Lesson 3 - Mere Christianity (b) Flashcards
How does Lewis’ view of the personal Trinity influence his apologetics and theology?
Lewis View of the Personal Trinity
- God is personal, but beyond personality
- If he wasn’t personal we couldn’t relate to Him at all.
Apologetics
- The purpose of humanity is to enter into the fellowship of God and taken into the life of God
- Trinities are all around us that point to God as trinity (love: Lover, object of love, acts of love)
- Trinity provides what we most need for an objective morality: a basis for personal value. Christianity says the basis for all living is love and there is no love without Trinity. This is what was missing in Greek thought.
Theology
- Prayer illustrates the personal trinity, while maintaining the integrity of the person
- Christian belief about the Trinity is absolutely essential to everyday behavior.
– Lewis method: moves from theology (God is trinity) to illustration (God as dance) to the practical goal (prayer)
How is Lewis the reasoning romantic?
Reason (rational faculty) and imagination/romantic (intutitive faculty) are indispensable for all knowing.
- Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the natural organ of meaning.
- Imagination came first for Lewis with his longing and desire. Reason was a result of Lewis strict school and tutoring. These two came together in revelation for Lewis.
How does reason and imagination contribute to epistemology?
- Reason helps you know the truth (the what). Reason tells us what is and provides structure and categories in which we know and can make sense out of)
- ) Imagination helps you know the meaning (the why). Imagination tells us what the truth means for us.
Both of these work together to help us know what we know.
a. ) Imagination is a dialectic of desire; an ontological or lived dialectic. We follow our desires in life.
b. ) Reason is a dialectic of logical, philosophical argument. Examine evidences, sift through conflicting “isms”
Reason - looking at
Imagination - looking along
What is the “Kantian Wall”?
– Kantian Wall = split the physical and spiritual realms apart into the phenomenal (physical) and noumenal (mind).
– Kant divorces the scientific (phenomenal) and poetic (noumenal) realm to say that all knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge ends with experience but can added to through the brain. All modern thought builds off of this epistemological dualism.
How does Lewis respond to the Kantian wall?
- ) As created man, we didn’t fragment between the two, but enjoyed picture thinking. Adam could think and imagine in a unified way.
- ) It is the very nature of thought to want these two to come together. It is the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms (Ex. metaphors)
What does Lewis mean by “looking along” and “looking at”? What is his conclusion in this dichotomy?
- ) Looking along - experience/subjective/imagination/inside
- ) Looking at - objective/outside/reason/rational
Examples:
- young man in love (vs. measuring pulse, breathing, etc.)
- Girl who’s doll is broken (vs. she’s had a physical neuron phenomenon)
Conclusion: modern trend is to reduce knowledge to only what can be looked at. Look at is what gives us what’s real, we tend not to trust inside experiences.
What is real? The modern mind says empirical evidence. Yet, we have all had true inside experiences (pain). We need both to know what’s real.
What are the distinctions and similarities of myth, allegory, and symbolism?
Allegory
- Images that stand for concepts
- clear, unambiguous, rough one-to-one relation between verbal symbol and that which is signified. (Pilgrim’s Progress)
Symbolism
- non-conceptual thinking, not conceptual like Allegory
- Material world is copy of the real, invisible world (Narnia)
- Images stand for something the writer has experienced but cannot reduce to a concept (Aslan as Christ)
- Symbolism reaches for the Transcendent
Myth
- highest form of symbolism (attempt to grasp the transcendent, too real for words)
- attempts to present a spiritual vision, portrays universal truths about man and the universe
How does Lewis use myth, allegory, and symbolism apologetically?
- Lewis believes meaning is the most important thing to any context. Meaning is accomplishing in two ways: allegory and myth
- Myth = romantic + rational, subjective + objective, looking at + looking along,
- The way to connect the head and the heart is through story
- It is picture thinking to help us understand the core of reality
– Myth is a form of general revelation in how all stories point to the great story (Ex. dying and rising God)
– Myths > Thought, so Incarnation (special revelation) > Myth (general revelation)
– Christianity = myth becoming fact through Incarnation
– Myths put all men into contact with God through meaning
What is the role of reason, according to Lewis, in apologetics?
– all knowledge, both theoretical and practical, depends on the validity of reason
a. ) Reason is independent of nature, but not autonomous. Universe is ultimately mental. Only if we have validity of reason can permit man to talk about it as true or false.
b. ) Human reason participates in Cosmic Reason. Any true thinking about the universe must be possible because the rules of thought and the rules of the physical universe rests in a transcendent cosmic creator.
c. ) Dialectic of reason - Therefore reason faithfully followed leads to God. It helps clarify one’s position and can lead to a theistic position.
How does Lewis’ understanding of reason differ from Immanuel Kant and David Hume?
Hume - empirical attack on reason
- No cause and effect
- No uniformity of nature
- Only know things from sense experience
- Skepticism - can’t really know anything
Immanuel Kant - Subjective view of reason, in response to Hume
- Objects conform to the operation of our minds
- the objectivity of modern science depends on the subjectivity of our minds
- the external world is not rational, but our internal minds are
- External to the human mind is physical reality which must be filtered through the categories of reason.
- Human reason does not exist “out there” in the external world. Rather it exists as it were “shut up inside our heads”.
Lewis
- Reason is not in our heads, but out there objectively
- parallelism between what we think “in here” and what exists “out there”
- If human reason is subjective (Kant) then our knowledge is merely an illusion. We read rationality into an irrational universe
- On the other hand, if a transcendent cosmic reason exists, then human knowledge is a response or apprehension of a rationality with which the universe is saturated. Human reason is subjected to an external, objective reason.
