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This is so cool. I was thinking lately (something I do a bit of now and then) and I don’t know what on earth set me thinking about this, but I remembered a passage from C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Last Battle’ and I realized something I’d never noticed before… then I was just like ohhhhhhhhh boy I gotta share this on the forum.
CAUTION: FURTHER PROCEDURE MAY RESULT IN ALLEGORICAL INSPIRATION.
The passage was told from the perspective of a young Calormen soldier whose name is Emeth. Basically, for those of you who haven’t read the Chronicles of Narnia, the Calormens are middle-eastern in culture and worship a false, demonic god called Tash. Tash, in the story of The Last Battle, represents Satan, and Aslan (the Lion) represents Christ. Emeth has truly believed in Tash all his life, and served him to the utmost of his sincere ability.
Anyway, this is the passage, with a lot of description edited out for the sake of brevity!
So I [Emeth] went over much grass… till lo!… there came to meet me a great Lion…. Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion will know I have served Tash all my days and not him…. But the Glorious One bent down his head… and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but a servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash I account as service done to me.
Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom… I… questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true… that thou and Tash are one?
The Lion growled… and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?
I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand… yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.
Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’Now at first glance that’s all well and good— it sounds great, and right, and makes sense, doesn’t it? But I realized, after pondering it for a little, that what Lewis is saying there is that only sincerity matters. Is that true? Can a pagan truly believe in his gods, and truly serve his gods, and enter Heaven because he truly believed in what he was serving, and through that served Christ?
I don’t think so. ‘For I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.
Obviously in this story Emeth found the truth, but Aslan says he accounts every service Emeth rendered to Tash as rendered to himself, even BEFORE Emeth found the truth.
Anyway— I just wanted to share. 🙂 Any thoughts?
I’m just about to take a webinar, so I can’t stick around long, but my quick answer is NNNNNOOOOOOO!!!! C.S.Lewis scares me honestly. He’s got some great stuff and then he’s got some stuff that makes me go, “Huh? Wait, but – you – what? Where did you get that idea? Wha-wa-wa…???”
I shall return.
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I’ll hold you to that. 😉
I totally agree with you, @kate-flournoy. I was talking with a friend recently, and she was asking me all sorts of hard questions about God and life and something like this came up. I don’t remember the exact wording, but I know I said something that if you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died to save you from your sins and that He was raised from death to life, and if you try to live your life as Jesus did, then you belong to God; you are considered a child of God. Not if you are a “good” person. My friend said that, compared to other people at her school, she’s a “good” person. She then proceeded to call me “perfect” because I never fight with my parents (and when I do, it’s about “stupid” stuff like homework and what clothes I want to wear). I answered with an enormous “NO!” I am far from perfect; I am a sinner in need of saving; and we only receive that saving grace is we trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
Also, my high school pastor at church yesterday mentioned all the really good people who will be in hell. I don’t want to a “fire and brimstone”-type preacher here, but it’s true: because they didn’t accept Jesus’ offering of grace and forgiveness, they will be unfortunate enough to hear the words, “Get away from me, for I never knew you.”Anyways, I think I might have gotten a little bit off topic there a few times. This is a great topic and I can’t wait to see what other people may have to say.
So the main idea I was trying to convey is that, Yes, Kate, just because you do “good” things, or keep your promises, or really believe in something that isn’t true, doesn’t mean that God will forgive you and allow you to spend eternity with Him. It all starts with realizing that you are a sinner in need of a Savior, and realizing that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
Yes, @Belegteleri, totally agree! 🙂 Saying that a man can sincerely serve a false god (nothing more than a delusion of his own erring human brain) and through it serve the one true God in Whom he does not believe is the height of arrogant ignorance.
@kate-flournoy
It was great to take that webinar. It is just as good to be done and come here.When it comes to arguments like these, I tend to prefer the point by point approach. I’ll try to use that here. C.S.Lewis justifies the Calormen soldier in this way:
1. He who seeks good seeks the God who is good.
2. He who seeks the God who is good finds Him even if he does not know it.
Therefore: He who seeks good finds God.4. All who find God are accepted by God.
5. He believes he has already proven the Calormen soldier sought God
Therefore: He believes the Calormen soldier was accepted by God.There. That’s classical logic for you. Let’s examine number 1.
1. He who seeks good seeks the God who is good. This is totally false. Just read Romans 3.
“There is none righteous, no, not one;
11 There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.
12 They have all turned aside;
They have together become unprofitable;
There is none who does good, no, not one.”
Romans 3 tells us, “Hey, don’t worry about ‘if someone seeks good, will they find God?’ That doesn’t matter. They don’t seek good in the first place.”2. He who seeks the God who is good finds Him even if he does not know it. This treats God almost like an impersonal god. God, is in fact, personal. He is not a “good force” you can tap into. He is God – Yahweh. Those who are saved are not his disciples. That is how they learn the gospel. The actual salvation of God makes them children. In fact, Galatians 4 confirms that a personal relationship with God is, in fact, essential to the transformation of our desired from seeking evil to seeking good.
8 Formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods at all. 9 But now that you have come to know God (or rather to be known by God), how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless basic forces? Do you want to be enslaved to them all over again?I might not have phrased #4 the way Mr. Lewis did, but I certainly don’t disagree with it. The rest is just clockwork. The conclusion is false because its premises 1 and 2 were false.
C.S.Lewis also said in his book Mere Christianity,
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him
What C.S.Lewis said in The Last Battle was not a typo. He repeated the same view elsewhere. Somewhere else he said that those in any faith could come to salvation in God by choosing those parts of their religion in line with the Christian faith. This makes me worry that perhaps Mr. Lewis might not have understood the gospel in the first place since the bible says very clearly, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved.”
I am not sure that I am correct in my conclusion, but I got the sense in reading Mere Christianity, that Mr. Lewis also had an almost self-made type of view of salvation. He did not think that works actually saved you, but he thought (or so it seemed to me) that the life you had in christ was dependent upon your good works to grow or whither away and that you needed to do a lot of good works to make sure it stayed alive and that if you didn’t do enough it might die. Now there is a lot of truth there, but I also believe there is some lie mixed in and a half truth is all lie.
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Great thoughts!
Because of the picture Mr. Lewis is painting here for us, that good works are a part of salvation, there is therefore no picture of accountability and future judgment and everyone has the chance at being received as a son so long as he does good things in this life.
Such a false picture of just and holy judgment. If it was as Mr. Lewis proposes here, there would be no need of Christ’s death on the cross. But because we all fall short of God’s glory, and because there is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood, God demonstrated His love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That if we confess with out mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved.(Rom. 3:23, Heb. 9:22, Rom. 5:8, Rom. 10:9)
https://rolenahatfield.com/
Yeeeah… I wouldn’t agree with the point of that section at all. :/
I mean, in the Bible we hear about those who thought they were serving God by doing good works in his name only to hear in the end “I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.” With that, it seems pretty obvious that a pagan can’t, without even knowing God, just whoops into serving him.
I’d say the way to life is a leeeeetle bit narrower than that.Good thoughts, everyone. 🙂
I was just reading Mere Christianity today and came across a passage where Lewis really laid his view out in clear terms. He said:
“There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points.”
There was another quote by him though that I really liked and that I thought the rest of you (being authors) would like too. He said:
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
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The first one made me shudder. The last one was pure inspiration.
Agreed, @Kate-Flournoy
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