Thesis question articulation IX: Summary

Summary
Series begins back here.
The project is pointedly contemporary in its focus. The perception of inexorable threats to the future of industrial society as it is presently known is the dark background against which we will explore the possibility (and possibilities) of faithful Christian moral thought. However, the deeper issues are in one sense perennial. The fragility and temporariness of political and social orders may be closer to the surface at times, but it is never so distant as to be irrelevant.

Inhabiting the collective imagination of many Westerners are apocalyptic images drawn not least from the Bible and Hollywood. For those familiar with the alarming statistics concerning ecological damage to the health of the biosphere, it does not take much effort to picture a cascading series of systemic failures, increasingly widespread shortages in the material conditions required for daily life, a breakdown in civil order and rapid descent into violence and chaos. How can moral thought avoid being paralysed or oversimplified by such apocalyptic nightmares?

There is some similarity between my question and the one adopted by C. S. Lewis in his address “Learning in War Time”. Lewis was speaking to an incoming group of undergraduate students in Oxford about the possibility and importance of any kind of reflection in the bleak period following the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939. He noted the threats to the possibility of learning and articulated both philosophical and Christian reasons for both the necessity and possibility of learning even in war time. My question is both narrower (asking after only ecclesial moral attentiveness) and has what may be a less pressing, but even darker background.
This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

Inside and outside: take a second look

"[...] if we are to understand a great religion it is always first of all necessary to that we should find out, not merely what its formularies are, but what it has meant in the experience of those who follow it. That is the only way in which we can pronounce judgement on it. The man who stands outside of a religion altogether, and merely criticises its theological formularies, is like a blind man attempting to pronounce judgement upon pictures from hearsay. If, for example, a man should repudiate the doctrine of the Trinity simply on the ground that it clashes with his own mathematical conceptions, without ever inquiring how it has come about that people quite as mathematical as himself have none the less felt driven by their experience to formulate their belief in this way, he is like a blind man who should deny the possibility of perspective on the ground that pictures are painted in two dimensions."

- William Temple, The Kingdom of God, 1-2.

Of course it is possible to know something of things from the outside, indeed, sometimes one must be outside to see the whole in a particular way. However, what Archbishop Temple is pointing out is that the converse is also true: sometimes one must be inside an experience to know what terms used to describe that experience mean. To use an example from C. S. Lewis (whose "Meditation in a Toolshed" makes much the same point), who has the more important perspective on romantic love: a young man in the first flush of new love, or the neurologist who studies the electrical patterns and chemical changes in the brain, but has never known what these feel like from the inside? Of course, both perspectives are important. But our tendency is to give precedence to the objective viewpoint that observes and does not participate (or rather, who participates primarily through observation). In some circumstances, this is an important stance. But it is a mistake to make this priority absolute and universal.

Indeed, even the observer who attempts an "objective" perspective is far from neutral, but brings her assumptions and categories to her experience of observation. But here I have begun to repeat contemporary platitudes. So I will finish with one more:

Never criticise a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Then, when you criticise him, you are a mile away - and you have his shoes.

Another new discovery: the God gene

In another exiting discovery for human knowledge, John Cleese has discovered the "God gene", which gives people the need to believe in God.

H/T Stephen Cook.
C. S. Lewis was making this argument back in the middle of last century; reductive naturalism explains away not only God but also the very rationality which would support reductive naturalism.

C. S. Lewis Today conference

After a successful gathering in 2006, the second C. S. Lewis Today conference will be held in Sydney on 23rd-24th May. The conference will be "two days of talks, panel discussion, film viewing and workshops designed for anyone interested in Lewis, professional or amateur."

This event has been timed just before the release of Prince Caspian, the film from the second book in the Narnia Chronicles (the films, wisely, are following the original publication order, rather than the chronology of the narrative), and has managed to secure a 40-minute preview reel, which will be screened on the Saturday afternoon.

Speakers include: Alan Jacobs (leading US Lewis scholar), Tim Gresham (Lewis's step-grandson), Tony Morphett (well-known Australian scriptwriter), Robert Banks (author, academic and founder of MCSI), Greg Clarke and John Dickson (directors of the Centre for Public Christianity) and many more (including yours truly).

Registrations close this Friday.

What is forgiveness? II

(ii) Not excusing but accusing
There is all the difference in the world between excusing and forgiving. To excuse something is to find a reason for it's not being so offensive after all, some mitigating circumstance or alternative explanation that reduces or removes blame. To the extent that an action is excusable, forgiveness is not required. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis points out, only the inexcusable can be forgiven.

Therefore, forgiveness is only required when genuine wrong has been done, and only to the extent that the offence was culpably inflicted. But this also means that to forgive is implicitly to highlight this fault. "I forgive you for reading my blog", implies that you have been doing something wicked.

Forgiveness, of course, needs to get beyond simply accusing, but it can't get around doing so. The wrong must be named, not simply swept under the carpet. Whom do you need to accuse, rather than excuse?
Fifteen points for naming the world-famous building containing this recently-added staircase.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V.

Excuse me, forgive me

C. S. Lewis on forgiveness

"A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in [the forgiveness of sins]: from thinking that God will not take us to himself again unless he is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness; and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.

"When it comes to a question of our forgiving other people, it is partly the same and partly different. It is the same because, here also, forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or no bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. They keep on replying ‘But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise.’ Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. (This doesn’t mean you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every trace of resentment in your own heart – every wish to humiliate or hurt him or pay him out.) The difference between this situation and the one in which you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily, in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough. As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (thought not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think: as regards other men’s sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending carefully to everything which may show that the other man was not so much blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christians means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of family life – to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son – how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says."

- C. S. Lewis, “On Forgiveness” in Fern-seed and Elephants, 43.

This distinction is very important and yet I see people confusing these concepts all the time.
Fifteen points for the location of this sculpture.

Lewis on desire

"If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

"We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connexion with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward."

- C. S. Lewis, opening lines of The Weight of Glory, a sermon.

I posted this in response to this post by Michael Jensen. Eight points for guessing the country in the image.

God with us? III

Dangerous goodness
During their time in the wilderness, the tabernacle pitched in the middle of the camp reminded the Israelites that God was with them. He had promised to meet Moses from his 'throne' between the golden cherubim above the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25.22). The Israelites could therefore say “God is with us”. Indeed, he had promised: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” His presence protected them, provided for them, guided them through the wilderness, and set out the good regulations by which they were to live. But this wasn’t all cause for celebration. To have the maker of heaven and earth living with you is not a safe prospect.

When world leaders arrive in Sydney for the APEC Conference this September, we’re going to know about it: road closures, parking restrictions, security checks, traffic escorts, a public holiday and a highly visible police presence. Current estimates place the security budget at $169 million. Many of the world’s leaders will be in our midst and every measure will be taken to ensure their security.

But when the living God dwells in the midst of his people, the precautions and barriers are not to keep him safe from the people, but to keep the people safe from him. God might have been with them, but he wasn’t in any straightforward sense simply on their side, at their beck and call. They could not keep God in a box. God didn’t live in the box, he sat on top of it, a king on his throne between the cherubim.*
*1 Samuel 4.4; 2 Samuel 6.2; 2 Kings 19.15; 1 Chron 13.6; Psalm 81.1; 99.1; Isaiah 37.16.

There’s a great passage in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where the children are speaking with Mr and Mrs Beaver about the prospect of meeting the great lion Aslan, who in the novels represents the presence of God.

    “Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
    “That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs Beaver; "if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly.”
    “Then he isn't safe?” said Lucy.
    “Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

Dangerous goodness. That’s what it’s like to have God dwelling in your midst. Dangerous goodness. No one is safe from his purifying, life-giving power.
Apologies for using this Lewis quote again. I find it very useful.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI.

Twenty novels that made me cry

After top twenty theology influences and going to see Moby Dick by John Bell, thought I'd do another top twenty.
Rules: Must be novels. Ranked by recommendation, not amount of crying. One per author. Sometimes the crying was from laughter.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
3. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. The Outsider by Albert Camus
7. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
8. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
9. Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell
10. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
11. Bliss by Peter Carey
12. Catch-22 by Jospeh Heller
13. The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
14. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin
15. The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemmingway
16. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
17. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
18. Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
19. Bridge to Terebithia by Katherine Paterson
20. Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander

What about you?

UPDATE: Check out Aaron's Top 20 theological experiences.
Ten points available in comments.

Lewis on limits of knowledge

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?"

- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 54.

If you hadn't guessed, a higher proportion of quotes recently means that I'm in essay mode. I'll get back to my heaven series soon...

Barth on the unknowable God

Jesus: the ultimate iconoclast

“It is in full unity with Himself that He is also – and especially and above all – in Christ, that he becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and peverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea about God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to constitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be the “Wholly Other.” But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ. We cannot make them the standard by which to measure what God can or cannot do, or the basis of the judgement that in doing this He brings Himself into self-contradiction. By doing this God proves to us that He can do it, that to do it is within His nature. And He Himself to be more great and rich and sovereign than we had ever imagined. And our ideas of His nature must be guided by this, and not vice versa.”

- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 186.

I have often come across the idea that God must be (by definition) absolute, or beyond our knowledge, or utterly different. We have a rich tradition of philosophical reflection upon the idea of God. However, many of these ideas are human projections of our wishes and fears, negations of what we are: finite, visible, mortal. While a theist may be happy with calling God infinite, invisible and immortal, a Christian should feel uncomfortable. Barth goes further: a Christian should consider such ideas pagan because they have not taken what God has actually revealed of himself in Christ seriously and centrally. We don't bring our preconceived notions of divinity to Jesus to see if they fit. It is from Jesus that we get our 'image' of God. Jesus is the great iconoclast.

Of course, there is a corresponding error in the opposite direction: that knowledge of God in Christ is simple, obvious, straightforward and exhaustive. This second arrogance, the presumption that we know everything of God, that God is not a problem interrupting and overturning our knowledge, is the ugly twin of the arrogance of projecting an a priori Christ-less image onto God and assuming that he is therefore safely defined as unknowable. Either way, God becomes innocuously contained, either inside or outside the sphere of our language and knowledge.

"Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 75.

Lewis on vulnerability

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven* where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), 138-39

I thought this quote was apt to follow the ones from Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard recently posted. All three invoke the necessity of engagement and the impossibility of cool detachment as our basic stance towards life.
*Of course, Lewis's reference to 'Heaven' needs to be taken with the same grain of salt that this passage advises us to take regarding Augustine's advice about not loving anything except God too much lest our hearts be broken. For a fuller discussion, see this post with some of my thoughts on heaven..

Lewis on the body

"And what, you ask, does it matter? Do not such ideas only excite us and distract us from the more immediate and more certain things, the love of God and our neighbours, the bearing of the daily cross? If you find that they so distract you, think of them no more. I most fully allow that it is of more importance for you or me today to refrain from one sneer or to extend one charitable thought to an enemy than to know all that angels and archangels know about the mysteries of the New Creation [...]. Yet I will not admit that the things we have been discussing for the last few pages are of no importance for the practice of the Christian life. For I suspect that our conception of Heaven as merely a state of mind is not unconnected with the fact that the specifically Christian virtue of Hope has in our time grown so languid. Where our fathers, peering into the future, saw gleams of gold, we see only the mist, white featureless, cold and never moving.

"The thought at the back of all this negative spirituality is really one forbidden to Christian. They, of all men, must not conceive spiritual joy and worth as things that need to be rescued or tenderly protected from time and place and matter and the senses. Their God is the God of corn and oil and wine. He is the glad Creator. He has become Himself incarnate. The sacraments have been instituted…. After that we cannot really be in doubt of His intentions. To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth is we cannot be trusted even with the that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may someday be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else – since He has retained His own charger – should we accompany Him?"

- C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 171-72.

Despite frequent platonic tendencies elsewhere, in this passage Lewis manages to keep resurrection at the centre of Christian hope, and thus allows the gospel to provide the controlling categories of eschatology, rather than the Augustinian time/eternity split he commonly uses.

A brick flung at a gramophone

We have been taught to think of the world as something that 'progresses' or 'evolves'. Christian apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden violent end imposed from without: an extinguisher popped on to the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play - 'Halt!'
- C. S. Lewis, 'The World's Last Night' in Fern-seed and Elephants, 72.

Explaining evil?

‘What the gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it’s there, nor a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles somewhat so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.’

- N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, 58

‘The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens man completely.
'The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.’

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Temptation, 77

[DB image in public domain (to the best of my knowledge)]

The Inner Ring

C. S. Lewis has a wonderful sermon called 'The Inner Ring' about the tendency in the human heart to want to be 'in the know', 'one of them', to be welcomed inside by a thousand little glances and gestures. Inside: into the inner ring, some little group of 'you and me and Matt and Steve - us...' The desire for acceptance is insatiable, for there are always more rings to get inside, and while outside I am filled with that yearning expectation that as long as I fit in and learn to speak just so, and pass over those topics in the silence of disdain, and chuckle approvingly at those comments, then maybe, perhaps, I just might get the nod.

Most inner rings are relatively small and informal. Today I think I experienced one of thirty-eight.

A whole new world

[Photo by Adrian Smith]
What will be new about the new heavens and earth? Where is the discontinuity? What will not last?

The short answer is: death. The long answer is death and mourning and crying and pain, the bonds of futility: in sum, the old order of things. It will be a new world order for a renewed world. No longer will God be absent, no longer will mortality loom and pronounce doom. What is hidden will be revealed. Injustice and half justice will be banished; things will be right.

But of course, all I am doing here is quoting the Bible. What does it mean?

Theologically, the problem with this world is neither physicality nor transience, nor temporality, nor humanity per se. It is evil, and its partner, death: the chaotic destruction and convoluting of life, of God's good world. Where did it come from? See my coming post on the origin of evil (and here). What is it like? See my coming post on the nature of evil. What is God doing about it? The gospel: the life, death and resurrection of his Son. Why is it still around? Because the gospel continues: the cross and resurrection were promise as well as achievement; there is a chapter yet to come in which the resurrection is applied to the entire world. What is its destiny? Exclusion from the new world. Whatever we make of the images of eternal destruction, they are complemented by images of exclusion: there is no symmetry between the new creation and what is not in it.

However, this raises the question of whether good things will be excluded. I have often stressed the continuity between creation and its redemption through the language of release (as in Rom 8) or of renewal. But is it true that no good thing will be lost? That not a hair of creation's head will perish?

Now, of course, one piece of scriptural witness I haven't yet mentioned is marriage. Specifically, 'in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.' (Matt 22.30) Is this a good part of this creation that misses out on renewal? No: though like everything else, it must 'die' in order to be raised/transformed. Marriage will remain: the new Jerusalem is 'prepared as a bride adorned for her husband'. The wedding feast of the Lamb and his Church affirms, liberates and restores marriage. What does this mean for those presently married? I am not entirely sure; but the good gift of marriage is not excluded.

Have I here undermined all my previous confidence in continuity? If marriage can be so transformed as to possibly mean the end of all present human marriages (remember, our vows are until parted by death), is anything really 'safe'? Of course not, if by safe we want to retain them as they are. But absolutely, they are secure in the transformative power of God to become truly themselves. The risen Jesus was not at first recognised by even his closest followers. But it was truly him.

Towards the end of The Great Divorce (and despite other problems I have with this text), Lewis captures this dynamic with a beautiful image. One man's lust, a sneering whispering slimy lizard on his shoulder, is killed so that he can 'go on to the Mountains' (an image of new life). As it dies, it becomes an enormous stallion that then carries him on his journey. The narrator reflects upon this with his guide (the Teacher, who is meant to have a Scottish accent. Don't ask):

‘Do ye understand all this, my Son?’ said the Teacher.
I don’t know about all, Sir,’ said I. ‘Am I right in thinking the Lizard really turned into the Horse?’
‘Aye. But it was killed first. Ye’ll not forget that part of the story?’
‘I’ll try not to, Sir. But does it mean that everything – everything – that is in us can go on to the Mountains?’
‘Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.’

- C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 95.

'In the end is the beginning'

'And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.'

-C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 173.

cf. The Preface to Jürgen Moltmann's The Coming of God:

But Christian eschatology has nothing to do with apocalyptic ‘final solutions’ of this kind, for its subject is not ‘the end’ at all. On the contrary, what it is about is the new creation of all things. Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.