer's customary second thesis, Act and Being (1931/1962), took issue with current idealist philosophy, arguing that neither in its neo-Kantian or its neo-Hegelian forms could philosophy come to terms in the notion of a God truly transcendent; such a conception must wait upon theology, upon revelation."

Nor do their writings have the studied ambiguity of the other dominant linguistic paradigm available to philosophers and theologians, that of being pithy, epigrammatic, and not-quite-comprehensible. You can see this in Kierkegaard:

"The first question in the earliest and most compendious instruction the child receives is, as everyone knows, this: What will the child have? The answer is: da-da. And with such reflections life begins, and yet men deny original sin. And to whom does the child owe its first drubbings, whom other than the parents?" (Either/Or, p. 1)

Or Wittgenstein:

"Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object. – And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word 'this' innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." (Philosophical Investigations, par. 38)

Both Lewis, an Oxford don and Cambridge professor, and Chesterton, an accomplished literary critic, clearly knew how to talk the language of academia. But in nearly all of their writings, even in their more technical book-length treatments on academic topics, they decline to do so. Lewis gives his own reasons in the brief essay, "Before We Can Communicate":

"[If you try to speak in plain language, you will discover] just how much you yourself have, up to that moment, been understanding the language which you are now trying to translate. Again and again I have been most usefully humiliated in this way. One holds, or thinks one holds, a particular view, say, of the Atonement or Orders or Inspiration. And you can go on for years discussing and defending it to others of your own sort. New refinements can be introduced to meet its critics; brilliant metaphors can seem to illuminate its obscurities; comparisons with other views, 'placings' of it, are somehow felt to establish its position in a sort of aristocracy of ideas. For the others are all talking the same language and all move in the same world of discourse. All seems well. Then turn and try to expound this same view to an intelligent mechanic or a sincerely inquisitive, but superficially quite irreverent, schoolboy. Some question of shattering crudity (it would never be asked in learned circles) will be shot at you. You are like a skilled swordsman transfixed by an opponent who wins just because he knows none of the first principles. The crude question turns out to be fatal. You have never, it now appears, really understood what you have so long maintained. You haven't really thought it out; not to the end; not to 'the absolute ruddy end'.

"You must either give it up, or else begin it all over again. If, given patience and ordinary skill, you cannot explain a thing to any sensible person whatever (provided he will listen), then you don't really understand it yourself."

This is one of the many reasons why Chesterton and Lewis have been so popular: precisely because they write so well, they don't sound like academics. You have to pay close attention to realize the extent of the learning which sits behind nearly every paragraph.

But precisely this clarity, I believe, works against them in the academic world. For one thing, it's admittedly not very precise: it leaves you to fill in many of the gaps yourself, and you have to go hunting around in Augustine or Athanasius or even Freud to find a passage Lewis refers to obliquely (perhaps even leaving out the name of the theologian with whom he is discoursing). But another is that, to an academic, it just doesn't sound right. This may be hard for non-academics to believe, but I'm convinced that academics like the sound of academic writing. It gives them a sense of security, confidence, even superiority. It's very similar, I believe, to why I carried around a brief case when I was in high school: I thought it made me look intelligent and serious.

How else could you explain the production of so much writing that sounds like this?

"More specifically, Winch seeks to deal with the problem of the universal and the particular in regard to the study of alien societies in a manner that is quite different from one of the traditional ways in which this has been approached. A pervasive framework for dealing with the universal and the particular has been to think we must first specify what is universal or generic (for example, the supposedly universal 'categories' of rationality) and then treat the specific differentia that distinguish particular societies."

(And that's from a book I liked.)

To summarize, there are a variety of reasons why Lewis and Chesterton are ignored by mainstream academic theology, and some of them are legitimate. But I don't think they're ultimately persuasive; and I believe that they're outweighed by the numerous benefits which would accrue to theologians who spent more time reading Lewis and Chesterton. More on that tomorrow.

Gabriel’s Revelation

There was a fascinating article a couple days ago in the International Herald Tribune, about a text, potentially associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, that has been termed "Gabriel's Revelation"; Time also has an interesting (and surprisingly reasonable) take on it. "Gabriel's Revelation" is apparently a stone on which are written a series of some 87 lines in Hebrew, believed to date to the first century BC. One of the various interesting things about this text is that it may refer to an otherwise unattested Jewish belief in a suffering Messiah who would die and then rise again in three days. A "best guess" at the text (in Hebrew) can be found on page 4 of the PDF here.

This would be a pretty interesting artifact if (a) the text is authenticated (apparently its provenance is somewhat obscure), and (b) the reading which supports the claim receives more widespread support. But there's the catch: apparently the text is exceedingly hard to read at exactly this point.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, [Knohl] says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet - "In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice" - and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words "L'shloshet yamin," meaning "in three days." The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Yardeni and Elitzur, but Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is "hayeh," or "live" in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, "In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you."

In other words, to put it generously, the assertion that the text refers to a belief in a Messiah who will suffer and rise after three days is unproven at this point. That it might refer to such a belief is about as close as we can come.

I should add that at least one assertion made by Knohl certainly isn't true, or at least, doesn't have the shattering implications that he claims:

"This should shake our basic view of Christianity," he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where he is a senior fellow and the Yehezkel Kaufman professor of biblical studies at Hebrew University. "Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

This would "shake our basic view of Christianity" only if we're scholars with very specific axes to grind about the nature of first century Messianic expectations. (That particular set contains a very few, highly inbred members, for what it's worth.) If we're just regular Christians, I can't think of any way that this stone would have a substantial impact on us at all, other than as an interesting artifact. Jesus himself held to the belief that the Messiah would die and be raised after three days, and in a famous passage (Luke 24:25-27) showed to his supporters in some detail how this belief was supported by the Old Testament. Many Christians have also believed that the story of the Messiah was prefigured in such diverse pagan sources as the myth of Osiris, or even the Eclogues of Virgil:

Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy: the great cycle of periods is born anew. Now returns the Virgin, returns the reign of Saturn: now from high heaven a new generation comes down. Yet do thou at that boy's birth, in whom the iron race shall begin to cease, and the golden to arise over all the world, holy Lucina, be gracious; now thine own Apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, in thine, O Pollio, shall this glorious age enter, and the great months begin their march: under thy rule what traces of our guilt yet remain, vanishing shall free earth for ever from alarm. He shall grow in the life of gods, and shall see gods and heroes mingled, and himself be seen by them, and shall rule the world that his fathers' virtues have set at peace.

Or Plato's Republic:

And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. . . The just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound --will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.

In other words, once the scholars arrive at a consensus (a process that might take decades), Gabriel's Revelation will probably shed some light on otherwise obscure elements of first century Judaism, and maybe even hint at Jewish sources for certain Christian beliefs. But it's hardly a challenge to Christianity that one particular aspect of the Christian story might have been accidentally hit upon, guessed at, understood, or even revealed, prior to the advent of Christ Himself.

Work in the Spirit

Back in 1992, I purchased and read Work in the Spirit, by Miroslav Volf, my theology prof at the time. Volf was a humble and kind professor, but he possessed an impressive intellect and a memorable discipline for study. I remember a conversation he had with a student who had "only" read one of the textbooks once. "Any book worth reading once," Professor Volf said, "is worth reading twice." So in that spirit, and in light of the recent change in my employment status, I recently picked Work in the Spirit back up and reread it.

Back in '92, my impression of the book was that it was solid, though not inspiring. On a second rereading, I think the book is both better and, in a few places, a bit worse than I remember it.

Some parts of it are really pretty interesting.

"After Western civilization has climbed up the ladder of the Protestant work ethic to a state in which incessant work has become one of its main features, it has pushed this ladder aside but continued to work even more frantically. Work thrives today more on the insatiable hunger for self-realization than on the Protest work ethic." (p. 129)

"God did not create human beings simply to be servants but above all to be God's children and friends. As much as they need to do God's will, so also they need to enjoy God's presence. In order to be truly who they are, they need periodic moments of time in which God's commands and their tasks will disappear from the forefront of their consciousness and in which God will be there for them and they will be there for God -- to adore the God of loving holiness and to thank and pray to the God of holy love." (p. 137)

"The dynamic character of human needs is a specifically human phenomenon. It is grounded in the permanent self-transcendence of human beings. What human beings need is always beyond the boundary of what they actually have and are, so they live in an endless spiral in which today's desires glide into tomorrow's needs. Depending on the culture, the movement of the spiral might be slower or faster. The upward-moving spiral itself seems inherent to the human condition." (p. 150)

That last point, about the "permanent self-transcendence of human beings", with the result that the sphere of what humans think they need is constantly growing, was new to me. I wasn't unaware that human beings are in that state – after all, I am one – I just hadn't heard it described as "permanent self-transcendence". In other words, I've only ever heard that particular trait described in negative terms. The fact that at least some aspects of that trait might be a good thing was an intriguing idea.

In addition, I admire his attempt to reframe Christian reflection on work in light of "new creation". It's sometimes claimed that theology can't progress in, say, the same way that the hard sciences can: but I think the newfound emphasis (in, oh, say, the last century or so) on the eschatological dimension of Christianity is a genuine advance. It's also one that hasn't quite worked its way through all the various fields and spheres which theology touches, and Volf's book is a valuable contribution to the effort to do so.

At the same time, there are specific areas of the book which I think are a bit weak. Most of them are details which don't touch the main thesis of the book, but some of them are fairly central. As one example, Volf's critique of Luther's concept of vocatio (pp. 106-110) didn't quite work for me: all it seemed to show was that Luther's formulations needed a bit of tweaking and redirecting, not complete reworking. Somewhat more central, I'm not sure that his attempt to understand all work charismatically has sufficient Biblical warrant. Paul seems to restrict the charisms to work that occurs within the sphere of the Church. Even the charisms of, say, evangelism or healing, which are directed outwards, are still the appropriate work of the Church. And practically, I think that you weaken the idea of charisms by extending it to the entire sphere of work: and specifically, you weaken it more than you strengthen the idea of work by applying it to charisms. At Zango, I used to say repeatedly, "If everything is a high priority, then nothing is." And as a purely practical matter, if everything is charismatic, then nothing is. I have great admiration for Volf's attempt to understand work pneumatalogically and in light of the new creation (here he reminds me of Richard Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament), but I think that trying to understand it charismatically, i.e., through that specific manifestation of the Spirit's work, overly weakens the idea of charisms.

I should be clear that I'm not dismissing Volf's work. His central idea of human work as a cooperation with God, and as "building blocks" for the new creation, is a fascinating one, and it makes me think critically about my own contributions (or lack thereof) to the eschaton. It's definitely a worthwhile read. But there are parts that I would probably have constructed somewhat differently.

Fireworks in Yachats

Galena, Caedmon and I are spending the fourth of July with Galena's parents in Yachats, Oregon. They've got a house set back only slightly from the beach, and we had a front-row seat (as it were) to the fireworks display they do every year out on the point. A few pictures: Warming up: Getting going: The ocean under the fireworks: More.

Merkury Wireless Digital Photo Frame

For my father-in-law's 60^th birthday, my wife and I wanted to get him a digital photo frame, but because we wanted to be able to update the pictures remotely, in real time, we wanted a wireless frame as well. Our preference would have been one of the Momento frames, but because we'd procrastinated, ordering from Amazon would have taken too long, so we stopped by the local Fry's instead. Fry's had at least three dozen different frames to choose from, but only one supported wireless, a 15" frame from Merkury Innovations, for a little less than $300. So that's the one we picked.

We unpacked it today and set it up, and I've got mixed reviews.

The picture quality in the LCD is certainly reasonable, though it's not what I'd call wonderful. Once nice feature is that you can get photos onto the frame in a variety of ways. It supports five different kinds of memory cards (SD, MMC, MS, XD, CF), USB to your PC, wireless to your PC (it appears as a Windows Media Output Device through Windows Media Player), and wireless to either Flickr or Picasa. We tested all of these modes, and after some troubleshooting managed to get them all to actually work. The frame will play both video and audio files. You can control the delay between pictures in the slide show, the transition effect between each picture, and how photos that don't quite fit the proportions of the frame should be displayed.

The flaws in the device aren't fatal, but they are annoying. We didn't run into any show-stoppers, but some quirks in how the frame is implemented cost us an hour or two of troubleshooting.

The frame's WiFi is implemented in a dirt-cheap fashion, through a USB wifi card (included) that you plug into the frame through a host USB connector at the top. This has the unpleasant side-effect of ruining the frame's aesthetics, as the USB card then sticks out several inches above the frame itself.

I also ran into a number of problems trying to get the frame to connect either to my father-in-law's wi-fi network, or to my laptop. It turns out that (a) the frame can only deal with talking to or being one USB device at a time (you can't have it plugged into your PC and have the wifi USB card active simultaneously), and (b) you have to connect the memory card or USB wifi card to the frame before you turn the frame on. To Merkury's credit, both of these caveats are mentioned in the documentation, but both limitations are still a little odd these days. I believe that if you have to read the documentation for a consumer product, something has gone wrong. After downloading a bunch of pictures from my laptop to a card in the device, I also had to reboot the frame before it would see the new pictures. Apparently it scans the cards at startup, and never again.

Being able to access photo feeds through, say, Picasa is pretty cool, and it does work: but it would be nice if the frame supported generic RSS feeds as well, instead of just Picasa or Flickr. So far as I can tell, the frame loads Picasa's RSS once, and then doesn't touch it again until you manually tell the frame to refresh: it would be nice to have the frame reflect changes in a Picasa album in something like real time. In addition, if the frame loses power, it doesn't automatically reconnect to the RSS feed: you have to tell it to do so, and then wait while it does: about a five minute process. It would also be nice if Merkury had a website (like Momento supposedly does) which would allow you to combine RSS feeds from multiple locations, and control the pictures through that site. It would be much easier than navigating through the Picasa RSS feeds on the frame itself.

This leads me to my next point: as you'd have to imagine, the UI on Merkury's frame is pretty clunky: you control it through a tiny little remote that you'd better make sure to never lose. You can navigate through picture folders, etc., but even though the pictures are stacked in rows and columns, you can only navigate left and right from a given picture, not up to the one above it or down to the one below it, and you also can't move from page to page, except by moving right, right, right, right… to the last picture on the page, and then click "right" one more time to move to the next picture/page. Uggh. Ideally, you should also have a UI to control the frame from your local computer, perhaps implemented as an admin web site on the frame itself (kind of like how all routers these days come with web-based admin tools).

Merkury's website is hopeless. It doesn't even have this product listed, and doesn't have, say, firmware updates or anything else that would be helpful. The documentation that comes with the frame is acceptable, but it's written in the techno-Japanese English that we're all familiar with; a typical example looks something like this (all the misplaced commas, etc. are in the original):

On Computer, in the submenu of Library ,click "Add to Library",a window of "Add to Library" will display ,click "Advanced Option", then click "Add" to add picture/music/video files to Windows Media Player ,after adding the desired files ,click "Ok".

On the whole, it works. On the whole, Merkury has more work to do.

Ubuntu still isn't ready

I've been playing with Ubuntu for the last several months, on several different machines, using versions ranging from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. On the whole, I'm pleasantly surprised: Ubuntu is a reasonable OS, and as a Linux neophyte I've been able to get more done than I would have expected.

That said, despite all the hoopla about Ubuntu finally being a Linux desktop for the masses, I have to say that it's still not there. I don't blame the many people paid and unpaid who've worked hard on making Ubuntu a good OS: they've set themselves a very difficult task. But there are half a dozen areas where I've run into problems with Ubuntu that simply would never show up with, say, Vista or XP (or OS/X). Some examples:

• Some months ago, on my Ubuntu desktop, I walked through some instructions I found somewhere (I can't remember where), and managed to install FireFox 3.0 Beta 2. Now that 3.0 has been released, whatever version I try to install, I can only get Beta 2 to launch. I'm sure there's a workaround: but of course, that's not the point. This doesn't happen with Vista.
• On my laptop (an older Dell Precision M60), the Broadcom 4309 wireless card worked seemlessly with Gutsy Gibbon, but when I upgraded to Hardy Heron, it suddenly stopped working. I've been trying to troubleshoot the issue on and off for several weeks now, and I've gotten closer to fixing it, but it's still not working: after many hours of troubleshooting, the laptop now recognizes my home wireless network, but won't pick up an IP address from it or connect to the Internet. I'm sure there's a workaround, but of course, that's not the point.
• In the process of troubleshooting my wireless networking problems, several times my wired networking just stopped working. I have no idea why. Rebooting has (so far) managed to reconnect me.
• In Vista or XP, there are typically at most two utilities for any given task: one for command-line, and one for the GUI. With Linux, there are so many utilities, written by various third-parties, which do almost the same thing, that it's difficult and confusing for a newbie to know which one to use, and to understand how they interact.
• Astonishingly (to someone like myself), Ubuntu doesn't come with the ability to play DVD's. If you try, you get a completely useless error message. Several hours of troubleshooting later, I was able to figure out what I needed to install, but it was by no means straightforward.

I could go on, but I'll let this suffice for now. I do think that Ubuntu constitutes an important milestone for the Linux community: it's a promising release. But it's still hasn't met even Microsoft's "ease of use" milestones, let alone Apple's.

I should add one last comment. Many experienced Linux users will read this and think, "Well of course he's having problems. It's clear he doesn't know what he's doing." And they will have a very good point: but will have missed mine entirely.

Wallace Falls

We took another quick hike up to Wallace Falls today, with my nieces Ashley and Brianna. A few shots: More.