An Invitation to Glory
This post is an excerpt from The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis: Essays in Honor of Michael Travers (Wipf and Stock, 2019). It was written by Dr. Michael Travers. It was presented to the C. S. Lewis Society of New York in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of Lewis’s Death and again at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary on January 30th, 2014. Today, March 2nd, is the anniversary of Michael’s passing into the glory that he deeply longed for.
In his apologetics and fiction, C. S. Lewis invites his readers to hope for heaven and God. His great contribution is his reminder to twentieth-century western culture, which has lost its mooring, of what it means to be humans who were made for God and to long for him all our lives. C. S. Lewis reminds readers that this longing for God, this hope of heaven, is the proper state for all of us in a fallen world. He offers to readers a vision of the Christian mind.
Our culture needs to remember what it means to be human: we are created in the image of God and for the purpose of praising God. At the very outset of his Confessions, St. Augustine gives voice to the essential human need––and desire––to praise God:
Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and of Thy wisdom there is no number. And man desires to praise Thee. He is but a tiny part of all that Thou hast created. He bears about him his mortality, the evidence of his sinfulness, and the evidence that Thou dost resist the proud: yet this tiny part of all that Thou hast created desires to praise Thee.
Thou dost so excite him that to praise Thee is his joy. For Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.[1]
Because we were made for God, we cannot be satisfied apart from Him. Nothing in this world can satisfy the ultimate desire of the human soul to be satisfied in God. Human culture, particularly that inspired by Christianity, incarnates this desire for God in manifold ways, and, what is more, Scripture attests to it as well. The desire for God is a key element of the Christian mind.
The idea that we all desire God and hope for heaven is expressed in both the Old and New Testaments. In Ecclesiastes, the wisdom writer states that God has put “eternity into man’s heart” (Ecc 3:11), and evidences the implications of our desire for God in that nothing in this life ultimately satisfies the soul. The writer speaks of good things––such as work, food, and relationships––that we enjoy in this life, but he teaches that ultimate wisdom is to seek God and rest in him. Everything else is “vanity,” or futility. The Psalmist writes that the ancient Hebrews longed for rest in the Promised Land. But, because of their unbelief and sin, they had to walk the wilderness pathways for forty years before they were allowed to enter that rest, and then it was only the next generation that was allowed to do so (Ps 95:1–11). In the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews applies the temporal rest of the ancient Hebrews in the Promised Land figuratively to the spiritual rest Christians have in Christ and then to the eternal rest we ultimately will enjoy in the new heavens and the new earth (Heb 3:7–4:11).
In this life, we are not yet at rest, and we cannot be at rest until our faith becomes sight in heaven. We hope for future glory. In the New Testament, the apostles often write of a hope that looks forward to eternity. The apostle Peter admonishes us to be “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). Peter speaks this instruction to Christians, admonishing them to give a witness to non-Christians about heaven and eternity with God. For Peter, as for the other New Testament writers, this hope is not wishful thinking; rather, it is settled and certain hope, for it is predicated on the character of God as evidenced by the Word of God––“Christ in you, the hope of glory,” as Paul has it in Col 1:27. Paul speaks elsewhere of our hope in Christ, for Christ has paid the debt of our sins and granted us eternal life (Cf. 2 Cor 1:10; 1 Tim 4:10). In the earthly life of Christ our longing for God is made concrete in the transfiguration, when Peter, James, and John see Christ revealed in all his glory. The transfiguration follows immediately after Jesus tells his disciples that he will come again in great glory, thereby prompting longing for that glorious kingdom; it is then that he is transfigured before the three men, and they are given a glimpse of the future and the one on whom their hope is founded. In Romans 8, Paul writes that the Christian’s whole life is oriented toward this hope when we will be glorified in the presence of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Michael Travers
The Bible often expresses this hope in narrative form. Almost two-thirds of the Bible is narrative. From Genesis to Exodus, through the history books and prophets in the Old Testament, to the Gospels, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, and even the book of Revelation in the New Testament, the story of redemption is just that––a narrative. The writer of Hebrews symbolizes this life as a pilgrimage. He writes that we “desire a better country, that is a heavenly [one]” (Heb 11:16), and “for here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Heb 13:14). A pilgrimage is not just a wandering journey; rather it is a teleological journey with a destination. For Christians, that destination is heaven with Jesus Christ, our ultimate beatitude. It is no accident, then, that the Bible incarnates a grand metanarrative that encompasses the whole of the created order and our place as humans in that story.
Giving voice to the Christian narrative of hope is what Lewis did in his writings at a time when others had lost sight of that hope. He presented a vision of the Christian mind. Austin Farrer writes of the voice Lewis gives to Christianity:
It was this feeling intellect, this intellectual imagination that made the strength of his religious writings. . . . His real power was not proof [as in apologetics]; it was depiction. There lived in his writings a Christian universe that could be both thought and felt, in which he was at home and in which he made his reader at home.[2]
There is the note: Lewis invites his readers to come along home with him––to God and heaven. He knew that we longed for something beyond this world, and he invited us to join him in the search for our eternal home.[3] Lewis’s method for inviting others to put on the Christian mind, through his prose, poetry, and narrative, was to put the metanarrative of the Bible on display.
C. S. Lewis reminds readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of a truth that pre-modern western people knew as part of their culture and we have largely forgotten today: we were created to worship God. Lewis encourages his readers to worship God again––that is, to put on the Christian mind. He invites them to accept that “weight of glory.” Lewis embodies the heart of Christianity in this invitation, for the metanarrative of the Bible tells the same story: creation, fall, redemption, and recreation. Lewis incarnates this metanarrative in his apologetics, his poetry, and his fiction. It is by developing a Christian mind that Lewis fulfills his role as worshipper.
For Lewis, the original creation is the normative mode of existence for human beings, in fellowship with each other and God. In this created condition, there was no need for longing to escape and go to heaven, no need for hope, for all things were as they should be. Lewis invites his readers in all of these books to participate in the glory of things as they were meant to be. In the fall into sin, however, humans were plunged into a pathological condition, producing a sense of exile because we were cut off from God and therefore long to be reunited with him. It is this undesirable state of sin and exile that forms the foundation of Lewis’s apologetics and fiction. Our innate longing for a remedy finds expression in his novels, in the form of a pilgrimage, or quest––a journey that inherently incarnates longing and hope in its form and structure. This longing is for renewal of all that has been tainted by sin; it is a longing for a new life.
Lewis’s fiction provides descriptions of this coming renewal, which begins with a sense of release from sin’s effects. He expresses the sense of beginning a new and glorified life in heaven this way in The Last Battle:
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are––as you used to call it in the Shadowlands––dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.[4]
All of Lewis’s writings encourage his readers to long for God and to hope for heaven; this is a central characteristic of the Christian mind. And it is fitting that this is so, for the longer we live in communion with Christ, the more we long to see him face to face. Lewis knew that longing well and it shaped everything he wrote. This longing for the transcendent is what makes the Christian mind so beautiful.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.