Theology

Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean you have a lot of wrong ones – bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

Theology – the science of God. Lewis describes it as a map. Yes, standing on the coast looking at the ocean might be a better experience than looking at a map of the ocean, but this cannot replace the map which is based on what hundreds, even thousands, of people have observed while exploring the ocean. In fact, if you want to experience more of the ocean than the coast, you must have a map.

…you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way [via a map]. And you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music.

You won’t get anywhere by merely looking at maps; looking at a map is not the same as going out to sea, and you will not be safe at sea without a map. So it is with theology.

Many of the novelties of today are nothing more than rehashes of what theologians have addressed and dealt with centuries before, even in the earliest days of the Church. Yet, many ignore the map:

To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression – like believing the earth is flat.

We see it today, in the “intellectuals” who want the good, moral teaching of Jesus without the blood of Jesus. Yes, living in the moral teaching will lead to a happier life and a happier world, but one can say the same of the philosophies of many philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Confucious.

If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years.

Christianity means something different, something more: Christ is the Son of God, those who trust in Him can become sons of God, and His death saved us from our sins (the Eastern Church might add something to this) – whatever these things mean.

There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.

One of these difficult statements is that Christ is begotten, not created. To beget is to become the father of; to create is to make.

Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man.

Lewis labels man, in his natural condition, as Bios; the spiritual sense he labels Zoe. Bios has a resemblance to Zoe, but only in the way that there is a relationship between a photo and a place.

A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.

And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

Lewis sees theology as quite practical. The entire purpose for which we live is to be taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about God will make it harder (in Lewis’s words); it seems to me that too many wrong ideas about God would make it impossible – after all, worshiping the wrong God is the worst of sins.

The first theological issue for Christianity was to understand just what, and who, Jesus was. Shortly after His ascension, the earliest Church Fathers began grappling with this question. Here was a man who claimed to be God, yet He could not be simply dismissed as a lunatic.

As they worked it out, they came to the three-person God (and, as we have seen in Boyarin, this idea of a two-person God was already carrying reasonable weight within Jewish circles in the centuries both before and after Jesus Christ).

Then there is the question of time. Just how does time relate to God? The theologians worked out that some things are outside of time. Lewis offers that “almost certainly” God is outside of time, but I think this can be changed to “certainly.” God’s “life” does not consist in a series of moments. Every moment is always available to Him; all of our history is always present to Him.

Per Lewis, to have a history means change – one has lost part of his reality, and does not yet have another part of his reality. This is not possible for God.

And in this way Lewis gets past the question of God’s foreknowledge and our free will. On this, there is no contradiction as long as we don’t trap God in a timeline. What we call “tomorrow” is just as “now” for God as our “today” is – He is already in “tomorrow” just as He is already in every point of the timeline. God doesn’t “remember” something we did yesterday; he simply sees us doing these things.

Conclusion

Lewis recognizes that this idea of God outside of time might not be helpful for everyone, however he is dealing with objections that many raise. If one doesn’t find this idea helpful in some way, leave it be. I know for me, something along these lines was very helpful on many theological issues: time is part of Creation, and, inherently, God is not in Creation.

…it is not in the Bible or in any of the creeds. You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all.