Gavin Ortlund on "That Hideous Strength"

Baptist pastor & scholar, Rev. Gavin Ortlund, produces great and edifying videos - many defending the historic continuity and catholicity of classical Protestantism over against charges that Protestant theology is something totally novel that emerged only in the 16th Century as a departure from the Great Tradition of the ancient church.  As someone who cares greatly about the catholicity of our faith - that my beliefs are shared by Christians across every age (and not only the last 500 years) I greatly appreciate his work in this area.

Another passion that Gavin and I share is a love of C.S. Lewis.  Here is Gavin's review/introduction to one of Lewis' most mature novels, That Hideous Strength.  I think that Gavin is right to put this novel alongside Till We have Faces as being some of Lewis' best fiction.

Having read a bit of Charles Williams, I can tell you that you definitely see Williams' influence on this novel by Lewis.  Much of the other things Gavin says in this video strike me as "right on."  Gavin is right to point out that when Lewis talks about "the masculine" and "the feminine" in this work, he is not really talking about what we think of as gender or sex, but rather about something far more "Jungian": archetypal characteristics that - in mythologies, symbols, and typologies across many cultures - have been associated with a "masculine" or a "feminine" spirit for a variety of reasons that I suspect we moderns/post-moderns can only barely begin to appreciate.  I suspect there are depths of wisdom and insight buried there that Lewis would have recognized more readily than most of us.

I like what Gavin has to say about conversion often (especially in a post-Christian culture) being a "multi-stage" process.  This rings true to my experience and that of others I've known, and is refreshing to hear from a significant Baptist thinker.

A final point he makes that I think is very important is the connection between beauty and evangelism.  Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron is constantly making this point in his own excellent YouTube ministry (following a thinker named Hans Urs Von Balthazar): beauty points us to God, to the Source and Ground of all beauty, just as discovering truth points us to God who is the Highest Truth. 

It is my hope that in years to come Christians of all denominations and churches will be known by our wholesome and beautiful ways of being and building in this world in a way that will draw people in, as in the early centuries of our faith.  Lewis' work certainly is a great example of exactly that.

Are the Old Testament and the New Testament contradictory?

 An issue that many Christians (and explorers of Christian faith) have struggled with is the apparent disparity between God as described in the Old Testament - who is (at times) a God of war and wrath - and the Lord as he reveals himself in the New Testament.  

I like Holdsworth's approach to this question, though it is by no means a "final" or complete "answer" to all of the difficulties.  I have often pointed out to people that, because the Bible is a progressive or unfolding revelation, you know more about the character and purposes of God by the end of the story than you knew at the beginning.  In other words, St. Peter knows more of the character of God than Abraham did - though Abraham really did know the real God.  

If you think of it like this, we don't get to the later, more complete revelation, without taking those earlier steps in the process: You don't get Jesus, the New Covenant, and the Moral Teachings of the Sermon on the Mount without first getting Moses and the Law.  And so it then is a bit self-contradictory to use Jesus and his teachings as a reason to reject the Old Covenant as being truly from God.  

That still doesn't solve the real difficulties of God who is depicted as commanding what we would call "crimes against humanity" when he tells the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites completely, (and there are more complications in all of that than is often appreciated - including questions around our attempt to judge ancient & pre-Christian methods of warfare by modern standards, which are very influenced by Christianity), but it does make "space" to look again at the Old Testament as genuine revelation of God. 

Another aspect of how the Tradition has dealt with this question that Holdsworth doesn't get into here is the fact that many of those troublesome passages that horrify us today, were read allegorically by the Early Church Fathers.  They would say to think of the Canaanites as symbols of the sin and idolatry that reside in our hearts and must be completely rooted out.  This tradition of reading much of the Old Testament and the Psalms opens a new possibility of hearing a "word" in these passages despite our concerns.

Calvin Robinson and Paul Kingsnorth on Christ and Culture

 Here is a fascinating conversation as Anglican clergyman Calvin Robinson (Free Church of England) interviews Paul Kingsnorth - writer and environmentalist - who converted to (Eastern Orthodox) Christianity from a kind of neo-paganism just a few years ago.  What they have to say about culture, about the monetization of the 7 Deadly Sins, about the call to steward the Creation is all worth considering.

 

Beauty will Save the Polis

In a secular-materialist worldview Beauty is merely a matter of personal opinion, rather than public good.  It is seen as a luxury which is great for those that can afford it, but truly serving no practical utility.  This is the mentality that gives us hospitals, libraries and (perhaps worst of all) schools that are ugly concert buildings in which the drive to "saving some money" always triumphed over aesthetic concerns. 

We Christians, like the ancient Hebrews and ancient Greek philosophers before us, believe that humans are not mere "meat machines", but that we have a soul, and that feeding and nourishing the soul is every bit as important to human flourishing as feeding and nourishing the body.

If we classical Christians are correct about this, it should follow that communities that actually do "go above and beyond" the bare necessities of our material existence and invest in beauty will actually be healthier, stronger, and - finally - even wealthier than communities that treat us merely as organisms needed food and shelter in order to survive.    

Like other Classical Christians I've affirmed lately my trust that, "Beauty will save the world," and here is one case where investing in beauty actually revitalized a community and created a virtuous cycle of improving the local public health, quality of life and 'commonweal.'