Great Insight from Lewis

In the next few posts, I am going to be putting up various quotes by C.S. Lewis in his great work, Mere Christianity, that show his great insights and wisdom.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. 

 

All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts--to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.  And they are very terrifying facts.  I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable.  But I must say what I think true.  Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort.  But it does not begin in comfort;  it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to the comfort without first going through that dismay.  In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.  If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:  if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.  Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics.  It is time we did the same about religion.

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 32.

Go on and laugh...you know it's funny!

Ravi on Apologetics

"Apologetics is a subject that ends up defending itself. The one who argues against apologetics ends up using argument to denounce argument. The one who says apologetics is a matter of pride ends up proudly defending one's own impoverishment. The one who says conversion is a matter of the heart and not the intellect ends up presenting intellectual arguments to convince others of this position. So goes the process of self-contradiction. "I am convinced, in the words of C. S. Lewis—who in my estimation is probably the greatest Christian apologist in recent memory—that the question of being an apologist is not so much whether you use an apologetic in answering someone's question, but whether the apologetic you already use is a good one."