Bruce Edwards on NT Wright's Assessment of Mere Christianity

Here is an interesting response to N.T. Wright's remarks about C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity by Bruce Edwards, a noted Lewisian scholar.

Before Joe Camel...

Before the days of Joe Camel, there was Fred Flintstone. Seriously. Watch this.

N.T. Wright on C.S. Lewis

I was reading a review of Lewis' Mere Christianity that NT Wright has written for Touchstone. This is the 60th anniversary of its publication. I ran across these words of Wright's. Well said.

I think it’s important that we are justified by faith: not by believing in justification by faith, but by believing in Jesus Christ. Obviously a clear understanding of justification would help a great deal, but I don’t myself regard that as the first thing to explain to a potential convert. Sufficient to draw them to Jesus.

The rest of the review is quite good. Wright offers some good criticisms and reaffirmations of Lewis in this classic work of the Oxford don.

In the days following the Virginia Tech massacre...

Peggy Noonan has some apt words for such a time as this. She wonders where all the common sense--perhaps we should read "backbone" here--has gone in our therapeutic culture. She implies that Cho Seung-Hui's behavior has been spoken of in such ambiguous--seemingly compassionate--terms that it lacks any sense of reality. Noonan's piece picks up on an irony present in our culture today: with all the talk of tolerance and compassion that's perpetually in the air, it's interesting that there is little in the way of real compassion present in our society. It takes real differences for there to be a place for actual compassion. Don't call someone a "mental defective," it may just exacerbate their psychosis (which, believe me, I understand--words and assumptions one develops about himself do affect his understanding of his self) or hurt their self-image. I heard this sentiment expressed just this week regarding Cho. But isn't it more damaging--and after Monday's events, I think everyone has to answer "yes"--to take such a narrow view--to think only of an individual's rights and self-image? I thought this part by Noonan was an insightful piece of writing:

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

That is, it's actually cold not to name things what they are and it's actually heartless not to interfere and intrude upon one's privacy--especially when the private world of that person does not match the real world "out there" of everyone else.

In the end, Noonan says that the most realistic and truest thing she has heard all week came from one of the shooting victims.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

Good Friday

I posted this quotation last year on Good Friday. It's worth doing it again.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. C.S. Lewis