Integrative Essay

In all honesty I have no idea what to write on. I have really not been looking forward to writing this paper since the class first started. I have always had problems with writing papers on as broad of topics as this as long as I have had to write papers. As you can tell from my torrent of complaints and participation in class, or lack thereof, there are times where I would rather have my education forced upon me like a dictatorship. However Lewis would have serious problems with this. As he said in Our English Syllabus on the subject of education “Do not tell me that you would sooner have a nice composite menu of dishes from half the world drawn up for you. You are too old for that. It is time you learned to wrestle with nature for yourself. And whom will you trust to draw up the menu? How do you know that in that very river which I would exclude as poisonous the fish you specially want, the undiscovered fish, is waiting? And you would never find it if you let us select.” Which I take to mean that Lewis wants me to just suck it up and put these childish impulses to gravitate towards whatever is easiest and come up with a legitimate introduction to my paper instead of this debauchery that tries to trick readers into thinking that they have just been given all of the things necessary to the beginning of a paper such as a background, thesis, lack of I statements (oops), and set of instructions on where all of this is going two or three pages from now so that they can simply skip ahead to the conclusion and still know what happened in the middle. While I would hate to spoil the plot of this masterfully crafted piece, a main point or at least a statement of purpose or intent at the beginning seems a little less out of my reach. What I hope to achieve here is not anything of great consequence but to simply examine the many works of CS Lewis in the context of the main themes that were discussed in Engaging God’s World by Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

The first step of this in my opinion is looking at what themes were brought up by Plantinga so that we know the context in which we are viewing Lewis’s work. In the five chapters of his book Plantinga covers longing and hope, creation, the fall, redemption, and vocation. Being that these five topics basically encompass everything in the entire world, I think that it is safe to move on and view Lewis’s works as they were intended: dealing with the issues of the world. The first and foremost of these issues in my mind in looking at our world are the issues of Bulverism and Perspective.

Bulverism is something I think that each and every one of us can relate to. Not only have we all seen it I think that all of us have been guilty of it at some point. Bulverism for those of you who may be reading this and are unfamiliar with this term is the practice during an argument of assuming that your opponent is wrong without showing why and attacking them personally instead of their argument. While it’s easy to pass this off as something that is wrong with politics today or some other far away argument that fails to affect us in the slightest, it is something that we are faced with on a much more personal level on what is at least for me an almost daily basis. I personally know at least four people whose unparalleled egos prevent them from ever believing even for a moment that they could be wrong about anything. Logical arguments that clearly explain what points of their argument is incorrect do not reach them. Even the ones that are capable of argument after they have been confronted refuse to hear what you have to say. While I understand that on some issues such as our faiths we cannot be ready and able to compromise at any moment however we should be at least able to listen to what it is that the other side is trying to say, or in other words be willing to look at it from another perspective.

Lewis in his essay Meditation in a Toolshed talks about how we have to look at everything from multiple perspectives in order to see the entire picture. He says “I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam and looking at the beam are very different experiences.” He goes on to ask which experience is the true one, looking at or along. He resolves this matter quite finally when he states that in order to obtain an entire view of something you must look at both sides of it. This is just as true I think for arguments as it is for sun beams. We must be willing to see things from every side and make our decisions based on our feelings (along) about the objective view of every other view (at). I heard somewhere that the best way to convince people that you are correct is to concede something to your opponent, and while this may seem like some sort of a trick I see it as a step towards understanding. This is because by conceding something we are acknowledging that our opponent is correct about something and if this is true than there may be other things on which we can agree.

This brings me to my final point we can despite all of the things that divide us, sometimes for very important reasons (see my previous entry my humble and honest opinion a correction to my blog on Mere Christianity), we still agree on some points. In the preface to mere Christianity Lewis talks about how in order to make sure that his book about the common ground on which all Christians stand regardless of denomination was not just particular to himself or his beliefs he ran it past members of four different denominations to see what they thought, “Otherwise all five of us were agreed. I did not have the remaining books similarly 'vetted' because in them, though differences might arise among Christians, these would be differences between individuals or schools of thought, not between denominations. So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters written to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or 'mere' Christianity.” If the churches whose leaders are represented in this grouping of people Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic could all agree on the same basic common ground then I think that despite my natural tendency towards pessimism I think that there is hope for mankind however I would point out that this hope is but a sliver.

At this point you must be asking yourself two questions one how did I make it through all of that (supposing you read it instead of skipping ahead as was advocated in the first paragraph as I recall) and secondly how does all of this mumbo jumbo laced with Lewis quotes all relate back to the themes mentioned at the beginning. I would think that this should be fairly obvious. If there is any one theme that is the focus of this essay I should think that it is longing and hope. The majority of main things I have talked about throughout this paper have been negative. This is exactly why hope is so important though even a sliver can be enough. As Plantinga said when speaking about Peter and Pentecost “Here, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, one man’s hope spreads out to cover all humankind” One man and all of humanity. There is a lot of negativity in this world I have talked about only a small portion of it and have a great deal more built up inside of me alone however with just the small hope that we can find some common ground and come together we can as Christians or even humans begin to build the kingdom of God and this is our vocation.






Works Cited

Lewis, Clive S. Bulverism. Print.
Lewis, Clive S. Meditation in a Toolshed. Print.
Lewis, Clive S. Mere Christianity. Print.
Lewis, Clive S. Our English Syllabus. Print.
Plantinga, Cornelius. Engaging God's World A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. Boston: Wm. B. Eerdmans Company, 2002. Print.