Good infection

Reading CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, I came across another one of those quotes I had heard before, but never located. It's in a chapter titled 'Good Infection', and is really talking about the nature of the connection between us and God.

Here is the quote:

"Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire. If you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prizes which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what could he do but wither and die?"

This, I think, is brilliant. It highlights the 'intrinsic' character of salvation, as opposed to an 'extrinsic' version - intrinsic to God that is. What do I mean?

Lewis highlights the fact that salvation and all its blessings are not somehow separable from God, as though you could have the blessings without having God. 

On the one hand, this helps us understand what Paul (especially) means by "union with Christ". Our connection with Christ is not like the way we connect with a supplier, where a buyer pays something, and gets something in return. It's not only that we could never 'pay' God for salvation - it always comes to us as a gift, because of the price that Jesus paid - but also that there is no necessary relation between the supplier and the item that is supplied - it could be anything! Whereas what Lewis is pointing out is that what God gives us is nothing other - and nothing less than - himself! Hence, salvation could never keep God at a distance, as so many unbelievers think, who see themselves as "going to heaven" but have nothing at all to do with God.

On the other hand, it also helps us to understand why condemnation is not the arbitrary withholding of a "prize" from people who don't meet the selection criteria. To keep oneself from God is necessarily to keep oneself from the blessings of salvation, because salvation is nothing other - and nothing less - than the blessing of God's glory present and powerful for you. 

Why does this matter? I suspect that many unbelievers in our post-Christian but still Christian hung-over context believe in God and salvation (at least, that's what the census says), but see salvation precisely like a prize, in the way that Lewis speaks about. And when we speak about salvation without clarifying its intrinsic character, we are heard to be saying, 'God is a prize giver, and you need to meet the criteria'. What happens then is an argument about the criteria - and many unbelievers are simply offended when you try to tell them they don't meet the criteria. 

What Lewis helps us to see - and this is part of the whole contextualisation challenge - is that the problem here lies with the way the issue is framed in the first place. Salvation is not a prize, it is a 'good infection'. 

Andrew Katay

How do we faithfully and resonantly speak about sin?

The gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is for all people of all cultures, because to Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and earth to be the saving Lord, and so we are to make disciples of all nations!

That universal gospel must therefore also be articulated in many particular forms, corresponding to the particular languages, thought patterns, symbols and assumptions of the different peoples to whom it is proclaimed. This simultaneous Biblical faithfulness and cultural resonance is the dual challenge of contextualisation.

One of the most important claims of the gospel is that, apart from Jesus Christ, human beings are sinners in need of saving, those who have fallen short of the glory of God. And so the question is, how do we faithfully and resonantly speak about sin?

In a time when people in Australia had a widespread cultural echo of Christian truth as part of their mental furniture, speaking of sin as rebellion against God made sense. Most people believed in God, and his moral law, which you either sought to keep or rebelled against. The culture backed this way of thinking.

However, that time is long past! There is little agreement on who God is, less agreement on the moral law, and no sense at all that not living as a Christian is an act of rebellion. It's still true, of course, that sin is rebellion against God. It's just that talking that way is increasingly meaningless for people who don't even operate with those categories.

However, rebellion is not the only way that the Bible speaks about sin.

In Romans 1, arguably the Apostle Paul's most sustained and profound reflection on the nature of sin, it is sin as idolatry that is most prominent. Rather than honouring God and giving him thanks, people have suppressed the truth about God, exchanging the glory of the immortal God for the images of creation.

And then comes the really interesting move!

As Paul continues to define idolatry, he introduces a term that becomes deeply powerful for him. In Rom 1.24, Paul changes key, although he is playing the same tune about idolatry. He writes "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity." There are two crucial things to notice here. First, idolatry is now described as a condition of the heart, namely, lust. That's something of an unfortunate translation, because it makes it sound like the issue is only sexual, whereas in fact, the word is far broader than that. In the original Greek it is 'epithumia' and means 'over-desire'. The way that Paul talks about idolatry thus becomes to speak about the over-desires of the heart, the craving of the heart to find meaning, purpose, life - in other words 'salvation' - in some aspect of the creation, rather than in the creator. And second, this over-desire is the 'sin behind the sin', the sin that leads to the acts and omissions of impurity that we see all around us. In fact, when you look at just about anywhere that Paul talks about sin behaviour, he virtually always also talks about its root as being epithumia, over desire - it's everywhere!

And the point is this: over-desire is something that deeply resonates with our modern technological culture. The promise, and inevitable failure, of things and experiences and relationships, money and power and sex, to satisfy the human heart is the stuff of endless songs, movies, books, articles and blogs. The culture knows about sin! 

And so we have a great opportunity to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a Biblically faithful and culturally resonant way at this point - to show the dynamic of the idol-structure in people's lives, which leads to death. From there, the claim of the life giving Lord Jesus Christ to offer forgiveness of sins and freedom to live can make powerful sense.

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Just preach the gospel?

A few weeks ago, a guy approached me outside our church building and indicated that he wanted to know more about God - he felt a spiritual vacuum in his soul, and knew that he needed to do something about it. 

He was a senior, quite proper Englishman, and it occurred to me that reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis might be a way to begin to address his questions - and then to move on from that to a gospel in due course.

It's been a joy to see him open up spiritually. At the same time, one of the great things about reading the book cover to cover is that you find out the context of many of the great CS Lewis quotes you've heard a dozen times, but not been able to place.

The thing that stands out to me is that Lewis engages in a brilliant piece of contextualisation. The first part of the book is a sustained argument for the existence of God on the basis of morality - I'll leave you to read it to get a sense of how he does it.. How is that contextual? The book started its life as a series of broadcasts during the second world war, where issues of right and wrong, and in particular the growing moral outrage at the actions of the Nazi regime, were at the forefront of people's minds. And so Lewis takes that and uses it as a starting point for his presentation of the gospel.

The point is this. Culturally, we are in a very different place from mid-WW2. And so the question for us has to be, what constitutes contextually strategic starting points for our presentation of Christ? What are our cultural narratives that either presuppose or are completed by, Christ?

Of course, we could just say, 'just preach the gospel'! But actually, that just pushes the question back a little further - is there any 'just' when it comes to peaching the gospel? Or does every presentation of the gospel have to start somewhere?

We'll look in more detail at this in later posts. For now, take this as an encouragement to read Mere Christianity, and see how someone else in a different time and place had a go at really insightful contextualisation, as a stimulus for our own efforts - and enjoy discovering the quotes!