A Good Dose of C.S. Lewis

"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."

--The Problem of Pain (200)

Narnia and the Atonement?

Many people were moved in the last few years over the newly done "The Chronicles of Narnia." I know I was excited to see it, as many others were, Christian and non. I particularly was excited to see it because I was interested in seeing the spiritual truths and analogies used by C.S. Lewis in his classic that I wasn't at a younger age probably keen to pick up.

So, upon the release, I went with the masses to see this beloved story made film. I can say that it touched me in a way beyond my expectations. For it was here in the "Chronicles of Narnia" that I was deeply moved by the offering of Aslan of himself in place of the boy Edmund, so that he might be freed from the White Witch and her dominion. Aslan took the place of the "traitor" and was killed by those in the Witch's kingdom. I was so struck here by the picture of Christ giving Himself as an offering for me. Edmund, the boy who should have been the one killed, is spared by the love of Aslan. So it is that Christ gave Himself, to be put to death by the kingdom of darkness, so that the enemy could be satisfied. But as Christ rose from the dead, so does Aslan. Aslan shows that the White Witch has no power over him and his kingdom. The movie ends with the "daughters of Eve" and the "sons of Adam" being crowned as kings and queens of Narnia. In this picture, I was moved by the love of God displayed in the offering of Christ.

I later discovered that Lewis was in fact bringing words and pictures to something that many of the early Christians believed about the Christ's atonement for us. And Disney took Lewis' work and displayed the magnificence of this "rescue"also known in theology as the Ransom View of the atonement. It was in this film that I was stunned by the deep love of God, something that I understood for that moment in time.

Many of my protestant friends, as I have been looking in Eastern Orthodoxy, interestingly enough bring up the atonement quite often. They don't "agree" with the Orthodox and are "concerned" about my views. Funny, many of them went to see "The Chronicles of Narnia" and saw Christ. And when I think about the atonement, it is this ransom of Christ giving Himself as an offering so that the Evil One might be defeated, that I rest my faith. Many of these friends would agree with me until they hear that it isn't the modern understanding of the atonement.

It wasn't until the 11th century that a Western theologian brought further details to this that were not what the Church seemed to believe for the first 10 centuries. Up until Anselm, an archbishop of Canterbury, Christ' death had been chiefly understood as a ransom from the devil. Frederica Matthewes-Green explains, "The wages of sin is death,' and due to our sins we were enslaved by death, poisoned and helpless to resist sin. Christ comes on a rescue mission, and in the process he suffers.....As a human, he dies and gains entrance to Hades; once there He blasts it open, as God, and sets the captives free."

What is interesting is that in western theology, in 'Satisfaction Theory', the Father is the one who needs to be appeased and it is the Father who demands this. However, Gregory of Nazianzus in the 4th century (closer in proximity to the apostles) protested that the question of "Who received the payment?" should not be pressed hard. Matthewes says regarding this, "No matter what the debt the Devil was owed it could not possibly have included God himself. On the other hand, the Father could not have been the recipient of the ransom, since he was not the one holding us captive. And if the blood of Isaac had not please him, why would he desire the blood of his beloved son? In fact, Nazianzus sums up: the Father accepts Christ's sacrifice without having demanded it; the Son offers it to honor him; and the result is the defeat of the Evil One. 'This is as much as we shall say of Christ; the greater portion shall be reverenced with silence.' "

In closing, I feel that Frederica sums it up well here,

"Anselm took aim at the exaggerated versions of the ransom theory, but didn’t agree to leave the greater portion to silence. He theorized that the payment *was* made to God the Father. In Anselm’s formulation, our sins were like an offense against the honor of a mighty ruler. The ruler is not free to simply forgive the transgression; restitution must be made. (This is a crucial new element in the story; earlier Christians believed that God the Father did, in fact, freely forgive us, like the father of the Prodigal Son.) No human would be adequate to pay this debt, so God the Son volunteers to do so. "If the Son chose to make over the claim He had on God to man, could the Father justly forbid Him doing so, or refuse to man what the Son willed to give him?" Christ satisfies our debt in this, the "Satisfaction Theory.""And that has made all the difference," as a tousled Yankee poet liked to say. Western Christian theology marched on from that point, encountering controversies and developments and revisions, but locked on the idea that Christ’s death was directed toward the Father. When Western theologians look back at the centuries before Anselm they can’t find his theory anywhere (well, there are some premonitions in Tertullian and Cyprian, but it wasn’t the mainstream.). You can read St. Paul to support the "satisfaction" view, so Anselm is hailed as the first theologian to understand St. Paul.That’s a stretch, though. Would Christians really have misunderstood their salvation for a thousand years? Did the people Paul wrote his letters to have no idea what he was talking about? Did the early martyrs die without understanding the Cross that saved them? Why would the Holy Spirit permit such a thing, if He was sent to lead them into all truth? Is the "plain meaning of Scripture" is so obscure that it couldn’t be discerned for a thousand years, and then only by someone from a culture utterly different from its authors?Western theologians search the pre-Anselmian millennium and can’t find the theory they’re after, but fail to see the theory that permeates there. Before Anselm, the problem salvation addresses is seen as located within us. We are infected by Death as a result of Adam’s fall. This infection will cause us be to spiritually sick and to commit sin, both voluntarily and as a result of the Devil’s deceptions. Christ offers to rescue us in accord with the Father’s will, like the young police officer above. In this action, God the Father and the Son are united: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself."That’s the "before" snapshot. With Anselm, the problem salvation addresses is between us and God (we have a debt we can’t pay). After Anselm it is even sometimes formulated as *within* God (His wrath that won’t be quenched until the debt is paid). This theory loses the unity of will between the Father and Son; it can appear that the Son has to overcome the Father’s resistance. It loses the idea that the sickness is within us, and we need to be healed; it can appear that a legal acquittal is sufficient and a transformed life a nice afterthought at most."

I have decided for myself that the next time someone wants to be concerned about the eastern view of atonement, and my life, that I am much more comfortable, biblically, siding with that of the earliest Christians.

*If you would like to read all of Frederica Matthewes-Green's article that is quoted from here, here is the website: http://www.frederica.com/writings/the-meaning-of-christs-suffering.html

Some thoughts on Ted Haggard

I have read some interesting and note worthy thoughts by Christians on what has happened with Ted Haggard. I offer two below. The first is taken from a post from Scott McKnight's Blog www.jesuscreed.org. He has some noteworthy thoughts regarding the evangelical Christian world and what can be learned from it. Below that, is an article taken from Frederica Matthewes-Green's website www.frederica.com and was found, as well, on First Things website www.firstthings.com.

Most who know me, would know that this story would be of special interest to me.

Scott McKnight on Ted Haggard
"And I wonder what we can learn from yet another moral collapse of an evangelical leader.
What is perhaps saddest is that this has gone on for a long time in his life. I’m not sure making more or new accountability structures for leaders is the place to start, though I’m quite sure we will all begin to think about this more.

But, what I find here is what I want to call the evangelical environment. In evangelicalism, and the charismatic stream in which Ted Haggard swims, sin is bad and sin by leaders is real bad. This leads to a complex of features that creates a serious problem:

1. Christians, and not just pastors, do not feel free to disclose sins to anyone;
2. Christians, including pastors, sin and sin all the time;
3. Christians, including pastors, in evangelicalism do not have a mechanism of confession;
4. Christians and pastors, because of the environment of condemnation of sin and the absence of a mechanism of confession, bottle up their sins, hide their sins, and create around themselves an apparent purity and a reality of unconfessed/unadmitted sin.
5. When Christians do confess, and it is often only after getting caught, they are eaten alive by fellow evangelicals — thus leading some to deeper levels of secrecy and deceit.

What we saw with Haggard is not just about leaders; it is about all of us"

Ted Haggard and Suffering Frederica Matthewes-Green
Posted Tuesday, November 7, 2006
[First Things, November 7, 2006]
I was in Denver for about a hundred minutes this weekend. I hadn’t planned it, but when I arrived at the airport Friday morning to begin my journey to Calgary, I was surprised to see that’s where I would change planes. The story about Ted Haggard had hit the news the night before, and I had been for some reason really moved by it. I walked through the Denver airport praying the Jesus Prayer for him: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on Ted.” That whatever needed to happen would happen, and that it would be used for Ted’s ultimate healing. And I prayed for his wife, Gayle, and their five children. I cannot imagine their pain.

I was probably not the only person who found his initial response suspicious: “I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver.” Imagine that you’re a guy, and a male escort you’ve never heard of suddenly announces to the press that you two have been in a sexual relationship for years. After you got through screaming “WHAT?!?” for a few hours, you would say, “This is really sick and creepy and repulsive. I have never met this guy. It is scary to think anyone could have this kind of full-blown delusional fantasy going on. This is some kind of John Mark Karr thing. I’m disgusted, and I feel stalked, and am talking to the police about protection.”

So “I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver” was pretty feeble. “In Denver”?

But in the rush of travel, I didn’t catch any images of Haggard until the return trip Saturday; I didn’t know what he looked like. An airline rescheduling unexpectedly brought me back through Denver on the way home — that had the looks of something God-arranged. This time while praying my way through the airport I spotted some newspaper dispensers with Haggard’s name in the top headlines. I knelt to read the stories and saw that sad truths were coming to the surface.

But I also saw a photo of Haggard, and for the first time connected a face with the name. So that’s the guy! I had seen this face before, I guess in photos of evangelical leaders. It sure had struck me as a crazy-scary one – somebody I’d instinctively step away from. The zones of his face are sending out conflicting messages. It looks like both terror and attack. The overall effect is frenzied.

Ted wrote in the letter read to his church on Sunday: “There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all my life.”

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we speak of the impulses that move us toward any kind of sin as “passions.” You shouldn’t think of this term as related to “passionate.” It’s more like “passive.” (As in “The Passion of Christ;” his passion is what he endured.)

These impulses beat us up. They originate as thoughts, sometimes as thoughts that evade full consciousness. The roots are tangled with memories, shame, anger, fear—and the thoughts are also very often inaccurate.

All this mess damages our ability to see the world clearly. We go on misreading situations and other people, and venture further into confusion. The illness compounds itself, to the delight of the Evil One who nurtures lies and has no compassion on the weak. To him, the weak are breakfast.

Eastern Christianity speaks of this as the darkening of the nous, that is, of the perceptive center of a person. (Most English bibles translate nous as “mind,” but that’s not quite it; the nous is not the rational intellect, but a perceiving faculty. Thoughts and emotions are subsequent reactions to the nous’ perceptions.) The damaged nous is like a pair of glasses fitted with distorting lenses. It needs healing.

The Greek word represented by this kind of “passion” is “pathos.” It means suffering. It is because we are helpless in our suffering that Christ came. He took on vulnerable human form, and went into the realm of Death and defeated the Evil One. Now we are invited to gradually return to health, by fully assimilating the truth that sets us free – by assimilating the presence and life of Christ himself. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” St Paul said. This life fills and changes us like fire fills a piece of coal.

In the Eastern Christian understanding, sins are not “bad deeds” that must be made up in order to satisfy justice. They are instead like bad fruit, which indicates a sickness inside the tree (the analogy Jesus uses in Matthew 7:7-8). Sin is infection, not infraction. And God not only forgives freely, but sent his Son to rescue us when we were helpless.

With God’s help, we begin to heal. Like an athlete striving for the prize (I Cor 9:24, Phil 3:14, 2 Timothy 2:5) we resist succumbing to lying thoughts. The ancient spiritual disciplines – continual prayer, fasting, and love of others – are like the exercises in a time-tested workout routine. They make us stronger. When we fall, we get up. This is a life of continual repentance – and you can see in that word re-pent, “re-think.” Salvation is health, and health comes from knowing the truth and resisting lies. This gradually heals the nous so that it is restored to its original purpose: to perceive God’s light permeating all Creation.

St. Paul writes, “Be transformed by the renewal of your nous.” The biblical word for repentance, meta-noia, means literally the transformation of the nous. We are welcomed into God’s kingdom in an instant, as we see in the story of the Good Thief; but full healing comes slowly, and will continue every day that we live.

So it is a mistake to present Christianity the way some churches do, as if it is the haven of seamlessly well-adjusted, proper people. That results in a desperate artificial sheen. It results in treating worship as a consumer product, which must deliver better intellectual or emotional gratification than the competition. And that sends suffering people home again, still lonely, in their separate metal capsules.

What all humans have in common is our “pathos.” Getting honest about that binds us together. And then we begin to see how the mercy of God is pouring down on all of us all the time, just as the Good Samaritan bound the wounds of the beaten man with healing oil. May God give this healing mercy to Ted and Gayle, and to their children. May God reveal his healing mercy to Michael Jones, who told the truth. May God have mercy on all of us.

What Good Is it to Me?

What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place within myself?

And, what good is it to me
if Mary is full of grace and
if I am not also full of grace?
What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son
if I do not also give birth to him
in my time and my culture?

This, then, is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God
is begotten in us.

-Meister Eckhart