| Every few months a pastor friend of mine asks me for two or three topics related to cultural apologetics that his church staff should be discussing together. I love this exercise, because it forces me to summarize and apply what I’ve been seeing, hearing, and reading from church leaders around the world. Sometimes we’re able to see together what others may have overlooked. Many of you have followed the Gospelbound podcast for the last five years. I’d like to welcome you to my new weekly newsletter, Unseen Things. We take our inspiration from one of my favorite passages in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 4:16–18: So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. What we see today in the world often makes us lose heart. But we don’t put our faith in the world. As we look to the eternal, we enjoy renewal day by day. God can even turn our creaking, growing bodies into the means of anticipating a weighty glory greater than anything we can currently comprehend. Many will associate this “weight of glory” with one of C. S. Lewis’s most famous sermons, delivered on June 8, 1941, toward the beginning of the Second World War. This week I published my first essay from research for my next book, Churchill and Lewis: For the Salvation of the World. I’ve written a chapter about the context and influence for that Lewis sermon. But this week’s essay focuses on the novel Lewis published in the final month of the war. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength continues to challenge and inspire readers 80 years later. (I can’t help but see the connections with the contemporary TV show Severance. You have a hapless protagonist named Mark, the mysterious work of Lumon, the strange role of animals, and the central premise of malicious control through a severed head.) As I’ve talked to pastor friends, I’ve told them to consider how “escape” has become the organizing idea behind the 21st century West. Compared to Mere Christianity, the defining apologetic text of the 20th century, That Hideous Strength might be more relevant in the 21st century. The antagonists (N.I.C.E.) promise an escape from biology. More than wealth, or fame, or purpose, or identity, the modern West pursues escape—from obligations, from commitments, from confinement, from limits. Aided by digital technologies, we’ve come closer than ever before to escaping the need for God, the need for each other, even the need for our own bodies. Even in this dystopia, however, Lewis saw hope for humanity. We can wake up and realize we can’t really live out—and don’t really want—what modernity offers, these “dry and choking places.” Deep in our Western subconscious, Lewis believed, was the memory of something more, of something big enough even to redeem everything suffered. Indeed, though we have not seen God, we love him. Believing in him, we rejoice with joy that is filled with glory (1 Pet. 1:8). We don’t escape this world. Far better, one day we will, with unveiled face, see the glory of the Lord return to this world (2 Cor. 3:18). |
