C.S. Lewis always manages to defy simple characterization. Just when you think he fits the customary evangelical model he comes out with something that makes you pause and wonder and reconsider. Try this on for size from The Four Loves:
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already forseeing -- or should we say "seeing"? there ar no tenses in God -- the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
Lewis in other places writes that God is beyond time. All things happen in one moment for God. We see events unfolding sequentially, God sees them happening at once. And so when God creates, he creates with the cross in mind. He loves because we won't love back. This is love -- love unconditioned by our response. It doesn't matter if you like it, God will love you anyway.
Karl Barth in his Dogmatics says, What unites God and us men is that He does not will to be God without us, that He creates us rather to share with us and therefore with our being and life and act His own incomparable being and life and act, that He does not allow His history to be His and our ours, but causes them to take place as a common history. That is the special truth which the Christian message has to proclaim at its very heart.
Your life, beyond what you may ever know or want, has been taken into the life of God on the cross. His history is our history. His love is our love. Denying it, doesn't make it not so. What a great message to share.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment