The Form of Faith

Reflections on My Life, Romanticism, Meaning, and the Christian Faith in the Early 21st Century

Prothero

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498244176
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

The Form of Faith is a hybrid work, part spiritual autobiography and part essay--a style that stands in a long and honorable line going back to Lewis, Newman, and ultimately Augustine. Moreover, this work was created in response to the question that loomed large in the author's mind and with which he still wrestles: how does one live a Christian witness in the twenty-first century that is not culturally hijacked by political identification and can speak to the millennial generation?

Eight: Jack Lewis Surprises Me

What distressed me most—more even than my own folly—was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

—Phantastes, George MacDonald

So I was back in California, more confused than ever. Everything I had placed in the vacuum my Christianity had left behind had evaporated and proved itself a mirage. Looking back on it now, I would with the benefit of hindsight, have realized, that 1) I was some sort of artist and needed to find a way to live that, and 2) being an artist meant doing something else likely menial for money to survive on at least in the early and middle stages if one were lucky. But I did not know nor want to believe such things. I got into a messy and short-lived romance that ended my career in environmental education. That door closed, but I had discovered that I could bear jobs that involved teaching. With my background in environmental education, I took some teacher aide jobs in my parents’ town. Somehow teaching did not engage my frustration and sense of futility as had any other job. I should have taken this as a clue to my true calling, but I was still in the fog of denial and in no hurry to emerge.

There I was, sitting in a bedroom in my parents’ house, with little money, an English degree, and no direction. I was 24 years old going on 25 and all that I had dreamed of since college had been hastily abandoned in my impatience, or had self-destructed, like my music career. I had finished a novel of mixed quality and even I knew it wasn’t all that good. It was titled, The Sun is But a Morning Star, a title I took from the final line of Thoreau’s Walden. Looking back, it seems comically presumptuous for a 24 year old, confused young man to pontificate about the meaning of life in a novel. That nobody took me or my novel seriously in retrospect is hardly surprising. This is the point where the Tiger leaped from the brush and grabbed me by the heart and the mind. It came about when I stumbled “accidentally” on a C.S. Lewis book my mom had lying around. It was a book they’d bought years before to give to Donald, on Bruce’s suggestion when Don was struggling with faith in his high school years. Since then it had collected dust. I read it, and if someone had hit me on the side of the head with a baseball bat, the shock would have been less. It was Surprised by Joy.

The Tiger had not been idle over the years. Before I left NAU, I felt the explanation of human behavior in terms of the fall of humanity in sin fit the facts better than any sort of psychological theory. Psychology does a contorted dance around the question of good and evil, which it knows it cannot define. But to believe that all evil can be explained away with psychological explanations is a fools’ game and I’d come to realize it. Psychology was fine so long as it stayed in its narrow confines of explaining large swaths of known human behavior. When it tried to be as large as philosophy or theology, it became laughable.

I also came to feel that Jesus of Nazareth really was more than a country preacher, misconstrued by his followers and executed by the Roman government. I wasn’t sure where that was going, but the minimalist explanation didn’t fly. Thus the Tiger had made two critical moves to place himself in position to pounce.

And to pounce on me, he sent C.S. “Jack” Lewis. Lewis I had met vaguely in his Chronicles of Narnia—and looking back on it now, there wasn’t much difference between Christ the Tiger and Christ the Lion. But Surprised by Joy was Jack’s spiritual autobiography, his Augustinian confession. What struck me with such force is that though Lewis was raised in Belfast and suffered through English boarding schools, and never set foot in America, much less the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, he had been struck with joy in the precise manner that I had. He too mounted a fruitless chase and was a victim of joylust. He was the literary artist and in his early days, visual artist too, the non-athletic boy shunned by his schoolmates for his inability to play games well. Though it seemed impossible, in spite of all the differences of circumstance, time, and nation, Jack had grown up just like me. The only significant difference I could discern was that he had lost his mother early and unlike me had resorted to a virulent pessimism and atheism. I had just found my freedom and resorted to an open-minded agnosticism. But piece by piece, Jack worked his way back to faith. I was willing to do so too, but all my intellectual problems stood in the way. And this is what Jack Lewis did for me and for many others too. With clarity and simplicity, Lewis honestly and openly confronted all the intellectual objections to faith, all the road-blocks, and plowed right through them.

By the end of the book, the road back to faith was clear of obstructions. I know the Evangelical reader would want me to say I knelt down and prayed. Well, I prayed, even if I didn’t do it the prescribed way. I was probably sitting in a chair with the book half-open in my hands. Heck, Lewis prayed his surrender prayer in the sidecar of a motorcycle. I didn’t need the emotional Evangelical kneel. The important thing was that I admitted Christ was God and knew I had to live accordingly.

Some Evangelical readers will be tempted to put the book down at this point. After all, I’ve been “saved,” end of story. No, no, no. As I said before, our being saved, our being changed (as Lewis pointed out) into the sort of person Christ meant us to be when we were created, that takes a long, long time. Conversion is a process, not a moment. This was only the start. I have yet to see the finish.

Now the reader may question my math, because earlier I said that the Tiger had taken seven years to get me back, and this is 1980 and I’ve only been out of the sheepfold for five. True enough. My heart was home and my intellect was satisfied for the time being. But joylust is something like an addiction. Maybe it is in fact an addiction. I was still struggling in the Tiger’s maw.

Meanwhile, over the next three years I bought and read everything Lewis wrote, except perhaps for some of the critical studies over books I hadn’t read. And he never disappointed. He was balanced like Bruce, neither liberal nor conservative, though many try to claim him for one side or another by cherry-picking him. In fact, I became something of a Lewis scholar. By 1985, I had discovered and joined the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society, which proved to be an open door to many worlds.

I suppose it could be said that Jack and I thought so much alike that it was natural for me to see life in his terms without much discomfort. And if you find Lewis’ world-view repugnant, you can toss this book in the return pile now. But be sure you do that for what Lewis is and not what someone told you he is. Let me make six points as to why I was so influenced by Lewis so readily.

1. Lewis neither right nor left

It is pretty universally known that C.S. Lewis in creating Puddleglum, the marshwiggle in The Chronicles of Narnia, was modeling the pessimistic-optimist character of the creature on the personality of his gardener, Fred Paxford. As much as this is true, in a far subtler sense, Lewis was creating, perhaps unconsciously, with Puddleglum, an image of himself. It’s like we’re all human, but Jack Lewis is a marshwiggle. And that marshwiggle thinking, so very marshwiggelian in it’s consistency and character, is startling and arresting to those of us who aren’t marshwiggles.

In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum starts off as being merely the pessimist. If Lewis had kept the characterization of Puddleglum along these lines, Puddleglum would have been merely an interesting but marginal character. But Puddleglum grows in the course of the story, and becomes a projection of Lewis’ own personality, or perhaps more accurately, Lewis’ thinking.

Puddleglum’s acts in the prince’s quarters are both surprising and brimming with courage and integrity. He insists on freeing the prince from the silver chair when the sign is given, even if following the sign means certain death. But his magnum opus is Puddleglum’s magnificent analysis of the witch’s argument after he has just stomped out her magical fire. What’s unique about this analysis is that it starts with what sound like concessions. Puddleglum allows for the witch’s version of reality. He’s all about anticipating counter-argument. But then he turns that reality on its head by arguing that the imaginary world is better than the “real” one and worth fighting and dying for. This piece of what seems like pretzel logic the witch cannot answer and she resorts to combat instead.

All these actions of Puddleglum are far above and beyond mere pessimism. They take us by surprise. They are contrary to our expectations. And they reflect the way that Lewis defeats his critics’ expectations repeatedly.

As one example of this, Lewis’ approach to literary criticism was simultaneously reactionary and revolutionary. In the face of the school of F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards, Lewis not only attacked Modernist approaches to literature, he undercut their ground so that they simply were irrelevant.

In the field of theology, despite his orthodox stance, Lewis can be maddeningly hard to pin down. Evangelicals are likely to criticize Lewis for not holding that the Bible is without error. Yet he reveres the Bible as scripture. He straddles the inerrancy debate. In Reflections on the Psalms he writes:

His [Christ’s] teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.2

And as Lewis speaks of Christ’s propensity to not be “pinned down,” so Lewis the marshwiggle won’t be pinned down either. This is the surprising marshwiggelian perspective emerging here. We want Lewis to be an inerrantist, or a Catholic, or an American Evangelical, or at least something with a firm position. We want him to try to bottle the sunbeam somewhere for Heaven’s sake! He refuses to do it. He zigs when we look for him to zag.

One fares no better if one tries to pin Lewis down in terms of contemporary politics. In one essay in God In the Dock Lewis can bemoan becoming “willing slaves of the welfare state,” a snarky title to warm the heart of any modern conservative or libertarian. Then he blows it all away in the next essay about how “We Have no Right to Happiness” that shoots down the underpinnings of libertarian thought. He places in his autobiography George MacDonald’s assertion that the doorway to Hell is covered by the words “I am my own.” Those words are perhaps the very heart of the libertarian concept and Lewis associates them with damnation. He applauds the concept of membership and disparages the concept of the collective, and yet in a personal letter concedes that the National Health Service is ultimately a good thing. For anybody uncertain of what that means, Lewis is mildly lauding a single-payer-system of socialized medicine, something which is an anathema to current day conservatives. With Tolkien, he deplores the mechanized future—I am certain he would have viewed the advent of the internet with horror—and embraces an almost Luddite agenda that would make any extremist eco-saboteur happy. Lewis calls himself conservative on more than one occasion, but when he is called on to describe the Christian state in Mere Christianity, it sounds at one time socially conservative and so...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• One: Sunday School Jesus
• Two: Summer Camp and Finding Another World
• Three: Joy and Junior High
• Four: Blessed Liberty and Gregg
• Five: Bruce and Christ the Tiger
• Six: High School and Farewell to California
• Seven: Rambling and Joy
• Eight: Jack Lewis Surprises Me
• Nine: The Long Road Back
• Ten: Anglicanism and What I Could Not Be
• Eleven: Love Vindicated and Watercolor Paint
• Twelve: There’s No Place Like Rome
• Thirteen: Santa Ana and PhD
• Fourteen: Christ and the Millennial
• Fifteen: Recognition
• Sixteen: Adelante
• Bibliography