Faith Filled Friday: How Catholics Should Read the Bible

This is an essay I put together to read to my Adult Faith Formation class at my parish a few weeks ago.  I found that many were reading the Old Testament in a literal, denoted way as a fundamentalist Protestant would read it.  Actually this subject had come up frequently over the years I led our Faith Formation.  I decided to put it into an essay. 

 

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The Bible is the inspired word of God.  It is God speaking to His people.

What does inspired mean?  It means that the Holy Spirit had a hand in the writer’s generation of the work.  It means that there is a Truth in the writing and then under the Holy Spirit the work was selected because as St. Paul says it “is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”  (2 Tim 3:14)  No where does it say it has to be literally true.  It has to have truth. 

God talks to His people in various ways, in various forms of communication, that is in various genres of literature.  Some of the genres included are legend, history, moral laws, liturgical rubrics, prophecies, poetry, song, apocalyptic literature (dream states), maxims, fables, and more.  One of the most frequently found in the Bible is history, but it is not a history as the modern person would grasp.  It is a history that is focused on where the author prioritizes a moral to be learned over the exact facts of what happened.  The truth is the moral, not necessarily the facts.

Every genre speaks truth but it is the truth dictated by the form of the genre.  Truth is in one of the four modes to read the Old Testament: literal, spiritual (allegorical, moral, anagogical).  The text does not always provide truth in all four modes.  The writer is writing in a genre.

For a Catholic to read and understand the Old Testament requires you to read it as knowing the New Testament, that is in the light of Christ.  You have to know and understand Jesus to know what the meaning of the OT passage/book is, otherwise you will be reading it as a Jew, and even then you will be missing the cultural context of Judaism.  You cannot really understand the OT without understanding Christ first.

Christ overturns the OT Himself on more than one occasion. 

-The woman caught in adultery.  By OT laws she should have been stoned to death but Christ did not allow it.  Jesus doesn’t exactly say there but the implication was that the OT was lacking.

-But on divorce not only does Jesus overturn the OT but He explains the theology. 

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him,* saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?”

He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’

and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

They said to him, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss [her]?”

He said to them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. (Mat 19:3-8)

 

The key words “Moses permitted you.”  What Moses wrote down is not necessarily what God intended.  But God allowed it to be written down.  Why?  At least two reasons: (a) it still contained truth.  Marriage was still an important truth. (b) Because the people at the time were not ready to accept the hard truth of the real meaning of marriage.  “Because of the hardness of your hearts…”

The Bible is a progression to Jesus, can only be understood in Jesus, and humanity needed to build to that understanding.  Remember salvation history: Jesus came in the fullness of time: when the people of the covenant had experienced slavery, freedom, moral degradation, kingdom, civil war, fragmentation, and subjugation.  It also required the development of the Greco-Roman world for the development of the language of philosophy and a stable government for the seeds of Christianity to grow.  Christianity is not just an updated Judaism.  It required the language of Greek philosophy to fully understand Christ.  St. Augustine was a Platonist, St. Thomas Aquinas an Aristotelian. 

Why is Genesis in the genre of legend and myth?  Because the moral and religious concepts (a) would have been difficult if not impossible to convey if written into a non-fiction book form, (b) would not have been accessible to a people living in 1500 BCD, and (c) would not have been culturally integrated into a people’s heart.  [Side note: Nothing against St. Paul but if we only had the letters of St. Paul to understand Christ and no Gospels, Christianity would never have taken root in people’s hearts.]

I remember hearing a Rabbi speak on Genesis and why it was written the way it was, especially the seven days of creation.  His theme was, did you expect God to come to earth and present mathematical formulas, chemical equations, and astrophysics to the people living in the desert?  He spoke to them with what they could understand.

As to legend in Genesis, what exactly is legend?  Legend is a narrative that takes place in some distant history with some kernels of factual truths but the facts are vague.  Adam and Eve and their children populated the world?  It doesn’t match scientific history, and it doesn’t match evolution or genetic history.

So if Genesis is in the genre of legend and speaks in spiritual truths, why should I not believe in the Jesus and the Gospels as not just spiritual?  Because the Gospels are not in the genre of legend.  The Gospels are very specific as to their genre.  They tell you.  Here are a few places:

Luke 1:1-4

Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us,

just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us,

I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus,

so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.

John 1:6-7

A man named John was sent from God.

He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

John 21:24

It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.

1 John 1-5

What was from the beginning,

what we have heard,

what we have seen with our eyes,

what we looked upon

and touched with our hands

concerns the Word of life—

for the life was made visible;

we have seen it and testify to it

and proclaim to you the eternal life

that was with the Father and was made visible to us,

what we have seen and heard

we proclaim now to you,

so that you too may have fellowship with us;

for our fellowship is with the Father

and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

We are writing this so that our joy may be complete.

 

God is Light.

Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

This is not just the genre of biography.  It is the genre of eyewitness testimony.  It’s of facts, of witness, almost a testimony in a court room.  People have analyzed the Gospels as evidence gathered by detectives for a courtroom process.  You can still disagree with the validity of the testimony, but the genre speaks of witness.  If you are a Christian, you are obligated to believe it.  It is not legend or myth or even moral fable.  Witnesses went to their death refusing to disavow that Christ lived and performed these miracles.  This is very much different than anything in the Old Testament.

Faith and reason must align.  The Catholic Church insists on it.  You cannot have something true in faith but untrue to reason.  The primary reason we know that God exists is through reason.  Remember the early paragraphs of the CCC—we know God exists through the physical world in collaboration with reason.  Your whole theology would collapse if you denied reason in one case but justified it in another.  I gave the example of St. Robert Bellarmine and Galileo:

 

“I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.”

Turn to Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Humani Generis—how humanity was generated—addressed evolution and how to understand Genesis.  Here is a key quote:

 

This letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.  (paragraph 38)

This should not be leading you to a loss of faith as some have said to me.  I am fortifying your faith.  The reason we have such a growth in atheism is because of erroneous literal readings of scripture when they were not meant to be read that way in the first place. 

This is not new nor is it “modernist,” if modernism is what you suspect.  None of the great Catholic theologians Origen, Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine read these passages in a literal way. 

They read the scriptures understanding the genre, the level of development of the people from a particular time and place, and most importantly of a people who had not witnessed the incarnation—Jesus Christ—to understand what the more important truths lay inside the narratives of the OT.

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Post #6

This is the sixth of a series of posts on Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

You can find Post #1 here.    

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.  

Post #5 here.  

 

The last two posts were summaries from Book 3, “Christian Behavior.”  I did not have the space to post notable quotes, so I will take this entire post to quote important passages from all twelve chapters.  I hope you enjoy these quotes.

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From Chapter 1: The Three Parts of Morality

 

In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, “No, don’t do it like that,” because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work.

 

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Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

 

From Chapter 2: The Cardinal Virtues

 

According to this longer scheme there are seven “virtues.” Four of them are called “Cardinal” virtues, and the remaining three are called “Theological” virtues. The “Cardinal” ones are those which all civilised people recognise: the “Theological” are those which, as a rule, only Christians know about…. They are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.

 

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There is one further point about the virtues that ought to be noticed. There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man. Someone who is not a good tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean by a good player is the man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained by making innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They have a certain tone or quality which is there even when he is not playing, just as a mathematician’s mind has a certain habit and outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character. Now it is that quality rather than the particular actions which we mean when we talk of a “virtue.”

 

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The point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a “Heaven” for them—that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.

 

From Chapter 3: Social Moraility

 

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right.

 

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The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying “Do as you would be done by” to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works.

 

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All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one’s work is to produce something good…

 

From Chapter 4: Morality and Psychoanalysis

 

When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all men. Or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his subconscious. Thus fear of things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first kind: an irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second kind.

 

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That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked.

 

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One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.

 

From Chapter 5: Sexual Morality

 

We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians call the virtue of chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of “modesty” (in one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.

 

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Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it: the Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.

 

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In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so “natural,” so “healthy,” and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them…Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth—the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is “normal” and “healthy,” and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense.

 

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Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.  All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two.

 

From Chapter 6: Christian Marriage

 

The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words “one flesh” would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact—just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.

 

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But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from “being in love”—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

 

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This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.

 

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There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

 

From Chapter 7: Forgiveness

 

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Because in Christian morals “thy neighbour” includes “thy enemy,” and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.

 

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I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do—I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.” There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it.

 

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Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

 

From Chapter 8: The Great Sin

 

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

 

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Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not.

 

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For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

 

From Chapter 9: Charity

 

Charity means “Love, in the Christian sense.” But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

 

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The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. … But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

 

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Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.

 

From Chapter 10: Hope

 

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

 

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The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”

 

From Chapter 11: Faith

 

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

 

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Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense… We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is that we fail.

 

From Chapter 12: Faith

 

I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I said just now that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy.

 

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All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.” Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, “Have I reached that moment?” Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on.

 

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Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.

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This video is a reading from passages from Book 3. 

 

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Post #5

This is the fifth of a series of posts on Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.  

 

Book 3: Christian Behavior

Summary for Chapters 7 thru 12:

Chapter 7:  Forgiveness

One the most difficult tenets of Christianity is that one must love our neighbor as ourselves, including the forgiveness of our enemies.  We are only forgiven of our sins on the basis that we forgive other’s sins.  This does not entail that one allows evil to stand unchecked.

Chapter 8: The Great Sin

The greatest sin in Christianity, and this differentiates Christianity from almost all other religions, is the sin of pride or self-conceit.  Pride, which is opposite the virtue of humility, is at the heart of all other sins.  Other sins may bring people together, but the sin of pride brings enmity between man and man and man and God.

Chapter 9: Charity

Charity, which means love in a Christian sense, does not mean emotion or sentimentality.  Charity is an act of the will, which makes it irrelevant whether you are fond of other or not.  Once you treat all people with charity you will find that it will lead to affection for all people.

Chapter 10:  Hope

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.  We are meant to hope for our final destination that can only be achieved after this life has ended.

Chapter 11: Faith

One sense of the notion of Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.  This rebellion of your moods against your real self is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

Chapter 12: Faith

Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own.  All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.”  Then you are living by Christian faith.

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Manny’s Comments:

 

The chapter on forgiveness was fairly straight forward.  His explanation of the sin of pride and the need for humility seems to come right out of Thomas Aquinas.  Lewis has a great quote on pride that is worthy of memorizing: “For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

 

It is interesting Lewis connects hope with the disparity of the imperfect of the earthly world with the perfect of the heavenly world.  He doesn’t say this in these words but he seems to define hope as the desire to close the gap between the imperfect and the perfect.  That is an interesting way of thinking about it.

 

My thought on hope jumped to Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Dante the character is questioned by St. James on what is hope in Canto 25 of Paradiso.  Dante’s response is this:

 

'Hope,' I said, 'is the certain expectation

of future glory, springing

from heavenly grace and merit we have won.

 

'This light comes down to me from many stars,

but he who first instilled it in my heart

was that exalted singer of our exalted Lord.

 

'"Let them have hope in you," he declares

in his god-song, "those who know your name."

Among those who share my faith, who does not know it?

 

'After he had imbued me with his song,

you poured your epistle down on me so that I,

overflowing, now rain your rain on others.' (Par 25:67-78)

 

To Dante, and this is right out of Medieval scholasticism, hope is the expectation of achieving future glory (beatitude) instilled in him by God through grace.  Hope is not something we do on ourselves, but something given to us.

 

How does this compare with Lewis?   I think Lewis is much more human centered than Dante or the Medieval scholastics.  On the other hand, Lewis does say that desires are innate and therefore must have their satisfaction somewhere, and that somewhere is heaven.  Hope I can’t help feeling is overly simplified here.  Hope is a virtue that is required.  Despair, the opposite of hope, is a mortal sin, and so hope is not just something that seeks satisfaction but something that is connected to salvation.  I’m not saying Lewis is denying any of this, but that he makes it too mundane.

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Manny’s Comments:

 

It is interesting Lewis divides faith into two parts: one that can be summarized as belief and the other that can be summarized as trust.  It was very insightful for me.

 

The first definition of faith is the belief that the God exists and that the Christian doctrines are true.  Lewis goes on to conclude that faith in this sense is a virtue.  Here is a pertinent passage:

 

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

 

In this sense, a Christian must maintain a strength against the fluctuations of doubts.  I love the quote: “Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”  That is so true.  I occasionally suffer from such a doubt when in a particular mood, and when I was an atheist I had the same occasional intuition.  We are all prone to have moments of doubts and moments of faith as our daily activities cause us to have thoughts.  Lewis is not saying it is wrong to have such moments, or that we shouldn’t evaluate those moments, but he is saying that a person of faith will not find the moments of doubts compelling.

 

The other type of faith is to live in the trust of God.  We all at some point realize that we don’t have the power to control the plan of our lives.  There are times when a crises or multiple crises hit us that we should step back and “let go and let God” as the saying goes.  That’s not to say we shouldn’t organize our lives and strive for our wellbeing, but at some point things go awry and that is when we need to turn to the Lord.  Perhaps one should think of it as God letting it go awry to test your faith.  Lewis frames it this way: “All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.”  Lewis in the chapter speaks of this faith when things come to a crises, but I think one should step back at various points of one’s life and ask God to let Him lead you, crises or not. 

 

Now that I’ve summarized Lewis’s two concepts of faith, I would like to see how that compares to the Biblical definition of faith.  The Letter to the Hebrews has two chapters on faith.  First from chapter eleven.

 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. (Heb 11:1-3)

 

Indeed the rest of the chapter provides Biblical examples of faith.  Then in chapter twelve, there is more.

 

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.  (Heb 12:1-2)

 

Hebrews chapter 12 goes on to give advice on how one should live one’s life, “enduring trials,” being disciplined to bear “the fruit of righteousness,” strengthening feet and hands, and accepting God’s graces without bitterness.  Between the two chapters of Hebrews, I think we can see both sides of Lewis’s definition of faith.  I think Lewis has explained a difficult Biblical definition of faith simply and well. 

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This section of Mere Christianity is focused on the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity (sometimes named as “love” but I think that “charity” is the more accurate term in our contemporary English).  I found this video that fills out more of Lewis’s view of the theological virtues insightful.  It’s a philosophical set of lectures from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History called “Faith, Hope, Charity, and Love in CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: The Theological Virtues.”