We should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.
—C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words
Where Words Rest for Meaning
On a shelf among my New Testament commentaries, I have a rock. It’s no ordinary rock. I keep it in the Book of Acts section. It was a gift given to me by someone who visited Mars Hill in Athens. I rub it from time to time, hoping it will increase my chances of actually going there someday. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m a Calvinist. Chance doesn’t exist; Jesus does. But I do sincerely hope to someday set foot upon that outcropping of rock, upon which the Apostle Paul challenged the Mars Hill Philosophy Club by quoting their own poet philosophers in Acts 17:28, Epimenides of Crete and Aratus. Contrary to the way this text is often preached, Paul was not telling them that they, following their poets, had things half right about the true God, as it were. Just the opposite: fragments and lines from these poets pointed to truth but needed the proper covenantal context of Christianity for that truth to be realized. As longtime Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology, K. Scott Oliphint writes in The Battle Belongs to the Lord:
When Epimenides says that “in him” we live and move and exist, he does not have the true God in mind at all. He is writing about a god of his own creation, a false god. When Aratus says that we are “his” offspring, he is not referring to the true God, but to Zeus. And it simply is not true that we are the offspring of Zeus. These twisted truths have become foolish exchanges of the truth of God for a lie.
But, when taken back to their rightful place, to the context of Christianity, these are glorious truths. So Paul takes them back. The Greeks had used these ideas to suppress the true knowledge of God. Paul takes them back to communicate the truth about the true Creator and Lord. In that sense Paul is saying, “Your ideas and concepts can only be true if they refer to the true God.”
Once placed in their proper context, these ideas of the Greek philosophers come back to their rightful place as absolute truths about the Christian God. That is Paul’s point, which he offers as a point of persuasion in his defense of Christianity.
Paul knew that words fitly spoken are like apples of gold in a setting of silver (Prov. 25:11–13). He knew that words communicated the good, the true, and the beautiful purposes of our covenant God in this world. Paul knew that words—poetic, beautiful words, in their proper context—are persuasive of the only worldview that can account for the objectivity in predication, which makes words mean something true. As we know, only a biblical principia (first things) will allow for persuasion of truth. Only our principium essendi (starting point of being) as the triune God of the Bible, and our principium cognoscendi externum (starting point for knowing external to us) as the Bible of the triune God can account for the requisites of intelligibility and reality as we experience it. Only this Reformed, covenantal approach to apologetics can account for inductive reasoning upon which science depends, deductive reasoning upon which math depends, the regularity of nature upon which science depends, objectivity in predication, morality, personhood, universals, etc.
My two primary maxims for my seminary students and ministerial candidates are as follows: (1) Pride will beat you out of the ministry, or the ministry will beat the pride out of you; (2) Ministry is hard . . . really hard. You need traveling partners! And I have many. For me, Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) makes it intellectually untenable that I can ever seriously doubt the Christian worldview. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) gives me an example of how to preach the Christian worldview. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) makes me want to believe the Christian worldview. I want to hone in on the second maxim: that we need traveling partners.
This past summer, while lecturing in London with other Westminster professors, I managed to spend a couple of days in Oxford. A dream-come-true for me was to tour the Kilns, the home of C. S. Lewis. My wife, Diane, and daughter, Lydia, made the trip across the Atlantic with me. One of the things I most wanted to do was to record a video of me reading two of my favorite passages from Lewis’s corpus. I stood in front of the lions at Trafalgar Square in London, as Lydia captured video of me reading the story of Jill Pole, whose misbehavior resulted in her friend, Eustace Scrubb, falling off a cliff. She awakens in a strange, mystifying world, only to find herself dying of thirst. No spoilers, here! Go read for yourself The Silver Chair, which magically transports you into the world of Narnia. There’s a lion Lewis likens to the lions at Trafalgar Square. That’s why we just had to go there. The words Lewis employs draw you right in between the two forepaws of Aslan.
The second passage I read was videoed in the flower garden of Lewis’s house, where he and his wife, Joy Davidman (1915–1960), spent countless hours just being together… until they weren’t. You see, I had a deep desire to read the opening passage of A Grief Observed. This book, written in the wake of Joy’s death, was, on the one hand, like a stream of consciousness journaling session, as Lewis processed his paralyzing grief. On the other hand, some have observed these hot, searing, agonizing words as Lewis at his poetic best. Alice H. Cook explains, “Ironically, it is in the midst of his soul-consuming crisis that he loses himself so completely in his subject that his poetic impulses are the least stifled and most flowing… Lewis’s grief at the time of writing, this unstructured format would allow his most lucid, most authentic prose to come forth.”
So, I took my tattered old trade paperback edition of A Grief Observed, sat in Jack and Joy’s flower garden, and read aloud:
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources.” People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “common-sense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
Why would I want to read that in that quiet flower garden? Why would this book and these words, somewhere between free verse and fearful vexation, mean so much to me? Well, in the summer of 2015, when the doctor told us there was nothing more he could do for my mom’s pancreatic cancer, I wearily wandered into my study and almost mindlessly grabbed this ragged little book, and found my world painted to the very corners—lyrics for the minor key my heart was hearing. Lewis was my traveling partner.
The power of words to connect to one’s world, especially in seasons of soul-hollowing grief, should come as no real surprise. For it was the power of words through the agency of the Word (John 1:1) by which the world was created to begin with (Gen. 1:1). Was not the Apostle Paul poetic, as he relayed the reality of his suffering to the believers in Corinth?
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you. (2 Cor. 4:8–12 KJV)
The Power of Words for Lewis and His Companions
Lewis, as is widely known, was part of a literary club, the Inklings. Yes, I tried to get into their old haunt, Eagle and Child, or “Bird and Baby,” as they affectionately dubbed it. Alas, it was closed for renovations. So, we did what the Inklings would do when the Eagle and Child would run out of beer—bolted across St. Giles Street to The White Horse. The famous friendships that breathed life into one another for this heady group of Oxford writers are legendary. I ordered a beer at The White Horse while wearing my C. S. Lewis t-shirt. I had my picture made at the very bar where philologist J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) would have ordered countless pints of English ale throughout the years of their comradery. I was clearly the tourist in that quaint little pub.
Along with visiting the Kilns, there was one thing that mattered most to me. Strolling the streets of Oxford, we made our way down High Street to Magdalen College, where Lewis was a don. I will never get over entering the beautiful iron gates near the Magdalen Bridge and taking the walk—the same walk that Lewis (32 years old), Tolkien (39 years old), and Hugo Dyson (35 years old) took on the mile-long path encircling a little island in the middle of River Cherwell, a tributary of the Thames. “Addison’s Walk” changed everything for Lewis, the evening of September 19, 1931. I just had to walk in their steps. Even as I write this little reflection, I have sprigs of red clover I snatched from alongside the path pressed in a journal on my desk.
These Oxford professors had been drawn to one another because of their love, not only of English stouts, but of words, the lyrics to the music of the good, the true, and the lovely. They loved Edmund Spenser’s (1552/53–1599) The Faerie Queen and were indebted to the unknown author of the fourteenth century’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. They loved good beer, delicious food, and their pipes. In fact, their discussion of poetry and Christianity began that evening over dinner in Lewis’s room at Magdalen. They also loved stories, myths, tales that ushered readers into another world, new and yet vaguely familiar. Tolkien was a philologist and the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford. His passion for old Norse mythology and verse would eventually fuel his creation of whole languages, the tongues of which would require a world for their expression. Middle Earth was in its embryonic form. Dyson was Professor of English at Reading College and a Shakespeare scholar. Lewis, who would go on to become, perhaps, the most beloved children’s author and apologist, on the evening of their stroll, was Professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had theretofore fancied becoming a poet.
Their September saunter was a meandering on metaphor and myth. Tolkien and Dyson were committed Christians. They had a glorious agenda to lead their friend to credenda. Lewis loved the mythical Norse tales of the dying god. He was captivated by the beauty of their poetic words, but he was not convicted. In the end, myths, with all their poetic powers, said Lewis, are, “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.” Lewis was clinging to his rationalism and materialism.
Tolkien pressed in. He did not advocate the fables/ myths (μύθοις) of Titus 1:14, which were likely protognostic tales that utterly countered the truths of Scripture. The things that appealed to Lewis in poems and myths pointed to truths that only the context of Christianity could make sense of. Christianity, Tolkien insisted, was not mere myth, certainly not less than myth; it was the myth that actually happened in time-space-history. In saying this, Tolkien was not reducing Christianity to a level of the ancient myths but was suggesting that the gospel story works on us in a similar way. Yet, this story with its dying and rising God is more than beautiful words; it accounts for the beauty of words. More than iambic pentameter, it is inescapably proven; more than meter, it is the meaning of everything; more than a sonnet, it is salvation; more than verse, it is verity. Indeed, outside the context of Christianity, these myths are aimless and untethered to truth.
Taking leave of the footpath around 3:00 a.m., Tolkien left Dyson and Lewis to continue on Addison’s Walk until 4:00 a.m. He went home and began to write a poem in honor of his objection to Lewis’s charge of silvery ruse, which would become known as Mythopoeia. It was an appeal from Philomythus (Myth-Lover) to Misomythus (Myth-Hater). He wrote the piece in Chaucerian heroic couplets, as this was the typical meter of British Enlightenment poets, as if Tolkien were flaunting their (and Lewis’s) skepticism and materialist commitments with their own cadence. At the outset, Tolkien calls his friend to consider beyond, we might even say, transcendentally, sense experience:
Philomythus to Misomythus aka Mythopoeia
To one who said that myths were lies and therefore
worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.
He eventually turns Lewis’s words back against his straining skepticism:
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons,’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
Space does not permit the whole of the poem here. But Tolkien’s indictment of a naturalistic anthropology is powerful:
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
The nighttime conversation, and apologetic connection over words and friendship, that led him to write this poem were not for naught. Three days later (September 22, 1931), Lewis recounts for his friend, Arthur Greeves, the evening and how it affected him:
We began on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship—then finally drifted back to poetry and books.
The impact of that evening is made clearer in a follow-up letter to Greeves, dated October 1, 1931: “How deep I am just now beginning to see: for I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ— in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.” We might rightly surmise Lewis spent the rest of his life trying to explain it.
Just as that evening sparked poetry from the fire of Tolkien’s passion for his friend’s conversion, it would several years later (1937/38?) cause the held breath of Lewis to release in a poem that is engraved on a brass plaque along the footpath of Addison’s Walk to this day:
I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.
My love for the writing of Tolkien and Lewis is not trussed to a naïve denial of the significant theological differences I have with the former’s Romanism, or the latter’s doctrinal anomalies, here and there. There is, after all, more than plenty of Plato in Lewis. Yet, that Lewis was as evangelically oriented as he was in the context of a spreading liberalism and skepticism of the last century is significant. I am profoundly thankful for both Van Til and Lewis. I do not look to the latter as my paragon of systematic theology. I do look to him, however, grateful that he looked at his brother Warnie’s biscuit tin moss garden as a little boy, and there was born the tiniest of sparks that would one day flash across his expanding mind, a world that once had something inside the stable that was bigger than the whole world. Read The Last Battle. Or visit the aforementioned story of Jill at the stream in The Silver Chair, and you may wonder if Lewis was slipping into something close to a doctrine of irresistible grace. Whatever the case, though prose, it feel poetic and strikes a Van Tilian chord when he writes:
I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer.” The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonizing it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of the primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking.
When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the night mare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else. [Emphasis mine]
The Worth of Words for Pastor-Theologians
I actually think we are sitting on a golden opportunity in the training of candidates for various forms of ministry. By golden, I mean with reference to Proverbs 25:11–13. That our words in the church would be apples of gold in settings of silver is a far cry from lies breathed through silver. This biblical, covenantal, Reformed way of looking at the nature of languages, of words, is a full-front assault on the Nietzschean notion that truth is:
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Indeed, there must be objectivity in predication, not only for the affectional power of words, but for anything to be said of predication, whatsoever. Even Jean-François Lyotard’s (1924–1998) denial of le grand récit in La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savior, depends on the very objectivity in predication it seeks to avoid. Ministers today are thrust into the vacuous spaces of our cultural moment, in which we almost unavoidably, it would seem, breathe the air of Jaques Derrida (1930–2004):
Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way.
Vern Poythress counters with an utterly God-centered, trinitarian, and tri-perspectival approach to language:
Meaning is related to the fact that God knows everything (God’s “omniscience”). Control expresses the fact that God has boundless power and rules over everything (God’s “omnipotence”). Presence says that God is present everywhere—his “omnipresence.” Using these three aspects, we can trace the implications of the character of God for thinking about language.
This leads me to three theses I’d like to offer for consideration.
1. By the power of the Word, the truth stands on the power of words. The Person of the Logos, the eternal Word of the Father, is the proof of objectivity in predication, which speaks of truth, beauty, and goodness. The opportunity of which I speak for pastor-theologians is to recognize that words create worlds. Jesus is proof. The Word is the Creator of the world (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2). We, his vice-regents, participate in the creation of worlds, as it were, that declare, demonstrate, defend, and delight in truth, beauty, and goodness. We are his word-wielding creatures.
Their September saunter was a meandering on metaphor and myth.
2. Bearing God’s image means we are word workers. That man is created Imago Dei is why he cannot but be a purveyor and recipient of words. Calvin’s doctrine of the sensus divinitatis explains why we with words frame and understand the pieces of the worldview puzzle—theology, anthropology, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, all of which flow into and out of our experience and explication of truth, beauty, and goodness. Because we are not merely accidental bags of biology, words matter. They have power. William Blake (1757–1827) lamented the power of classic poetry, such as Homer’s Iliad, “The classics, the classics! …that desolate Europe with wars!” Yet, as Robert Fagles (1933–2008) insists, we see also compassion in Homer’s metrics. The very students of Homer’s epic about war, pettiness, competition, and the human condition were among those engaged by the Apostle Paul on Mars Hill, who himself recognized the power of words for men created in God’s image.
3. We are invited to the end of all words. This conversation about words, with words, means that, in a certain sense, every expression of the good, the true, and the beautiful resonates with our longing for home, where we will hear the most beautiful of all words in the New Heaven and New Earth:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:3–4).
In light of the above theses, the opportunity before us could be to introduce a study of poetics in ministerial training. To expose pastor-theologians to the power of prose and poetry would fill a lacuna. What if pastor theologians had on their desks, at the ready, when studying and preparing sermons and lectures, a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse?
Should we become students of words—beautiful words? Well, as students of the Word, there is a poet whose lyric suggests a world where the good, the true, and the beautiful are set before our baptized imaginations, as Lewis describes his experience of reading George MacDonald (1824–1905). Lewis in the very last days of his life wanted only to turn his attention to translating Virgil’s Aeneid, yet his little book Reflections on the Psalms calls our attention to the hymnal of the Old Testament people of God. And in that songbook, a poet turns our eyes to the Poet, who alone can satisfy the human heart—Yahweh, of whom it is so beautifully said:
I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord. (Psalm 104:33–35 KJV)