C. S. Lewis on Transposition

On Pentecost 1944 C. S. Lewis delivered a message he titled "Transposition." He provides an apologetic against claims that the heavenlies are merely a human conception, since they are described by purely natural things. "If we have really been visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than seelctions from terrestrial experience (crowns, thrones, and music), that devotion can find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old, familiar act of eating and drinking?" (The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses [San Francisco: Harper, 1980], 94).

In his defense of the use of natural imagery in the Scriptures, he first details how our varied emotions (the "higher medium") may be "transposed" into physical sensations of, say, tears or trembling (the "lower medium"). The tears are not the joy or grief itself; to be absolutely identified by weeping itself is to say grief and joy are one and the same. At the same time, however, these emotions are never experienced or tangible to us apart from the sensations into which they're "transposed." In like fashion, pictures aren't merely symbolic of the material world as transposed onto paper or paint. They are not simply signs or symbols that only correlate only by convention, as spoken and written words do.

Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only be being part of it. Their visibility has the same source. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. . . . It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified [in this example, light] is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental. (p. 102)

I know this is getting long, but bear with me. His coup-de-grace is pure genius, lifting us into wonder at the possibilities of stark, joy-bringing realities of heaven--realities which for now are only known to us by crowns, thrones, music, and the like.

Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. "But," she gasps, "you didn't think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?" "What?" says the boy. "No pencil marks there?" And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition--the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. "We know not what we shall be" [1 John 3:2]; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

You can put it whichever way you please. You can say that by Transposition our humanity, senses and all, can be made the vehicle of beatitude. Or you can say that the heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal experience. But the second way is the better. It is the present life which is the diminution, the symbol, the etiolated, the (as it were) "vegetarian" substitute. If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom [1 Corinthians 15:50], that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too "illustrious with being." They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal. (pp. 109-11)

For eyes to see

Do you think, perhaps, that heaven really is here right now? I mean, we seem to think of heaven as some sort of upper sphere of the cosmos, separated from the terra firma like layers on a cake. This is not without warrant; Revelation 21:3 says that "I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God." But doesn't it seem rather Manichean or Gnostic of us to think that the spiritual perfection where God dwells is completely distinct from the material earth?* And could it be that when the Bible speaks of the skies as the heavens, perhaps it's not merely symbolic?

We know that "now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Saint Paul prays that the Father of glory "may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened" (Eph. 1:17 -8). That is to say, there's a whole lot we cannot yet see or sense.

Our eyes can only pick up a narrow range of the total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Far from being able to see infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, X rays, and the like, we base our realities on what we can see with the paltry assortment of rods and cones in our eyes. When the eyes of our hearts are regnerated, when our sin-plagued, mortal bodies are swallowed up by life (Rom. 8:18-25; 2 Cor. 5:1-5), we'll see so much more--all the deep, shimmering realities that yet lie hidden to our senses.

We also can't see gases, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And when we can "see" them, it's only when the sky acts as a prism to refract certain wavelengths of the sun's light to us. How the skies appear depends on the angle and intensity of the sunlight reaching it. Illuminated by the very luminescence of God himself (Isa. 60:19-20; Rev. 22:5), will we see that the gases that fill the "heavens" are those same ones that we inhale every moment of our lives and that God turned out to be with us all along?

Now I don't mean to get all sappy or to throw out the Bible. But I sometimes wonder, what more is there? (Seriously, I need to get around to posting some quotes from C. S. Lewis' essay "Transposition".)

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*The philosophies of Manichaeism and Gnosticism arose out of the erroneous belief that matter was inherently corrupt and evil, as opposed to the good and pure immaterial spirit.

More thoughts on the Sacraments

"Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him--to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ. Amen." (Romans 16:25-7)

When I read through this passage at the tail end of Romans this morning, I recognized that this passage is speaking of the gospel proclaimed and "made known through the prophetic writings." But then I thought of another proclamation: the Lord's Supper. In 1 Corinthians 11:26 Paul says that "whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." If you connect the dots, the Supper is also a proclamation of the gospel that would serve to effectively "strengthen and preserve [us] in the one true faith unto life everlasting," using the words of the Lutheran liturgy. After all, it is a sign of the atoning death of Christ, a "visible gospel" tangible to our senses in the bread and wine. It says, "As truly as this bread and wine are real and give you life by being in you, so too do you have within you life by union to the crucified and risen Lord."

But it's not just the Lord's death that is proclaimed; it's also his resurrection and the consummation of the kingdom and our redemption. Note that little phrase "until he comes." Jesus talks of the meal as something to be shared again upon its fulfillment in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:14-18). Whenever we share this meal, we are (or ought to be) aware and expectant of the resurrection that followed Jesus' tomb and, by virtue of our union to him and participation in him through this meal, our own resurrection as well. Maybe this is why Catholics sing the mysterion before the Eucharist: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again"--an eager expectation of the coming wedding feast of the Lamb.

Finally--and here's where stuff gets way weird and theologically deep--we baptize children as a sign and seal of "our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace" (Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 94), right? Baptism incorporates us into the body of Christ, the church. And because Christ died for all people and gives us new birth by grace, not by physical, intellectual, or spiritual maturity, we baptize children. "And truly, Christ has shed his blood no less for washing little children of believers than he did for adults" (Belgic Confession, article 34). "Infants as well as adults are in God's covenant and are his people. They, no less than adults, are promised the forgiveness of sin through Christ's blood and the Holy Spirit who produces faith" (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 27).

So here's my question: ought we also allow children to share in the Supper? After all, if baptism seals or guarantees what it represents: "partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace," and such benefits include the gospel-confirming, faith-strengthening Supper, ought we not deny children this very benefit? Yes, Scripture says we are to "recognize" or "discern" the body of the Lord in the Supper (1 Cor. 11:29). But I'm not sure this has as much to do with consubstantiation as with the visible fellowship of the church in the Supper: "Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of one loaf" (1 Cor. 10:17). Would a little girl who loves Jesus and knows that Jesus loves her see everyone else communing at the Table and wonder, Why am I not allowed to take part? Didn't her baptism make her part of the body, the one loaf of which others partake?

Why Evangelicals Can't Write

In an entry on the Reformed Credenda/Agenda online magazine (http://credenda.org) titled “Why Evangelicals Can’t Write,” [1] writer Peter Leithart laments the lack of literary genius from Western Protestants. The reason he cites: the disappearance of real sacramental theology from Protestantism. He brings up the 1529 Colloquy of Marburg, where Lutherans and Zwinglians (from whom the Reformed and Anabaptist understandings of Baptism and the Supper stemmed) split over—of all things—the “real presence” of Christ in the Communion elements.

For many post-Marburg Protestants, literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods, and they definitely inhabit different academic departments.

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism. …

In contrast to this Christian affirmation of the cosmos, [Roman Catholic author Flannery] O'Connor saw Manichean impulses behind the modern denigration of material reality, and believed this made fiction writing almost impossible: "The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so much an incarnational art." …

Symbols separated from reality and reduced, as they are in much Protestant theology, to "mere signs," cannot do anything, whether in reality or in fiction. They exist as sheer ornament, or, at best, as pointers to some something in some real realm of reality that can do something. But if this is so, then the moment of grace, whether in fiction or reality, never enters this world, into the realm of what-is. Without a sacramental theology, and specifically a theology of sacramental action, Protestant writers cannot do justice to this world or show that this world is the theater of God's redeeming action. …

The renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins in worship. The renewal of literature, like the renewal of the world, begins from the pulpit, to be sure. But the pulpit will renew literature only when it is nestled where it should be nestled, between the font and the table.

Raised in an ecumenical Catholic and Lutheran family and now drifting to and from Reformed understandings, I’ve been met with myriad understandings of the Sacraments (and I mean the only two instituted by our Lord, Baptism and the Supper): known respectively as transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and, for lack of a better word, signification. And to think: as the Western (Catholic) Church separated from the Eastern (Orthodox) over the matter of from whom in the Godhead the Holy Spirit proceeds (i.e., whether he proceeds from both the Father and Son, or from only the Father through the Son), so did the Lutherans and Zwinglians part ways over exactly how it is we receive grace and fellowship with the risen Christ in a cake of bread and a cup of wine.

But Marburg really wasn’t about an inconsequential speck of doctrinal dust. Indeed, the whole of history “plays” at the Table. [2] All the thoughts upon literature and Flannery O’Connor aside (and I just picked up a copy of her complete short stories, which I’m eagerly looking forward to reading this year), the Incarnation is a reality, and whenever we encounter God in this life and the next, it’s bodily, through the raw stuff of this world. I love my edition of the vivid Bible paraphrase The Message: its cover pictures the boards of a splintering, white-washed wall, not glittering gold-leaf embellishments.

I think this is affirmed on a number of levels: (1) The third person of the Trinity is denoted by the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek pneuma. "Both terms mean, specificially, moved and moving air; they mean breath or wind, probably also storm" [3].

(2) God chooses first not to reveal himself in the Old Testament as some sort of esoteric body of knowledge or a Divine Consciousness or something like that, but he comes as a pillar of fire, a cloud of water vapor. His shekinah glory actually shines like the sun; it’s no mere illustration. The psalmist speaks of God’s voice as thunder (Psalms 18, 29). It’s not that God only used these things as inspired imagery; God actually came to people in these ways, as he met godly men in a burning bush or in a storm atop Sinai or in a gentle blowing (or as in the KJV's beautiful rendering, a "still small voice").

(3) God is revealed fully and satisfactorily in becoming the enfleshed Word dwelling among us (John 1:1-3, 14, 18), living a fully human life in a body that breathed, slept, and bled. Jesus said, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” Perplexed, his disciple Philip asks him to show them the Father. What was Jesus' reply? “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:7-9).

(4) That we are all held accountable to God’s self-revelation is true, but through what medium? Spirit? Knowledge? Nay—matter. “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:19-20, emphasis mine).

(5) God’s main chosen vehicle of revelation is not in some sort of euphoric vision, but in plain ol’ words on a page: scripture. As Scripture is read aloud in human words, God even takes on a human voice. (As an aside, this is part of why I believe biblical “tongues” are intelligible but foreign languages that can be interpreted for others’ benefit, as at Pentecost, not some sort of Spiritual gibberish a la Billy Madison.)

(6) Even the “higher emotions” of life—and surely those of life with God—be they joy, love, grief, relief, etc., are never ours apart from some sort of physical, bodily component. Neurotransmitters like adrenalin and dopamine are released; electric impulses trigger our sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems; our blood pressure climbs or ebbs. We perspire or go dizzy. [4]

I don’t know yet where I precisely stand concerning the sacraments (though I’ve been tiptoeing from Calvinistic Reformed [as opposed to Zwinglian] toward the Lutheran understanding), but it’s undeniable that God can be known apart from mediation through matter. To ask God that we come to him apart from his written and spoken Word, apart from human contact, apart from sunrise and vale, font and table, is to seek God not in truth nor on his own terms, but it is to seek the spirit of the world, avoiding the humble, avoiding the cross. Such will be only an exercise in futility; he does not promise to meet us otherwise. Now if only God would reveal himself through baseball!

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[1] http://credenda.org/issues/18-2liturgia.php; accessed 23 August 2006.

[2] Ref. Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).

[3] Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1963), 53.

[4] See C. S. Lewis’s amazing essay Transposition. (Then again, aren’t all his essays amazing?) Relevant excerpts shall likely be forthcoming on this blog.

A cruciform city plan

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sir Gallahad the Chaste stumbles upon Castle Anthrax and sees above it a vision of the holy grail, the cup of Our Lord's last supper. Upon entering its gates, one of the nuns living there sorrowfully exclaims, "Oh, bad, bad Zoot! She must've set alight to our grail-shaped beacon again." As funny as the movie is, it's not far from the truth that the light of the church, the "city upon a hill", must illumine the Cup of Christ: the new and eternal covenant in his blood.

"No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known." (John 1:18)

"To be sure, he [Christ] was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God's power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God's power we will live with him to serve you." (2 Cor. 13:4)

I've begun studying "Second" Corinthians (actually Paul's fourth letter to Corinth) out of the desire that God will graciously guide my roommates and I this year into true knowledge of him and that we'd serve him rightly in making known the message of reconciliation. Two related quotes have recently stood out to me, embracing how truly we must embrace a "cruciform" existence if we are to actually communicate the gospel in truth, not as false peddlers.

The first is from British Anglican pastor-scholar N. T. Wright's book The Challenge of Jesus (London: SPCK, 2000), as found on my buddy Ryan's Web site.

"When we speak about 'following Christ,' it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was simply not the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known.

"And when therefore we speak of shaping our world, we do not--we dare not--simply treat the cross as the thing that saves us 'personally,' but which can be left behind when we get on with the job. The task of shaping our world is best understood as the redemptive task of bringing the achievement of the cross to bear upon the world, and in that task the methods, as well as the message, must be cross-shaped through and through" (pp. 94-5).

Over sixty years earlier, German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw equally strongly the need for the body of Christ on Earth to display not glory alone in letting our light shine before men, but the glory of the cross and "the light of the Resurrection":

"Men are not to see the disciples but their good works, says Jesus. And these works are nothing other than those which the Lord Jesus himself has created in them by calling them to be the light of the world under the shadow of his cross. The good works are poverty, peregrination, meekness, peaceableness, and finally persecution and rejection. All these good works are a bearing of the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the strange light which alone illuminates these good works of the disciples. . . . It is by seeing the cross and the community beneath it that men come to believe in God. But that is the light of the Resurrection" (The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Muller, rev. ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1959], 133-4).

Dear Lamb of God, may we come to know the very heart of our Father through your sufferings and death, and in this, so know his love for the world more deeply, compelling us to die to ourselves to bring life to the others in our spheres. Amen.