sharien chan (post: 1210933) wrote:aw I like dr. Laura. My boyfriends mom got me one of her books "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands" XD I need to read it, but I feel awkward reading it in my dining hall XDDDD
C.S. Lewis was, in my opinion, the greatest popular level apologist of the modernist age. With the shift into the age of postmodernism, however, I think N.T. Wright takes over where Lewis left off. This is especially true now that he has largely shifted from writing works written for scholars (like his influential Christian Origins and the Question of God series) to writing at the popular level. His Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense gives C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity a run for its money, while his recent Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church is a powerful reminder that "heaven is important, but its not the end of the world" and that the Christian hope is ultimately for reembodiment at the resurrection and the new creation. To top it off, his For Everyone series of popular level New Testament commentaries takes over where William Barclay left off.Manillien (post: 1222957) wrote:Agree with warrior4jesus and sirthinks2much - C.S. Lewis' had a special gift! But Philip Yancey also writes good stuff..
Yes, please do read it. Its quite excellent.Warrior 4 Jesus (post: 1223511) wrote:Gives 'Mere Christianity' a run for it's money? Wow, I've got to read that!
Manillien wrote:Hmm yeah, that sounded impressive! I have read "The last word" by Wright, and it was good, so I'll read the one you mentioned as well... I also read somewhere - wikipedia - that Wright said, regarding the trilemma, that it "doesn’] N.T. Wright writes his thoughts about C.S. Lewis in an article titled Simply Lewis: Reflections on a Master Apologist After 60 Years, which can be read by clicking on link just given. My friend Craig Blomberg argues in his book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels that Lewis' trilemma should be modified into a quadrilemma of Liar, Lunatic, Legends, or Lord. Wright goes into more detail on his objections to the trilemma in the article formerly linked to, where he writes the following.But of course the real problem is the argument for Jesus’ divinity. And this problem actually begins further back: There is virtually no mention, and certainly no treatment, of Israel and the Old Testament, and consequently no attempt to place Jesus in his historical or theological context. (One of the “Screwtape Letters” contains a scornful denunciation of all such attempts, and lays Lewis wide open to the charge of ignoring the historical context of the writings he is using—a charge that, in his own professional field, he would have regarded as serious.)
I am well aware that some in our day, too, see the historical context of Jesus as part of what you teach Christians later on rather than part of how you explain the gospel to outsiders. I think this is simply mistaken. Every step towards a de-Judaized Jesus is a step away from Scripture, away from Christian wisdom, and out into the world of . . . yes, Plato and the rest, which is of course where Lewis partly lived. If you don’t put Jesus in his proper context, you will inevitably put him in a different one, where he, his message, and his achievement will be considerably distorted.
This deficit shows particularly in Lewis’s treatment of incarnation. Famously, as in his well-known slogan, “Liar, Lunatic or Lord,” he argued that Jesus must have been bad or mad or God. This argument has worn well in some circles and extremely badly in others, and the others were not merely being cynical.
What Lewis totally failed to see—as have, of course, many scholars in the field—was that Judaism already had a strong incarnational principle, namely the Temple, and that the language used of Shekinah, Torah, Wisdom, Word, and Spirit in the Old Testament—the language, in other words, upon which the earliest Christians drew when they were exploring and expounding what we have called Christology—was a language designed, long before Jesus’ day, to explain how the one true God could be both transcendent over the world and living and active within it, particularly within Israel.
Lewis, at best, drastically short-circuits the argument. When Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” he is not claiming straightforwardly to be God, but to give people, out on the street, what they would normally get by going to the Temple.
MBlight (post: 1229451) wrote:Some of my favourite and most life-changing books are:
Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell
Safely Home - Randy Alcorn (i'm busy with it now, but it's shaking the ground I stand on)
Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller
Circles in a Forest - Dalene Matthee
and finally...
The Cross Examination of Jesus Christ - Randy Singer
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