Was C. S. Lewis a Christian Hedonist?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, was C.S. Lewis a Christian hedonist?
00:00:09.000 | Joy led Lewis to Christ as the supreme object of his joy and the supreme source
00:00:21.360 | of his joy. So if we're asking the question, "What's the function of joy in
00:00:27.480 | Lewis and does it lead to Christian hedonism?" my resounding answer is going
00:00:32.160 | to be the function of joy was massive and yes it leads to Christian hedonism. I
00:00:36.720 | think I learned crucial elements of my Christian hedonism from Lewis. He called
00:00:43.760 | his autobiography "Surprised by Joy." That's a massive choice that he made to tell us
00:00:52.720 | that what he was experiencing during his 30 unbelieving years in this thing he
00:00:59.560 | called the inconsolable longing, used the German word "Sehnsucht." What he was
00:01:05.680 | experiencing there, this northerness, was ephemeral and always disappointing,
00:01:13.480 | disappearing. As soon as you tried to grasp it, keep it, make it your god, it
00:01:17.720 | went away. He wrote this really famous line, "If I find in myself a desire which
00:01:23.440 | no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I
00:01:28.640 | was made for another world." Well that's a description of the discovery it took him
00:01:34.360 | 30 years to get to, because he was constantly having these desires and he
00:01:39.160 | called them joy. He called these the stabbings, these breaking ends of
00:01:43.840 | something he knew not what, and the longing was the joy, and it was so
00:01:48.480 | intense he wanted it so bad, and yet it went away. And so he finally says in
00:01:57.000 | his story of his conversion, "Inexorably," this is a quote, "Inexorably, joy
00:02:04.240 | proclaimed, 'You want.' I myself am your want of something other, outside, not you
00:02:16.960 | nor any state of you." In other words, that's what he finally came to, is that my
00:02:22.880 | desire is pointing beyond my desire, and if I don't discover the God beyond my
00:02:29.160 | desire, the true God who awakens all my desires, who satisfies all my desires, I
00:02:34.200 | will live an endlessly frustrated life. So there was a quest for joy,
00:02:42.360 | which became a quest for the object of the joy so that the joy could be
00:02:46.600 | satisfied. That's how he became a Christian. So you can't overstate
00:02:50.760 | for Lewis the redemptive effect of joy in his life, and that, and the next stage
00:02:58.400 | for me in my own discovery, was to realize that it didn't just bring him to
00:03:03.400 | Christ. Joy remained, in Lewis's way of thinking, as a virtue behind all our good
00:03:13.120 | deeds. I remember, Tony, standing at a square specials book table in Vroman's
00:03:21.400 | bookstore, fall of 1968, on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California, looking
00:03:30.240 | down at a little blue paperback called "The Weight of Glory," author C.S. Lewis. I
00:03:37.560 | never picked it up in my life. I picked it up, opened, and read the first page, and
00:03:44.360 | the impact of that page on my Christian hedonism is huge, because that's the page
00:03:53.280 | where he basically says, "Every body is questing and pursuing joy, and the
00:04:02.280 | problem," he said, "is not that we are pursuing happiness, but that we are far
00:04:08.840 | too easily pleased." And I thought, "Yes! Yes! That's right! The problem is not that I
00:04:17.680 | want to be happy. The problem is that I'm settling on happinesses that are," to use
00:04:25.280 | his language, "like a little child making mud pies in the slum, because he can't
00:04:30.640 | imagine what a holiday at the sea is like." I tell you, that sentence, Tony, was just
00:04:35.400 | explosively illuminating for me, and became part of the ground of the last 40
00:04:43.520 | plus years of my life's work. So that's—yes, he was a Christian hedonist. And
00:04:51.920 | one last piece. I forget when I read it. I think I read it a year or two later, his
00:04:58.600 | book "Reflections on the Psalms," and at the time I was wrestling with how
00:05:05.960 | God-centered God seemed to be in the Bible, and I was being shown by Edwards
00:05:10.840 | and shown by Dan Fuller, and all over the Bible, that God was God-centered. And
00:05:16.760 | in his chapter on—I forget, something like a word on praise or something—he
00:05:23.360 | talked about his own struggle with God's self-exaltation, and he said it sounded
00:05:28.600 | like an old woman seeking compliments. "Praise me! Praise me! Praise me! Praise me!"
00:05:32.240 | It seemed to him that God was saying all over the Psalms, and He is. And then he
00:05:38.120 | gives these two pages—I think it's pages 92 and 93, I didn't even check it because I
00:05:43.040 | just—I remember it so well from those days—that praise is not the constrained,
00:05:51.640 | dutiful add-on to delight. So you delight and say, "Oh, I guess I should praise it
00:05:58.360 | because it's so beautiful." Nobody, nobody does that. If you love something, if you
00:06:04.600 | delight in something, it spontaneously overflows, and isn't that beautiful? Can
00:06:10.840 | you believe that? And you point, and you hope that somebody is standing at your
00:06:14.800 | side. I remember standing, reading the jokes in the New Yorker, in the library,
00:06:20.360 | at Fuller Seminary, and laughing quietly and wishing I could point to it with
00:06:25.200 | somebody, and that confirmed that Lewis is right, that I want to praise this joke
00:06:31.440 | right here, I want to praise this cartoon right now. My joy in this cartoon will
00:06:36.560 | not be complete until I find somebody and say, "Look, look, look at this!" And he
00:06:41.760 | argued that when God calls us to praise, He is calling us to bring our delight to
00:06:50.760 | consummation, which means it's not egomania, it's love. And that was the
00:06:56.720 | capstone for me, it was just a capstone to believe that God's requirement that I
00:07:03.440 | praise Him was an act for me, it was for me. He gets the glory, I get the
00:07:10.700 | consummation of the joy that I have in Him. So Lewis is a profound influence in
00:07:19.560 | my shaping of what I've called Christian hedonism, and I'll just thank God for Him
00:07:25.440 | until I see Him face to face, and can thank both Him and the Father that He
00:07:29.800 | let me bump into Him in my young years. Thank you, Pastor John. We will be
00:07:36.120 | studying the enduring influence of C.S. Lewis later this fall on September 27, 28,
00:07:40.440 | and 29 here in Minneapolis at the Desiring God National Conference. The
00:07:44.320 | conference is titled "The Romantic Rationalist--God, Life, and Imagination in
00:07:49.040 | the Work of C.S. Lewis." More details and registration will be available soon at
00:07:52.500 | desiringgod.org on the blog and under the "Events" tab. I'm your host Tony
00:07:56.840 | Reinke, thanks for listening.
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