By Max on Jun 30, 2010 in The Four Loves | Comments Off
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could [...]
By Max on Jan 7, 2010 in The Problem of Pain | Comments Off
Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. . . . .
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested,” [...]
By Max on Jan 7, 2009 in The Problem of Pain | Comments Off
…”If God is omnisicent He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture?” But as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know that his obedience could endure such a command until the event taught him: and the obedience which he did [...]
By Max on Jan 7, 2009 in The Problem of Pain | Comments Off
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it “unmindful of His [...]
By Max on Jan 7, 2009 in The Problem of Pain | Comments Off
When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshall us where we [...]
By Max on Jan 7, 2009 in The Problem of Pain | Comments Off
The idea of that which God “could have” done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited [...]
By Max on Jun 5, 2008 in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses | Comments Off
It must also be remembered that only a minority of the religions of the world have a theology. There was no systematic series of statements which the Greeks agree in believing about Zeus.
–
C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 116-17.
