Universal Skepticism

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Robert Farrar Capon:

The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can’t be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I’ll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: “Your fly is open.” If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?

(Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox: Images and Mystery in Christian Faith, [New York: The Seabury Press, 1974], pp. 17-18.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria

Uniformity of Nature

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

C. S. Lewis:

Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of nature? A moment’s thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. But of course all the observations that men have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are not watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, “Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed;” for that argument works only on the assumption that the future will resemble the past—which is simply the assumption of Uniformity under a new name.

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1978], p. 102.)

Jason Lyle:

     In order to do science we take for granted that the universe is understandable — that it can be quantified in a way the mind can comprehend. We assume that the universe is logical and orderly and that it obeys mathematical laws that are consistent over time and space. Even though conditions in different regions of space and eras of time are quite diverse, there is nonetheless an underlying uniformity. Because there is such regularity in the universe, there are many instances where scientists are able to make successful predictions about the future. …When we perform a controlled experiment using the same preset starting conditions, we expect to get the same result every time. The “future reflects the past” in this sense. Scientists are able to make predictions only because there is uniformity as a result of God’s sovereign and consistent power. Scientific experimentation would be pointless without uniformity; we would get a different result every time we performed an identical experiment, destroying the very possibility of scientific knowledge. …if asked, “Why will the future reflect the past?” One of the most common responses is: “Well, it always has. So I expect it always will.” But this is circular reasoning. I’ll grant that in the past there has been uniformity. But how do I know that in the future there will be uniformity, unless I already assumed that the future reflects the past (i.e., uniformity)? Whenever we use past experience as a basis for what is likely to happen in the future, we are assuming uniformity. 

(Jason Lyle, The Ultimate Proof of Creation, [Green Forest: Master Books, 2011], pp. 57, 58-59, 59-60.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria

Thomas Aquinas, The Five Ways

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Thomas Aquinas:

     I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. 

     The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. 

     The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God. 

     The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

     The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

(The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas: Part I. QQ. I.—XXVI., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, [London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, LTD., 1920], Q. 1, Art. 3, Answer, pp. 24-27.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria

Thankfulness

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Gerald Bray: (Commenting on Acts 14:16-17)

The proof of God’s existence lay in his bounty to those who did not know him or worship him as God. Unlike other deities, he did not take care of his own people exclusively, or respond only to their requests. His universal presence was not merely a means of helping believers wherever they were; rather, it demonstrated his concern for the entire world. Paul’s point was that, at the level of nature, God treats all human beings equally, and when the apostles sought to persuade unbelievers of his existence, it was to their innate sense of gratitude for the blessings that they had received that they appealed. One of the most popular American holidays is Thanksgiving Day, which manages to be religious and secular at the same time. The Pilgrim Fathers who first celebrated it did so for religious reasons, but it was essentially a harvest festival that had no place on the church calendar. Today it is a major celebration when people are expected and encouraged to be grateful, but no one specifies to whom thanks should be given. Christians have no problem with this because they thank the God of Jesus Christ, but what about followers of other religions, not to mention atheists and agnostics? You cannot be thankful in the abstract, and most people admit they have received blessings that they have done nothing to deserve, even if they are not clear as to where those blessings have come from. They are usually quite prepared to be grateful for them, though, and this feeling gives Christians an opportunity to talk about God. Perhaps it is here, more than anywhere else, that “natural theology” comes into its own, because it is at this level, more than in the abstract realms of philosophy, that most people are likely to be touched by the Christian claim that there is indeed a God from whom all blessings flow.

(Gerald Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology, [Wheaton: Crossway, 2012], p. 35.) Preview. 

George MacDonald:

“I should like to see the one that made that!” she said at last. “Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can’t have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don’t believe there is any nowhere, so he can’t be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don’t get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can’t say it!”

     …“Just fancy!” she said, “—if God were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look round and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there, and wondering when his little one would look round, and see him, and burst out laughing—no, not laughing—yes, laughing—laughing with delight—or crying, I don’t know which! If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him—I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colors and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!—and all the creatures—and the people that one would love so if they would let you!—and all——”

(George MacDonald, There and Back, [Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1891], Chapter XXII: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, pp. 221, 221-222.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria

Suffering

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

John Hick:

     Needless to say, this characterization of God as the heavenly Father is not a merely random illustration but an analogy that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. Jesus treated the likeness between the attitude of God to man, and the attitude of human parents at their best towards their children, as providing the most adequate way for us to think about God. And so it is altogether relevant to a Christian understanding of this world to ask, How does the best parental love express itself in its influence upon the environment in which children are to grow up? I think it is clear that a parent who loves his children, and wants them to become the best human beings that they are capable of becoming, does not treat pleasure as the sole and supreme value. Certainly we seek pleasure for our children, and take great delight in obtaining it for them; but we do not desire for them unalloyed pleasure at the expense of their growth in such even greater values as moral integrity, unselfishness, compassion, courage, humour, reverence for the truth, and perhaps above all the capacity for love. We do not act on the premise that pleasure is the supreme end of life; and if the development of these other values sometimes clashes with the provision of pleasure, then we are willing to have our children miss a certain amount of this, rather than fail to come to possess and to be possessed by the finer and more precious qualities that are possible to the human personality. A child brought up on the principle that the only or the supreme value is pleasure would not be likely to become an ethically mature adult or an attractive or happy personality. And to most parents it seems more important to try to foster quality and strength of character in their children than to fill their lives at all times with the utmost possible degree of pleasure. If, then, there is any true analogy between God’s purpose for his human creatures, and the purpose of loving and wise parents for their children, we have to recognize that the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain cannot be the supreme and overriding end for which the world exists. Rather, this world must be a place of soul-making. And its value is to be judged, not primarily by the quantity of pleasure and pain occurring in it at any particular moment, but by its fitness for its primary purpose, the purpose of soul-making.

(John Hick, “The Soul-Making Theodicy;” In: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion: Third Edition, ed. Kelly James Clark, [Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2017], Chapter 19: Theodicy, p. 224.)

John Keats:

     …The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven — What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say ‘Soul making’ Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence—There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not souls the till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God—how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion—or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation—This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years—These three Materials are the Intelligence—the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible—I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? 

(John Keats, Letter [“To George and Georgiana Keats, Wednesday, 21 April, 1819”]; In: Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings, [Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1966], pp. 117-118.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria

Stories

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Ecclesiastes 3:11b:

He has planted eternity in the human heart…

(New Living Translation.)

Timothy Keller:

Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy Stories” argues that there are indelible, deep longings in the human heart that realistic fiction cannot satisfy. Fantasy fiction—fairy tales and science fiction and similar literature—depict characters who

• get outside of time altogether;

• escape death;

• hold communion with nonhuman beings;

• find a perfect love from which they never part;

• triumph finally over evil.

     Of course readers and viewers know that fairy stories are fiction, but when the story is well told and these things are depicted vividly, it provides a peculiar kind of comfort and satisfaction. What we call “fantasy fiction” is massively popular and continues to be consumed by audiences numbering in the billions. The enduring appeal of stories that represent these conditions is unquestionable. But why? As a Christian, Tolkien believed that these stories resonate so deeply because they bear witness to an underlying reality. Even if we do not intellectually believe that there is a God or life after death, our hearts (in the Christian view) sense somehow that these things characterize life as it was and should be and eventually will be again. We are so deeply interested in these stories because we have intuitions of the creation/fall/redemption/restoration plotline of the Bible. Even if we repress the knowledge of that plotline intellectually, we can’t not know it imaginatively, and our hearts are stirred by any stories that evoke it.

     The English word “gospel” comes from the Middle English word Godspell which derives from two Old English words: good and spell (story). In Old English “to tell a story” was “to cast a spell.” Stories capture the heart and imagination and give us deep joy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Goodspell. It is the story that all other joy-bringing, spell-casting, heart-shaping stories only point to. What’s special about this one? It is the one story that satisfies all these longings—yet is historically true.

     If Jesus Christ was really raised from the dead—if he is really the Son of God and you believe in him—all those things that you long for most desperately are real and will come true. We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings, and we will see evil defeated forever. In fairy stories, especially the best and most well-told ones, we get a temporary reprieve from a life in which our deepest desires are all violently rebuffed. However, if the gospel is true—and it is—all those longings will be fulfilled.

(Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Viking, 2015], pp. 175-176.)

J. R. R. Tolkien:

     The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

     It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.

…In such stories when the sudden “turn” comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.

(J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories;” In: Tree and Leaf, [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965], pp. 68-69, 69-70.)

Timothy Keller:

     Tolkien goes on to argue that people sense that such stories point to some underlying Reality. As we read or watch them, we are being told that the world is certainly filled with danger, sorrow, and tragedy but that nonetheless there is a meaning to things, there is a difference between good and evil, and above all, there will be a final defeat of evil and even an “escape from death”—which Tolkien says is the quintessential happy ending.

(Timothy Keller, King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, [New York: Dutton, 2011], p. 227.)

J. R. R. Tolkien:

Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”

…The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels — peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner con- sistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

     …But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

(J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories;” In: Tree and Leaf, [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965], pp. 71, 71-72, 72-73.)

Cf. C. S. Lewis:

     And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. 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 Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle, [New York: HarperTrophy, 1994], pp. 210-211.)

Timothy Keller:

The Christmas story is not fiction, and yet, I would argue, it changes the way we read fiction in the most wonderful way.

     Just before Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings movie came out, there was a host of articles by literary critics and other cultural elites lamenting the popular appeal of fantasies, myths, and legends, so many of which (in their thinking) promoted regressive views. Modern people are supposed to be more realistic. We should realize that things are not black and white but gray, that happy endings are cruel because life is not like that. In The New Yorker Anthony Lane said about Tolkien’s novel: “It is a book that bristles with bravado, and yet to give in to it—to cave in to it [to really enjoy it] as most of us did on a first reading—betrays . . . a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.” Yet Hollywood nonetheless keeps on recycling fairy tales in various forms because people hunger for them.

     The great fairy tales and legends—“Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” King Arthur, Faust—did not really happen, of course. They are not factually true. And yet they seem to fulfill a set of longings in the human heart that realistic fiction can never touch or satisfy. That is because deep in the human heart there are these desires—to experience the supernatural, to escape death, to know love that we can never lose, to not age but live long enough to realize our creative dreams, to fly, to communicate with nonhuman beings, to triumph over evil. If the fantasy stories are well told, we find them incredibly moving and satisfying. Why? It is because, even though we know that factually the stories didn’t happen, our hearts long for these things, and a well-told story momentarily satisfies these desires, scratching the terrible itch.

     “Beauty and the Beast” tells us there’s a love that can break us out of the beastliness that we have created for ourselves. “Sleeping Beauty” tells us we are in a kind of sleeping enchantment and there is a noble prince who can come and destroy it. We hear these stories and they stir us, because deep inside our hearts believe, or want to believe, that these things are true. Death should not be the end. We should not lose our loved ones. Evil should not triumph. Our hearts sense that even though the stories themselves aren’t true, the underlying realities behind the stories are somehow true or ought to be. But our minds say no, and critics say no. They insist that when you give yourself to fairy stories, and you really believe in moral absolutes and the supernatural and the idea that we are going to live forever, that is not reality, and it is cowardly to give yourself to it.

     Then we come to the Christmas story. And at first glance it looks like the other legends. Here is a story about someone from a different world who breaks into ours and has miraculous powers, and can calm the storm and heal people and raise people from the dead. Then his enemies turn on him, and he is put to death, and it seems like all hope is over, but finally he rises from the dead and saves everyone. We read that and we think, Another great fairy tale! Indeed, it looks like the Christmas story is one more story pointing to these underlying realities.

     But Matthew’s Gospel refutes that by grounding Jesus in history, not “once upon a time.” He says this is no fairy tale. Jesus Christ is not one more lovely story pointing to these underlying realities—Jesus is the underlying reality to which all the stories point.

     Jesus Christ has come from that eternal, supernatural world that we sense is there, that our hearts know is there even though our heads say no. At Christmas he punched a hole between the ideal and the real, the eternal and the temporal, and came into our world. That means, if Matthew is right, that there is an evil sorcerer in this world, and we are under enchantment, and there is a noble prince who has broken the enchantment, and there is a love from which we will never be parted. And we will indeed fly someday, and we will defeat death, and in this world, now “red in tooth and claw,” someday even the trees are going to dance and sing (Psalm 65:13, 96:11– 13). Put another way, even though the fairy tales aren’t factually true, the truth of Jesus means all the stories we love are not escapism at all. In a sense, they (or the supernatural realities to which they point) will come true in him.

     If you are a Christian, it is hard to know what to say to a child reading a book who says, “I wish there was a noble prince who saved us from the dragon. I wish there was a Superman. I wish we could fly. I wish we could live forever.” You can’t just blurt out, “There is! We will!” There is a scene in the movie Hook where Maggie Smith plays an elderly Wendy from the Peter Pan story. She addresses Robin Williams, a grown-up Peter Pan who has amnesia. He is amused by the stories Wendy tells his children, but at one point she stares right at him and says: “Peter, the stories are true.” If Christmas really happened, it means the whole human race has amnesia, but the tales we love most aren’t really just entertaining escapism. The Gospel, because it is a true story, means all the best stories will be proved, in the ultimate sense, true.

(Timothy Keller, Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ, [New York: Viking, 2016], pp. 24-28.)

C. S. Lewis:

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from— . . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

(C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, [Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1984], Ch. 7, pp. 75-76.)

Note: See further: Destiny/Longing.

C. S. Lewis:

Let us again lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a ‘Boy’s Book’ or a ‘Girl’s Book’, as distinct from a ‘Children’s Book’. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfilment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration. The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.

(C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children;” In: C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, [San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1994], p. 29.)

George MacDonald:

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.

(George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture;” In: George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakspere: Enlarged Edition, [London: Sampson Low Marston & Company, 1895], p. 28.) [original spelling]

Frederick Buechner:

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order againt [sic] chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name.

     It is perhaps this aspect of the fairy tale that gives it its greatest power over us, this sense we have that in that world, as distinct from ours, the marvelous and impossible thing truly happens.

(Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], p. 81.)

Cf. Frederick Buechner:

     Like the fairy-tale world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had his first meal in the dark at his mother’s breast, and he had his last meal in the dark too, the blinds drawn and everybody straining to catch the first sound of heavy footsteps on the stair, the first glint of steel in the shadowy doorway. In the garden he could hardly see the face that leaned forward to kiss him, and from the sixth hour to the ninth hour the sun went out like a match so he died in the same darkness that he was born in and rose in it, too, or almost dark, the sun just barely up as it was just barely up again when only a few feet offshore, as they were hauling their empty nets in over the gunnels, they saw him once more standing there barefoot in the sand near the flickering garnets of a charcoal fire.

     In the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of the Gospel it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holierthanthous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant who more often than not wear the fancy clothes and go riding around in sleek little European jobs marked Pharisee, Corps Diplomatique, Legislature, Clergy. It is the ravening wolves who wear sheep’s clothing. And the good ones, the potentially good anyway, the ones who stand a chance of being saved by God because they know they don’t stand a chance of being saved by anybody else? They go around looking like the town whore, the village drunk, the crook from the IRS, because that is who they are. When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crowd and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.

     And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn’t shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time in the horrified question of the Baptist’s disciples, “Are you he who is to come?” (Matt. 11:13); in Pilate’s “Are you the king of the Jews?” (Matt. 27:11) you with pants that don’t fit and a split lip; in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over his head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.

     But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel is, of course, that he is the king in spite of everything. The frog turns out to be the prince, the ugly duckling the swan, the little gray man who asks for bread the great magician with the power of life and death in his hands, and though the steadfast tin soldier falls into the flames, his love turns out to be fireproof. There is no less danger and darkness in the Gospel than there is in the Brothers Grimm, but beyond and above all there is the joy of it, this tale of a light breaking into the world that not even the darkness can overcome.

     That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. To preach the Gospel in its original power and mystery is to claim in whatever way the preacher finds it possible to claim it that once upon a time is this time, now, and here is the dark wood that the light gleams at the heart of like a jewel, and the ones who are to live happily ever after are . . . all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be.

(Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], pp. 89-91.)

Madeleine L’Engle:

The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs, but in truth.

     When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading The Selfish Giant and The Book of Jonah these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew, intuitively, that they belonged to the same world. For the world of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is the world of Story…

(Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, [Toronto: Bantam Books, 1982], p. 54.)

G. K. Chesterton:

…I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. …the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. …I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, [New York: John Lane Company, 1909], pp. 104, 105, 109-110.)

John Eldredge:

…all the great stories pretty much follow the same story line. Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken. At just the right moment (which feels like the last possible moment), a hero comes and sets things right, and life is found again.

     It’s true of every fairy tale, every myth, every Western, every epic—just about every story you can think of, one way or another. Braveheart, Titanic, the Star Wars series, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. They pretty much all follow the same story line.

     Have you ever wondered why?

     Every story, great and small, shares the same essential structure because every story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a Story woven into the fabric of our being—what pioneer psychologist Carl Jung tried to explain as archetype, or what his more recent popularizer Joseph Campbell called myth.

     All of these stories borrow from the Story. From Reality. We hear echoes of it through our lives. Some secret written on our hearts. A great battle to fight, and someone to fight for us. An adventure, something that requires everything we have, something to be shared with those we love and need.

     There is a Story that we just can’t seem to escape. There is a Story written on the human heart.

     As Ecclesiastes has it,

He has planted eternity in the human heart. (3:11 NLT)

(John Eldredge, Epic: The Story God is Telling and the Role that is Yours to Play, [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004], pp. 12-13.)

L. M. Montgomery: (Anne)

     “Look, do you see that poem?” she said suddenly, pointing.

     “Where?” Jane and Diana stared, as if expecting to see Runic rhymes on the birch trees.

     “There . . . down in the brook . . . that old green, mossy log with the water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they’d been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart it, far down into the pool. Oh, it’s the most beautiful poem I ever saw.”

     “I should rather call it a picture,” said Jane. “A poem is lines and verses.”

     “Oh dear me, no.” Anne shook her head with its fluffy wild cherry coronal positively. “The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are you, Jane. The real poem is the soul within them . . . and that beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one sees a soul . . . even of a poem.”

(L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea, [Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1909], Chapter XIII, pp. 143-144.)

William R. White:

     Though nearly all of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, moves by narrative and story, it is Jesus who is the perfecter of the form. Through vivid pictures of seeds, pearls, and unemployed workers, he helps us imagine the kingdom of God. Through parables of lost children and dishonest servants, he invites us to picture a gracious and loving parent. Virtually nothing Jesus says is found in lecture form; instead, every word the gospels record is communicated through metaphor, parable, or simile.

     In the story, then, we come closer to gospel language than in any other literary or oral communication form. It is in the story that we know of God’s entry into our world and our redemption. Christians find the story appealing because it is the language of revelation, the language of God’s love, the language of Jesus. It may even be true, as Elie Wiesel has said, that “God made man because he loves stories.”

(William R. White, Speaking in Stories: Resources for Christian Storytellers, [Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982], pp. 11-12.)

Excursus: Allegory.

J. R. R. Tolkien:

     But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

     An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous.

(J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, [Boston: Mariner Books, 1994], “Foreword to the Second Edition,” p. xv.)

S. D. Smith:

     Yes, this is a true story. I believe that. Not that the events happened, but that the story is, please God, faithful to Reality. This is how Tolkien viewed his own stories, and if I have never actively imitated his storytelling (who could succeed at scaling that Olympian summit?), I have learned from him this and more besides. He is, in that sense, my master. Whether or not he would approve of this student, I’m not sure. He was profoundly biased against one particular feature of mine, to be sure. I am an American. Sorry, Master.

     Like Tolkien, I view this story (and this series) not as a propagandistic allegory, still less a religious tract, but a true story. A faithful story. It is honest, as best as I can tell. And therefore it is necessarily infused with echoes of that deep Reality. I do not apologize for that. We write from the depths of our inner life. As children we pretend at play, but it is always us pretending, and our make-believe is made up from what we believe. We love to make believe, and we make believe about what we love.

(S. D. Smith, Ember’s End: The Green Ember: Book IV, [Story Warren Books, 2020], “Author’s Note,” p. 413.)

Leland Ryken, Marjorie Lamp Mead:

To truly understand how Lewis viewed the character of Aslan in his Narnian stories, then, we must be very clear about the distinction between an allegorical approach and what we might term Lewis’ concept of supposal. …Lewis viewed allegory as limiting because allegory is dependent on what the author already knows, while in a mythic (nonallegorical) approach a story may well communicate truths that are beyond the author’s own apprehension. In other words, in the character of Aslan there are elements of truth that go beyond our intellectual comprehension and that speak directly and powerfully to our imagination.

(Leland Ryken, Marjorie Lamp Mead, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005], pp. 63, 64.)

Cf. C. S. Lewis:

     You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books “represents” something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing in that way. I did not say to myself “Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia”: I said “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.” If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.

(C. S. Lewis, Letter, “To Fifth Graders,” Magdalen College, Oxford, May 29th. 1954; In: C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children, eds. Lyle W. Dorsett, Marjorie Lamp Mead, [New York: Collier Books, 1988], pp. 44-45.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria