C.S. Lewis, soos die onderstaande artikel uit
Woensdag se NYT dit beskryf, was een van die bekendste christelike skrywers uit
die twintigste eeu.
Ek was nog altyd beïndruk deur sy gewildheid,
veral in die Engelse gemeenskap.
Die artikel hier onder vertel iets van die
resepsie-geskiedenis van sy werk en hoe mense steeds weer deur sy werke geïnspireer
word.
Wat my opval aan die artikel is hoe wydverspreid
oor die wêreld heen mense deur die kerk verwond word.
En dan is dit die skrywer, soos Lewis, wat hul
help om weer genees te word.
Dit hoef nie so te wees nie. As die kerk werklik
die voorbeeld van Christus volg, kan dit ‘n hawe van ontferming vir mense word.
Hoe gebeur dit dat mense seergemaak word en dan verder veroordeel en verwerp
raak?
Daar is baie rede’s. Die kerk se geslotenheid,
tradisionalisme, ongeduld, magsbewussyn en onverdraagsaamheid is sommige van
die oorsake.
Dink maar aan Christus se ontferming oor hulle
wat nie gereken is nie. Of aan sy oplettendheid oor mense wat swaarkry. Of aan
die keer toe hy op die grond gekniel het om voete te was. Of aan die keer toe
hy in die stilte van die donker nag lank gepraat het met die twyfelaar. Of ook
sy hand vir die Thomas-dissipels uitgesteek het.
Die man wat wonde genees het, al is Hy in die
proses self verwond.
Hier is die artikel:
C. S. Lewis, Evangelical Rock Star
By T. M. LUHRMANN
In 2005, Time magazine called C. S. Lewis the “hottest theologian” of the year — 42 years
after his death. That same year, a cover story in Christianity Today hailed him
as a “superstar.” To this day Lewis, who published the first of his children’s
books about “Narnia” in 1950, remains deeply compelling for many evangelicals,
more so than for Catholics and mainline Protestants. Why?
Lewis’s remarkable combination of theological
simplicity and tweedy British scholarship is no doubt one reason for his
appeal. In his famous book “Mere Christianity,” adapted from a series of BBC
radio talks during World War II, Lewis laid out a clear assertion of what it
meant to be Christian. Molly Worthen, a historian of religion, points
out that nearly a century after the Scopes trial, many evangelicals still worry
that secular intellectuals regard them as country bumpkins. Christians like
Lewis have helped to keep that sense of cultural inferiority at bay.
But the text for which Lewis is best known is his
“Chronicles of Narnia.” And what “Narnia” offers is not theological simplicity,
but complexity. The God represented in these books is not quite real (it’s
fiction) and yet more real than the books pretend (that’s not a lion, it’s
God). That complexity may help people to hang on to faith in a secular society,
when they need a God who is in some ways insulated from human doubt about
religion.
The story of Bob, a man I got to know while
writing a book on evangelical belief, offers some insight here. He grew up in a
strict evangelical church in Southern California, but he thought it dishonest
and manipulative. He remembers seeing, as a child, videos of violent and
vengeful Old Testament stories, images of people sent to hell for seemingly
arbitrary reasons. He concluded that this was meant to scare people into
choosing Jesus.
Bob married young — too young — and soon
divorced. After that, he was no longer welcome in his church. He left for
graduate school still a Christian, but with his faith in turmoil. He asked God
to help him deal with his distress. Three nights later, he saw on his pillow a
vision of Aslan, the lion Lewis created to represent God/Jesus in “Narnia.” Bob
described Aslan as glittering gold, with a mane that moved as if it were
blowing in the wind. A few months later, he had an image of Aslan tattooed on
his chest — to remind him, he said, of whom God had called him to be.
What Aslan gave Bob was a sense that God was real
and loved him, even though he did not trust the humans who told him all he had
been taught about God. This sense that the human church isn’t always to be
trusted crops up in many of the newer evangelical churches. People talk about
being “church wounded” and say things like “this isn’t about church, it’s about
a real God.”
In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis wrote that to
pretend helps one to experience God as real. In “Narnia” he offered a way to
pretend — by depicting a God who is so explicitly not a God from an ordinary
human church. Aslan keeps God safe from human clumsiness and error.
What does it mean that our society places such a
premium on fantasy and imagination? “No culture,” observes the child
psychologist Suzanne Gaskins, “comes close to the level of
resources for play provided by middle-class Euro-American parents.” In many
traditional societies, children play by imitating adults. They pretend to cook,
marry, plant, fish, hunt.
“Inventive pretend,” in which children pretend
the fantastic or impossible (enchanted princesses, dragon hunters) “is rarely —
if ever — observed in non-industrialized or traditional cultures,” Gaskins
says. That may be because inventive play often requires adult involvement.
Observing the lack of fantasy play among the Manus children in New Guinea,
Margaret Mead noted that “the great majority of children will not even imagine
bears under the bed unless the adult provides the bear.”
Westerners, by contrast, not only tolerate
fantasy play but actively encourage it, for adults as well as for children. We
are novel readers, movie watchers and game players. We have made J. K. Rowling very
wealthy.
This suggests that we imagine a complex reality
in which things might be true — materially, spiritually, psychologically.
Science leads us to draw a sharp line between what is real and what is unreal.
At the same time, we live in an age in which we are exquisitely aware that
there are many theories, both religious and scientific, to explain the world,
and many ways to be human.
Probably fiction does for us what the vision of
Aslan did for Bob: it helps us to learn what we find emotionally true in the
face of irreconcilable contradictions. That is what Joshua Landy, a professor of French
literature, argues in “How to Do Things with Fictions”: fiction teaches us how
to think about what we take to be true. In the cacophony of an
information-soaked age, we need it.
T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, is a guest columnist.
Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman are off today.
