C.S. Lewis contra Anti-theologians

September 17, 2008

In the beginning of the fourth section of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis suggests a reason why theology is so important in the Christian life. He gives this reason in the form of an analogy—one of his best.

His consideration of this objection to theology comes in a very appropriate place. Heretofore in his book, Lewis has clearly spoken in a very relevant vein—nearly everything he said has been clearly actionable. But this is not the case with some of the ideas in this new section. He is about to begin a discussion of Christ as begotten, not made, and although it’s a very exciting idea, and he draws out some very exciting implications from it, it’s the sort of thing that people in his day, and increasingly in our day, object to on the basis of its dogmatic, theological character.

He describes an encounter with an old R.A.F. Officer who objected to a talk Lewis once gave by saying that he had no use for all “your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him”, because he had met him for real out in the desert one night. The man had experienced the presence of God, in a way that many of us can relate to—and the apparently dry and formulaic body of Christian doctrine seemed to bear no relation to the vividness of his experience.

This Officer’s difficulty, suggests Lewis, is like that of a man who has seen the Atlantic, and then turned from it to a map of the Atlantic, “turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper.” He is, of course, going to find the map considerably less “real” than the actual waves in the actual ocean; but if he has any plans, like crossing the Atlantic to America, then he had better develop an interest in the map—no amount of experience with the waves on his little section of the beach will ever give him the knowledge he needs to navigate all the way across the Atlantic.

Several sections of modern American evangelicalism are like the Officer on his beach. I am thinking, for example, of certain varieties of the Emergent Church and of many of the seeker-oriented mega-churches. They understand that what people want are lots of religious experiences (or sometimes faux-religious experiences, but I don’t think the battle ever lies with debating the reality of someone’s experience—just with how they act on it), but they often ignore and suppress the idea that what they need is a guide to make their religion applicable to all of life intellectually and practically. But they are truly condemning those they seek to help, by rendering their experience, their acquaintance with the signposts to God, inexcusable by implicitly denying that these experiences should lead to a changed life or to substantial beliefs.

At the same time, I think another section of American evangelicalism should consider this analogy from a different angle. We in the Reformed tradition are very proud of our map. We study it, teach it, try to understand it. But sometimes we forget that it’s just a map of something, that no acquaintance with the currents of the Atlantic can substitute for a dip in its cold salt-water.

In order truly to follow Christ, we need a different take on these things: we need the map and the Atlantic.