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Post by Josh on Mar 16, 2007 22:06:41 GMT -8
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Post by hume on Mar 18, 2007 8:57:54 GMT -8
A nice tribute to a remarkable book. Wright mentions Lewis' slightly dated attempts at using popular lingo and his many World War II references -- typically these would be a barrier to readers of a later era, but for me they form part of the book's charm. Like the opening scenes of the recent movie adaptation of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.
For me the small section of the book in which he discusses the trinity was always the most fascinating, because in my church experience people stated a belief in this doctrine, but pretty clearly their belief had almost no actual content (and so I couldn't figure out just what I was being told to believe). Lewis makes a serious attempt to suggest what the idea of the trinity really means -- beyond a vague "3 equals 1" -- and why it's important. As a writer, he could hardly have set himself a more difficult task, but he pulled it off with minimal hand-waving.
Wright, predictably, takes issue with Lewis over the importance and relevance of the Jewish cultural context in which Christianity was formed. It seems that Lewis, presumably like most educated Europeans of his time, simply didn't know much about ancient history outside of Athens & Rome. I don't know that Wright isn't going too far in the other direction (does he really think the Trinity is a Jewish notion? What happens to that idea if you try to excise Platonism from Christianity?) ...
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