I just picked up the new issue of Christianity Today Magazine, which is not online yet. The new issue has C.S. Lewis on the cover and is full of articles about him, his writings, etc. He is also on the cover of the new Christian History & Biography Magazine, which is also full of articles.

Good stuff.

I found this paragraph in the opening story in the Christianity Today magazine interesting:

Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe, and he regularly visited pubs to drink beer with friends. Though he shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals he didn’t subscribe to biblical innerancy or penal substitution. He believed in purgatory and baptismal regeneration. How did someone with such a checkered pedigree come to be a theological Elvis Presley, adored by evangelicals?

That is a very interesting question indeed. I love Lewis. Mere Christianity changed my life when I was in college, and helped me begin a theological curiousity in me that I still have today. A Grief Observed comforted me in college as well, 11 years after my mother’s death. The Chronicles of Narnia I have read three times, and they have brought me much joy, and have helped me understand the importance of story and narrative in theology. And The Space Trilogy taught me that evil is pervasive, and that we cannot be silent. And on, and on.

I am indebted to Lewis, and it is not only his writings that I admire, but his personality and character as well.

But I wonder what most evangelicals would think of him, or his writings, if they were really aware of some of Lewis’s theological positions, which are quite different I would say from the average evangelical? Would they be concerned about some of his literary criticisms in regards to the Bible? Or what would most evangelicals think about his cigarette and pipe smoking? Or his drinking in the pubs?

I would just be curious if people’s views would change of him, or his work, if they found out, or knew that his theological beliefs, or lifestyle were incongruent with their own?

If you have never seen stick figures fight, Matrix style, then you are in for a treat…..it’s a tad violent (for stick figure fighting), but man these people are talented….

stick figure fighting

How can we further specify spirituality on these orthodox Christian terms, especially as it bears on the concerns of this book? Out of this tradition, we can say clearly what spirituality is not. It is not opposed to the body, it is not nonphysical. It is not removed from history, the ongoing flow of time. It is not asocial, a solitary activity or state of being. It is not primarily inward and invisible, a hidden affair of the private heart. In all these ways it is unlike a common conception of “spirituality” in our day as a compartmentalized experience, customized by and for the lone individual, removed from any pesky, constraining traditions or social bodies (institutions). There certainly are private spiritualities of this sort about; there are even quite a number of spiritualities considered Christian which are marked by these characteristics. I will not insist they have nothing going for them. I do insist that in their very nonphysicality, privacy, and denial of history they are not orthodox, or catholic and evangelical, Christian spirituality.

Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality For People, Not Angels by Rodney Clapp.

This is the question being posed by James P. Pinkerton in his Thursday Newsday.com Column. This is being reported over at Drudge Report.

Interesting….