Latest / Reformed Thinking / Two Notes | C. S. Lewis
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome back to Reformed Thinking.
- 0:01I am really glad you're here with us today.
- 0:03It's good to be back. We have a a really fascinating
- 0:07set up for this deep dive. You know, usually when we crack
- 0:10open a classic work of theology or apologetics, we have a
- 0:14tendency to go straight for the big chapters.
- 0:17The famous bits. Yeah, the bold headings, the
- 0:20thesis statements, the parts that, you know, get quoted on
- 0:23social media or printed on coffee mugs.
- 0:26We want the main event. That's right, we look for the
- 0:29Tri level Lord, liar or lunatic. Or we go looking for the moral
- 0:33argument for God. We want the greatest hits.
- 0:36Exactly. But today we're doing something
- 0:39a little different. We're we're going to the back of
- 0:41the book. We're looking at the fine print.
- 0:43We're diving into Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, which
- 0:46is, I mean, you could argue it's the most red apologetic work of
- 0:49the 20th century. Easily.
- 0:51But we aren't looking at the main text.
- 0:52We were focusing entirely on 2 short notes that he tacked on to
- 0:56the end of the section called Beyond Personality.
- 0:59It sounds a bit like we're scraping the bottom of the
- 1:01barrel, doesn't it? Tuning today for the footnotes.
- 1:04It does, and I have to admit, when I first looked at the plan,
- 1:07I was a little skeptical. I thought, well, surely if it
- 1:09was important, Lewis would have put it in the main chapters,
- 1:12right? Why are we sneaking backstage to
- 1:15look at the addendums? Because, and this is true for a
- 1:18lot of great thinkers, an author often puts their most their most
- 1:24rigorous, high level thinking in the notes.
- 1:27This is where Lewis is anticipating the really hard
- 1:29objections, the ones he knew. The casual radio listener might
- 1:33not ask, but the deep thinker, the skeptic, absolutely would.
- 1:37I mean, in the main text Lewis is sort of building a house for
- 1:41everyone to live in. A very accessible house.
- 1:43Exactly. But in these notes, he's showing
- 1:46you the blueprints for the foundation.
- 1:48He's explaining the structural engineering.
- 1:49He's answered the critics who actually wrote to him, saying,
- 1:52hey, your architecture doesn't quite make sense.
- 1:54So this is the director's cut of his theology in a way.
- 1:57In a way, yeah. These notes address specific
- 2:00criticisms he got after the original broadcasts, and in
- 2:03answering them he offers some of his most startling, almost
- 2:06sci-fi, speculations about the nature of God, the purpose of
- 2:10the physical universe, and the spiritual physics of humanity.
- 2:14Spiritual physics. I like that.
- 2:16So we're looking at 2 specific problems today then?
- 2:18We are the first one is a question of, well, efficiency
- 2:22and suffering. It asks a very plum question.
- 2:25If God's whole goal was to have sons, children who are like him,
- 2:29why did he go through the painful, long, messy process of
- 2:33creating biological humans and then trying to convert them?
- 2:36Why not just create perfect Suns from the start?
- 2:38That's. What he calls the toy soldier
- 2:39problem. That's the one.
- 2:40And the second problem is about us.
- 2:43How should we view the human race?
- 2:44Are we just collection of separate individuals like, I
- 2:47don't know, marbles in a bag? Or are we something else
- 2:50entirely? And that that leads us into a
- 2:52discussion on the devil's favorite strategy for social
- 2:55engineering. OK, so if I can frame the
- 2:58mission for this deep dive, we are hunting for those aha
- 3:03moments, those insights into the nature of God, the purpose of
- 3:07matter itself. I mean, why do we even have
- 3:09bodies and how to spot the enemy's traps in our Daily
- 3:14Politics and ethics? It really connects everything
- 3:16from the creation of the atom all the way down to how you
- 3:19treat your neighbor on the bus. Let's dive in.
- 3:21I want to start with that first question Lewis tackles.
- 3:23He calls it the toy soldier problem.
- 3:26And you mentioned he got this from a critic who wrote to him
- 3:29basically saying what God seems like a bad manager.
- 3:32That's a great. Way to put it.
- 3:33It's a fair challenge if you look at it from a purely human
- 3:35perspective of manufacturing, the critic asks.
- 3:39If God wanted sons, why create toy soldiers, which is Lewis's
- 3:43metaphor for natural, biological humans, and then bring them to
- 3:46life through such a difficult, painful process?
- 3:48Right, the critic is saying. Why build a tin soldier and then
- 3:51spend thousands of years trying to turn it into a real man?
- 3:54Why didn't you just start with the real man?
- 3:56It does seem like taking the long way around and a long way
- 3:59that's full of potholes and cancer and war and all kinds of
- 4:02suffering. You know, if I were a factory
- 4:03manager and I wanted to make cars, I wouldn't build a bicycle
- 4:061st and then just painfully hammer it into the shape of a I
- 4:09just built the car. That is the crux of the
- 4:11objection. Is God inefficient?
- 4:14And Louis breaks his answer down into two parts.
- 4:17There's what he calls the easy part, and then there's the hard
- 4:20part. And I should probably warn you,
- 4:21when Louis says hard, he means metaphysically hard.
- 4:25Let's start with the easy part then.
- 4:27I'm guessing easy is a relative term here.
- 4:29It is. The easy answer is that the
- 4:31process was never designed to be painful.
- 4:34The difficulty, the struggle, the suffering.
- 4:37That's not the manufacturing process God intended.
- 4:40That is the result of the human race turning away from God
- 4:43centuries ago. So this is the classic doctrine
- 4:46of the fall. The pain isn't part of the
- 4:48design. The pain is the interference.
- 4:50It's the monkey wrench in the gears.
- 4:52Precisely. Lewis argues that the turning of
- 4:56the tin soldier into a real man wasn't meant to be a horrific
- 4:59struggle. It was meant to be a joyful
- 5:01transformation by the tin soldiers.
- 5:03Us. We rebelled.
- 5:05And this brings us right to the topic of free will.
- 5:08OK. Lewis argues that God gave
- 5:10humanity free will because a world of mere automata robots
- 5:15essentially could never know infinite happiness or true love.
- 5:18We've talked about this in other contexts, but I think it's good
- 5:21to stress test it again. Why is a robot incapable of
- 5:24love? I mean, if I program my computer
- 5:26to print I love you every morning and it does it
- 5:28faithfully, why isn't that love? Because the computer had no
- 5:31choice. It could not have done
- 5:32otherwise. Love, by its very definition,
- 5:35requires the option not to love. If you hold the gun to someone's
- 5:39head and say marry me, well, the resulting marriage is not love,
- 5:42it's coercion. God decided that a world of free
- 5:45creatures, even with the inherent risk that they might
- 5:48rebel and break everything, that was worth more than a world of
- 5:51perfectly obedient well oiled machines.
- 5:54So the critics question assumes that the pain is God's
- 5:57inefficient method. But Lewis is saying no.
- 5:59The pain is what happens when the toy soldiers use their free
- 6:03will to March in the opposite direction of the commander.
- 6:06That's it. The inefficiency is our fault,
- 6:08not the manufacturers. So that's the easy part of the
- 6:12answer. It deals with the fall and the
- 6:14corruption of a good design. But then Louis pivots.
- 6:17He says, OK, let's look deeper. The critic asked why not just be
- 6:20get many sons at the outset. And this is where we get into
- 6:23the hard answer. This is where we leave, you
- 6:25know, the standard Sunday school curriculum and start walking
- 6:28into the philosophy department. It is, Louis points out, a
- 6:32fundamental doctrine that all Orthodox Christians agree on in
- 6:36the full and original sense. There was only one Son of God.
- 6:39That's the capital S Son, the second person of the Trinity,
- 6:42Jesus Christ, the eternal Word. Correct.
- 6:45Not a created being, but the begotten word.
- 6:48Now the critic is asking, could there have been many?
- 6:51Could God have just begotten, say 1,000,000 Jesus figures from
- 6:55eternity past? Why only one?
- 6:57It's a weird question when you say it out loud.
- 6:59Why didn't God clone Jesus a million times before the
- 7:03universe began? It is a weird question, and
- 7:06Lewis's response is fascinating because he doesn't just, you
- 7:09know, quote a Bible verse. He attacks the very grammar of
- 7:13the question itself. He asks if the words could have
- 7:16been even make sense when we apply them to God.
- 7:20OK, this is a heavy lift, so let's take it slow.
- 7:23When we talk about things in our world, finite created things, we
- 7:27can easily say this could have been different.
- 7:29Right, let's use Lewis's example.
- 7:31He talks about a printer, and he's in a person printing a
- 7:34book, not a machine. The letters on the page in front
- 7:36of you are black, but you could say they could have been red.
- 7:40Sure, that makes perfect. Sense.
- 7:41But why does it make sense? Why could they have been red?
- 7:43Well, because the printer could have decided to use red ink
- 7:45instead of black ink. And why would he have used red
- 7:48ink? Maybe his boss told him to, or
- 7:51maybe the shop was out of black ink that day, or he just felt
- 7:54like a change. Exactly.
- 7:56You can trace a chain of causes backwards, a finite thing.
- 8:00The black letter is the way it is because of previous thing.
- 8:02The choice of ink was the way it was.
- 8:04If you change the 'cause, you can change the effect.
- 8:07And that's why potentiality, the idea that something could be
- 8:09otherwise, makes perfect sense. For created things.
- 8:12Every fact in the universe is dependent on a previous fact.
- 8:16But God is not a created thing. And this is the massive
- 8:19distinction we so often miss. God is the uncreated Creator.
- 8:23He is what theologians sometimes called the ends, a say, the
- 8:26being who exists from himself. Lewis calls him the rock bottom
- 8:30irreducible fact. Rock bottom irreducible fact.
- 8:34I like that it feels very solid. It implies there's nothing
- 8:37underneath him, nothing holding him up.
- 8:38It's the most solid thing there is.
- 8:40There is no 'cause behind God. There's no factory that made God
- 8:43where we can go and ask, Hey Mr. Factory Foreman, why didn't you
- 8:46make God differently? Why didn't you give him 3 heads
- 8:48instead of making him a Trinity? Why didn't you make him, you
- 8:51know, Green? Because there is no foreman, he
- 8:53just is the IM. He is the source of all fact.
- 8:57He is the stopping point of all explanations.
- 9:00So asking could God have been different or could God have done
- 9:04this differently in his eternal nature is it's just nonsensical.
- 9:09It's like asking what is north of the North Pole.
- 9:12Once you get to the North Pole, there is no more north.
- 9:14It's just South in every direction.
- 9:15Once you get to God, there is no more.
- 9:16Why? It's a category error.
- 9:19You're treating the source of all facts as if it were just
- 9:22another fact that could be swapped out for a different one.
- 9:25God is what he is and that's the end of the matter.
- 9:28So when the critic asks why didn't God be get many sons from
- 9:31eternity, the first part of the hard answer is we are bumping up
- 9:35against the very definition of God.
- 9:37God is not a buffet where you can pick and choose attributes.
- 9:39So it's possible that the very nature of God, the logic of
- 9:43existence itself, means there can only be 1 begotten Son.
- 9:46It's not a choice, it's a fact. Lewis suggests we shouldn't be
- 9:50too quick to assume that anything is possible with God
- 9:53when it comes to logic. You know, nonsense remains
- 9:56nonsense even when we talk about God.
- 9:57But Louis doesn't even stop there.
- 9:59He goes even further into this idea of manyness.
- 10:03This is the part that, I'll be honest, it really made me sit up
- 10:06and just stare at the wall for a minute.
- 10:08He challenges us to think about what many even means.
- 10:11It's a profound mental exercise. Yeah, it's very simple, but it's
- 10:15very deep. Louis asks us to try and imagine
- 10:18the Father be getting many sons from eternity.
- 10:22Forget the theology for a second, just try to picture it
- 10:23logically. If there were many, how would
- 10:26they be different from 1:00? Another right?
- 10:27To have many of something to have a plural, you need to be
- 10:31able to tell them apart. You need to be able to say this
- 10:34is sun A and over there is sun B.
- 10:37Lewis uses this brilliant analogy of pennies.
- 10:39Imagine you have two pennies. They're both made of copper.
- 10:41They're both round. They both have the same image of
- 10:43Lincoln stamped on them. Let's say they're chemically
- 10:46identical down to the last atom. Why are they 2 pennies and not
- 10:51just one? Well, because they're in
- 10:53different places. One is here on the table and the
- 10:55other is, I don't know, in my pocket.
- 10:56OK, so space differentiates them.
- 10:59What else? Or I guess they're made of
- 11:00different atoms. This specific cluster of copper
- 11:03atoms is here, and that other cluster of copper atoms is
- 11:06there. Exactly, to differentiate 2
- 11:08identical things you usually need space and matter.
- 11:12You need a medium, what Lewis calls nature.
- 11:14To separate them you need to be able to say this one is at
- 11:17coordinate A and that one is at coordinate B.
- 11:19So if we try to apply this to God, we know the Father and the
- 11:23Son are distinct, but how? They aren't in different places
- 11:26because God doesn't have a body and doesn't exist in space.
- 11:29They're distinct by relation. The Father begets, the Son is
- 11:33begotten. That is a relational difference.
- 11:36It's like the difference between a speaker and the word that is
- 11:38spoken. They are part of one event, but
- 11:40the speaker is the source and the Word is the result.
- 11:43It doesn't require space or time to exist.
- 11:45It's an internal relationship within the Godhead.
- 11:48But if you try to introduce a third son for a million sons.
- 11:52Now you've got a problem. If you have a million sons, they
- 11:56all have the exact same relation to the Father, they're all
- 12:01begotten, and they'll have the same relation to each other.
- 12:03They're all siblings without space to stand in or bodies to
- 12:07make them distinct. What makes sun #4 different from
- 12:10Sun number 99? There's no basis for
- 12:12distinction. They would just collapse into
- 12:14one, the Begotten. Unless you introduce a medium to
- 12:18separate them. Unless you create a universe of
- 12:21space and time where they can stand apart from each other.
- 12:24And this is what Lewis calls the smuggling fallacy.
- 12:27He says we fool ourselves. We think we can imagine many
- 12:30eternal spirits, but we're cheating.
- 12:33We are. Absolutely cheating.
- 12:34We're smuggling in a picture of, say, human form standing in a
- 12:38room. We imagine a heavenly council or
- 12:41group of ghosts floating in the clouds.
- 12:43But the moment you imagine them standing next to each other.
- 12:46You've smuggled in space. You've smuggled in space.
- 12:48You've smuggled in the very universe you were supposed to be
- 12:51doing without. You're picturing a background, a
- 12:54stage. Exactly.
- 12:55Try to imagine 2 distinct minds that have no body, no location,
- 13:00no relationship to time, and they have identical origins and
- 13:03an identical nature. It's impossible.
- 13:05You can't separate them in your mind if.
- 13:06You strip away space and you strip away matter.
- 13:09The idea of manyness, just sort of It fades.
- 13:12It becomes just a word with no meaning behind it.
- 13:15And this leads to Louis's great speculation.
- 13:18And we have to emphasize, as he does, that this is guesswork.
- 13:21He's not stating. This is dogma.
- 13:23Yeah. This is him thinking out loud.
- 13:25He asks, was nature, was space-time and matter created
- 13:29precisely in order to make many nests possible?
- 13:32That is a staggering thought. We usually think of the universe
- 13:35as the stage, and we're the actors.
- 13:37The stage is just, you know, there.
- 13:39So we have somewhere to stand, but Lewis is suggesting the
- 13:42universe might be the machinery required to create distinct
- 13:44personalities in the first place.
- 13:46The theory is that perhaps the only way for God to have many
- 13:49sons, many distinct spirits, is to first make many natural
- 13:54creatures in a physical universe.
- 13:56You put them in different bodies, at different times, in
- 13:58different places. That separates them.
- 14:01It gives each one a unique history and the unique
- 14:04perspective. So my meanest the fact that I am
- 14:07me and not you is dependent on the fact that I was born in a
- 14:11specific year in a specific town with the specific genetic code,
- 14:16and I occupy this specific chair right now.
- 14:19And then once they are separate, once they're individuals, then
- 14:23you spiritualize them, you bring them into the family, you hand
- 14:25them the Christ life, as Lewis puts it, It's like.
- 14:29It's like casting a statue. You need a mold.
- 14:31The physical world is the mold. It separates the molten metal
- 14:34into a specific shape. Without the mold you just have a
- 14:37puddle of bronze. That's a perfect analogy.
- 14:39You can't just create the spiritual Suns from scratch in
- 14:42the void because they'd all be identical.
- 14:44You have to grow them in the soil of space and time to make
- 14:47them distinct, and then you harvest them, so to speak.
- 14:50This changes how I look at the physical world.
- 14:52It's not just a temporary holding cell we're waiting to
- 14:55escape from. It is the individuating machine,
- 14:58my body, my location in the 21st century, my specific set of
- 15:02experiences. These aren't accidental details.
- 15:05They're the very things that make me me and not you.
- 15:07And it gives a tremendous dignity to the physical
- 15:11creation. You know, think of Gnosticism,
- 15:13that ancient heresy. It taught that the spirit is
- 15:16good and matter is evil. They thought we were souls
- 15:19trapped in these meat suits and we needed to escape, right?
- 15:21Lewis is flipping that completely.
- 15:24He's saying matter might be the necessary tool for creating
- 15:27spiritual distinctiveness. You need the toy soldier stage,
- 15:31the tin soldier, the biological human, to create the distinct
- 15:34person who can then freely receive the life of God.
- 15:36So if that critic asks again, why the long way around?
- 15:40Why the biological evolution, the history of the bodies?
- 15:42The answer might be there is no other way to get a million
- 15:45distinct sons. You have to start with a million
- 15:47distinct creatures in space and time.
- 15:49It's a fascinating defense of the necessity of creation
- 15:52itself. It suggests that God isn't being
- 15:55inefficient. He's doing the only thing that
- 15:58logically works. I want to just pause there
- 16:00because that is a lot to digest. We've gone from the critics
- 16:03saying God is slow to realizing God is building a complexity
- 16:07engine called the universe just so he can have a relationship
- 16:10with you specifically. It makes the personal
- 16:13relationship with God actually personal and meaningful.
- 16:16He doesn't just love humanity in the abstract.
- 16:18He loves you. The specific unrepeatable result
- 16:22of this specific history. I want to bridge this to the
- 16:24second note Lewis includes because it feels like a natural
- 16:27progression. It moves from this huge cosmic
- 16:29scale right down to the social scale.
- 16:32So we've established that God uses the physical universe to
- 16:35create distinct individuals. But now how do those individuals
- 16:39relate to each other? This is where Lewis tackles the
- 16:41concept of the human race as an Organism.
- 16:44He makes a distinction between a collection and an Organism.
- 16:47This is so helpful because I think we often get this
- 16:49completely wrong. We talk about society or the
- 16:51public, but those are really vague terms.
- 16:54They are. We tend to think of the human
- 16:56race as a club or a crowd, a collection.
- 16:59Like a bag of marbles. Or, to stick with our earlier
- 17:03analogy, a stack of tennies. In a collection, the items are
- 17:06separate. You can add one or take one
- 17:08away, and it doesn't fundamentally change the others.
- 17:11If I lose a penny from my stack, the other pennies don't feel it.
- 17:15They don't change their nature, their independent units.
- 17:17But Lewis says Christianity views the human race as
- 17:20something more like a tree or a body, one huge Organism.
- 17:25And this brings us back to that penny analogy, but with a
- 17:28brilliant twist. Lewis says.
- 17:30Look at 6 pennies. They are quite separate, but
- 17:33they are very much alike. They're identical for all
- 17:35intents and purposes. But now consider my nose and my
- 17:38lungs. They are part of the same body.
- 17:40They share a common life. They're connected by the same
- 17:42blood supply. But they are very, very
- 17:45different. A nose looks nothing like a
- 17:47lung, and a lung looks nothing like a hand.
- 17:50You couldn't mistake them. And here is the counterintuitive
- 17:53principle he pulls from that things that are parts of a
- 17:56single Organism must be different in order to function
- 17:59together. Things that are not parts of an
- 18:02Organism, like pennies in a stack, can be identical.
- 18:05So real unity actually requires difference.
- 18:08If everything is the same, you don't have a body, you have a
- 18:11pile of spare parts. You know, if I have a bag full
- 18:14of eyeballs, that's not a body, that's a horror movie.
- 18:16That's a great way of putting it.
- 18:18A body requires a nose, an eye, a foot, a liver.
- 18:22They have to be different to be 1, and this defines the
- 18:25Christian view of the individual.
- 18:27Christianity doesn't view you as just an item on a list person
- 18:30#4,502,000,000 It views you as an organ in a body.
- 18:35You are intended to be different from me because you have a
- 18:37different function. You are meant to contribute
- 18:40something that no one else can. This is so important for how we
- 18:43view our relationships and honestly our politics because we
- 18:46are constantly falling into errors here.
- 18:48We seem to bounce between two extremes.
- 18:50We either want everyone to be the same, or we want absolutely
- 18:53nothing to do with anyone else. And this is where Lewis gives us
- 18:56a brilliant piece of advice on spiritual warfare.
- 18:59He talks about the twin errors. He identifies 2 opposites,
- 19:03totalitarianism and individualism.
- 19:06Let's define those first, because these words get thrown
- 19:08around a lot in the news, but Lewis is using them in a very
- 19:10specific philosophical sense. Totalitarianism in this context
- 19:15is the error of wanting to suppress differences.
- 19:18It's the penny mindset applied to people.
- 19:20It wants everyone to look alike, think alike, and act alike.
- 19:24It forgets that we are supposed to be different organs.
- 19:26It's the state or the church or the culture saying you must fit
- 19:29this mold exactly. It's the pressure to conform.
- 19:32Be another brick in the wall. Right.
- 19:34It values the whole, but it crushes the parts.
- 19:37And individualism is the opposite error.
- 19:40It's a mindset that says I am separate.
- 19:42Your troubles are no business of mine.
- 19:44I am an island, my religion is private, my life is my own.
- 19:48It forgets that we belong to the same Organism.
- 19:51So totalitarianism forgets we're different organs.
- 19:54Individualism forgets we're in the same body.
- 19:56Precisely. And here is the trap.
- 19:58This is the key insight. Lewis warns that the devil sends
- 20:02errors into the world in pairs. He sends them in pairs of
- 20:05opposites. This is such a great tactical
- 20:07insight. We usually think the devil just
- 20:09tries to sell US evil, but Lewis says he sells US false choices.
- 20:12He. Relies on your reaction.
- 20:15He knows you might have a natural, healthy dislike for
- 20:17totalitarianism. You hate the idea of being just
- 20:20a cog in a machine. You want freedom.
- 20:23So he uses that justifiable dislike to push you hard into
- 20:27individualism. He says, see the collective is
- 20:30bad so you should just care about yourself.
- 20:32Forget the community, be a lone wolf.
- 20:34Or if you're a person who sees the incredible selfishness of
- 20:37individualism, you see people ignoring the poor, you see
- 20:40people acting with total greed. The devil sidles up to you and
- 20:43says, see, that's terrible. Individual freedom is dangerous.
- 20:46What we need is to force everyone to be the same.
- 20:48We need strict control. And he pushes you toward
- 20:50totalitarianism. He effectively herds the human
- 20:53race. He encourages us to spend all of
- 20:56our energy and time debating which error is worse.
- 20:59As long as we are fighting about whether totalitarianism is worse
- 21:02than individualism or vice versa, we're distracted.
- 21:06We are playing his game. We are running back and forth on
- 21:09the deck of a sinking ship, arguing about which side is
- 21:12leaking more. It's like a pendulum.
- 21:14We swing from one extreme to the other, generation after
- 21:16generation, thinking we're correcting the problem, but
- 21:19really we're just trading 1 error for another.
- 21:21We see this in history all the time, don't we?
- 21:23A generation of extreme collectivism is often followed
- 21:27by a generation of extreme individualism.
- 21:29And the Christian goal, Lewis says, is not to choose the
- 21:32lesser of two evils. The goal is to go straight
- 21:34through between them. We have no concern with either
- 21:37extreme. So we need to hold 2 truths in
- 21:39tension at the same time. You are unique, created for a
- 21:43specific purpose, and that fights totalitarianism.
- 21:46And you are part of a whole deeply responsible for your
- 21:49neighbor, and that fights individualism.
- 21:51That is the biblical understanding of the covenant
- 21:53community. We are individuals, yes,
- 21:56standing before God on our own 2 feet.
- 21:58But we are also a people. We are a body.
- 22:01We cannot exist without the other parts.
- 22:04I want to apply this to our daily lives.
- 22:06Lewis mentions how we treat our children or our neighbors.
- 22:09He says when you find yourself wanting to turn your children or
- 22:12pupils or even your neighbors into people exactly like
- 22:16yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be
- 22:19that. That is a real conviction for a
- 22:21lot of us. I think it's natural to want
- 22:24people to agree with this. We want them to have our tastes
- 22:26or politics or specific theological nuances.
- 22:29It feels safer. But if I try to make you into a
- 22:32carbon copy of me, I'm fighting against God's design.
- 22:35I'm trying to turn a lung into a nose because I happen to be a
- 22:38nose. And I think noses are the best
- 22:40kind of organ. And if you succeed, you've
- 22:41actually damaged the body. A body with two noses and no
- 22:44lungs is in big trouble. It can smell everything, but it
- 22:47can't breathe. Exactly.
- 22:49We should celebrate the fact that our neighbor is different.
- 22:52That difference is not a bug, It is a feature of the design.
- 22:55It's essential for the Organism to live.
- 22:58But then on the flip side, when we're tempted to say, you know,
- 23:01that person's problems are their own fault, it's not my business,
- 23:04we are falling right into the other track.
- 23:06We are acting like the hand, saying to the foot, I don't need
- 23:09you. You stepped in the mud, you deal
- 23:10with it. But if the foot gets gangrene,
- 23:13the hand is going to die too. We are connected.
- 23:15The spiritual reality of the human race is unity, even if we
- 23:19don't feel it emotionally all the time.
- 23:21So bringing this all back together, from the cosmic
- 23:24speculation about manyness all the way down to the practical
- 23:27advice about not being a totalitarian or individualist,
- 23:30there's a really clear common thread.
- 23:33The thread is God's intentional design.
- 23:36He doesn't do things haphazardly.
- 23:38He didn't create toy soldiers because he likes watching us
- 23:41suffer. He created a physical universe
- 23:43because it might be the only logical way to generate distinct
- 23:46sons who can love him freely. And he doesn't create the human
- 23:50race as just a random collection, He created an
- 23:53Organism where our very different serves our unity.
- 23:57It reframes everything. My struggles, my physical
- 24:01limitations, my difficult neighbors.
- 24:03None of this is accidental. It is all part of the process of
- 24:07becoming a sun and part of the function of the body.
- 24:10It creates A worldview that is both humble and high at the same
- 24:14time. Humble because I'm just one
- 24:16organ. I'm not the whole show.
- 24:18I'm just a thumb or maybe an eyelash.
- 24:20But also high because I am an organ in the body of Christ.
- 24:24I have a specific, unique role that no one else in history can
- 24:27play. If I don't do my part, the body
- 24:29suffers for it. That is, the definition of
- 24:31dignity, isn't? It it is, and it guards US
- 24:33against the kind of polarization we see everywhere in the world.
- 24:36The world wants you to pick a side.
- 24:37Collectivism or hyper individualism.
- 24:39The gospel says no. You are a unique child of God
- 24:42called into a sacrificial community.
- 24:44It gets right through the middle of that false choice.
- 24:46And it is so much harder to walk that middle path than to just
- 24:49slide down into one of the ditches on either side.
- 24:51It's always harder to walk the ridgeline, but that's where the
- 24:54view is and that's where the truth is.
- 24:57I just want to circle back to that smuggling fallacy one more
- 24:59time before we wrap up. I think it is such a useful tool
- 25:03for you listening not just for theology but for thinking in
- 25:06general. It's a great tool for critical
- 25:07thinking whenever you're thinking about spiritual
- 25:10realities. Angels, heaven, the nature of
- 25:13God. You have to ask yourself, am I
- 25:15smuggling in space and time without realizing it?
- 25:18Am I imagining God is just a big man in the sky?
- 25:21Am I imagining Heaven is just earth with fluffier clouds and
- 25:25better lighting? Lewis is constantly pushing us
- 25:28to strip away those sensory metaphors to get to the logical
- 25:31core of the thing. And when we do that with this
- 25:33manyness problem, we realize how limited our minds are.
- 25:37We realize that time and space are not absolute containers that
- 25:41God sits inside of. They are things he invented like
- 25:44a painter invents a canvas. And he invented them for a
- 25:47purpose. To make you possible.
- 25:49That is a showstopper of a thought.
- 25:51It really is. As we closeout, I want to try
- 25:53and synthesize this for you because you might be feeling a
- 25:56bit dizzy from all the metaphysics.
- 25:58We've covered a lot of ground, from the printing press to the
- 26:01North Pole to the Physiology of lungs mirror.
- 26:04Let's boil it down to the essentials.
- 26:06OK .1 the pain and struggle of life are largely due to the fall
- 26:10or rebellion, but the physical universe itself, the fact that
- 26:14we're biological creatures in space and time, that is
- 26:18necessary. It isn't a mistake, it is the
- 26:20machine God uses to create distinct individuals.
- 26:23Right. Without the mold of nature, we
- 26:26would be indistinguishable spiritual blobs.
- 26:28There'd be no you. .2 We are not just a collection of individuals
- 26:32like pennies in a jar. We are an Organism.
- 26:35We are biologically and spiritually connected.
- 26:37Parts of a single body. And .3 because we are an
- 26:40Organism, we must be different, and we should stop trying to
- 26:42force everyone to be the same. That's totalitarianism.
- 26:45But we should also stop pretending we are uncontacted,
- 26:47connected. That's individualism.
- 26:49We have to reject the devil's false choices.
- 26:52We don't pick the lesser of two evils.
- 26:54We walk the path of the body of Christ, which is unity and
- 26:58diversity. It's deep theology, but it has
- 27:01immediate application for how I look at myself in the mirror and
- 27:04how I look at the person sitting across from me on the bus.
- 27:07That's the beauty of Lewis. He starts with the Trinity and
- 27:11he ends with how to treat your neighbor.
- 27:14He shows that your ethics are completely driven by your
- 27:16metaphysics. What you really believe about
- 27:19God changes how you treat people.
- 27:22I want to leave you with a final thought to chew on.
- 27:24This week, we talked about Lewis's speculation that space
- 27:27and matter might exist solely to allow you to be distinct from
- 27:31God and from your neighbor. A tentative guess, as he says,
- 27:34but a powerful one. If that is true, or even close
- 27:37to true, then your physical body, your height, your age,
- 27:40your location, your gender, even your physical limitations.
- 27:43They aren't just temporary vessels or accidental cages.
- 27:46There are the very definition of your unique selfhood.
- 27:49They are the tools God used to carve you out of the block of
- 27:52potentiality. That's right, you are not a
- 27:54ghost wrapped in a machine. You are a person being forged.
- 27:58So what does that mean for how you treat your physical life
- 28:01today? If your body is the very
- 28:03mechanism of your uniqueness, maybe we should stop resenting
- 28:07it and start seeing it as the gift that makes us possible.
- 28:11And seeing our neighbor's body and their situation with that
- 28:14same reverence, they are being forged too.
- 28:17Exactly, Thank you for diving deep with us today.
- 28:20This was a workout, but a good one.
- 28:22A pleasure as always. Keep thinking, keep reading, and
- 28:24we will see you on the next deep dive.