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“To represent transhumanize in words
Impossible were; the example, then, suffice
Him from whom Grace the experience reserves.
If I was merely what of me thou newly
Createdst, Love who governest the heaven,
Thou knowest, who didst life me with thy light.”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, “Paradiso,” Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto I, 70-75; It is Beatrice who is “thy light;” Dante may be referencing 2 Corinthians 12.3-4.
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 977; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 18 October, 1931.
“My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ’saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (’propitiation’ – ’sacrifice’ – ‘the blood of the Lamb’) – expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 976; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 18 October, 1931.
“He [brother, Warnie] and I even went together to Church twice: and – will you believe it – he said to me in conversation that he was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true. MInd you (like me, at first) he didn’t want it to be, nor like it: but his intellect is beginning to revolt from the semi-scientific assumptions we all grew up in, and the other explanation of the world seems to him daily more probable.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 948; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 10 January, 1931.
“I brought you into the world to be master of this house, and I raised you up; I am not obliged to die for you. I have received no such tradition from my ancestors that fathers should die for their children; it’s not a Greek custom. For yourself were you born, for better or for worse. You got from me all you were entitled to.”
The elder Pheres, chastising his son, Admetus. On this day, Admetus’ wife, Alcestis, died sacrificially that her husband’s life would be preserved; Euripides (485-406 BC), Alcestis (Translation by Moses Hadas and John McLean), lines 681ff.
“The word propitiation has great weight: for God, in a way that cannot be put into words, at the very time when he loved us, was hostile to us till he was reconciled in Christ.”
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.17.2; cited in J. I. Packer, “What did the cross achieve: The logic of penal substitution,” Lecture delivered at Tyndale House, Cambridge, 17 July, 1973.
“We know that the same power God displayed in creating the universe is at His disposal to assure our salvation. He showed that power in the Exodus from Egypt. He displayed His power over death in the resurrection of Christ. We know that no part of creation can frustrate His plans for the future. There are no maverick molecules loose in the universe that could possibly disrupt His plans. “
R. C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1992), 40.
“It seemed ridiculous that the small throttle lever could control such power.”
Commenting on an experienced large aircraft pilot’s first experience in a Spitfire. Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 221.
“. . . for knowledge, great knowledge, may be obtained in the mysteries of the gospel, and yet no work of grace in the soul (1 Cor. 13). Yea, if a man have all knowledge he may yet be nothing, and so consequently be no child of God. . . . Not that the heart can be good without knowledge; for without that the heart is naught. There is therefore knowledge and knowledge – knowledge that resteth in the bare speculation of things, and knowledge that is accompanied with the grace of faith and love, which puts a man upon doing even the will of God from the heart; the first of these will serve the talker, but without the other the true Christian is not content: ‘Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart (Ps. 119.34).”
Faithful, discussing the gospel with Talkative; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ch. 12.
“Thus far did I come loaden with my sin,
Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in,
Till I came hither; what a place is this!
Must here be teh beginning of my bliss?
Must here the burden fall from off my back?
Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?
Blest cross! blest sepulchre! blest rather be
The Man that there was put to shame for me!”
Pilgrim’s praise as he stands before the cross; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.
