Tag Archives: Charles Williams

Making New Connections, Patterns, and Links

I believe it’s common for Christian pastors and ministry leaders to say believers don’t need to learn more about the Bible as much as they need to apply what they already know. Maybe it’s only common in South. I’ve heard statements like this many times, and they’re good so far as they go. People who know Christ Jesus is risen and will come again in the flesh, who know to seek first his kingdom and not to worry about other concerns, who have passing familiarity with the fruit of the Spirit, may just need to apply what they know to their daily decisions.

But if that’s the case, why do these pastors continue to preach?

There are many reasons to continue to preach. Let me offer one reason that pushes back on notion that we don’t need more Bible knowledge, just more Bible application. Good preaching and teaching can make connections people haven’t, and maybe can’t, make for themselves. This is often the missing piece. It isn’t that church congregants aren’t familiar with biblical principles. Of course, they may not be, but familiarity doesn’t change the heart without reflection. We naturally take up unbiblical assumptions and patterns that work against the life God has called us to. Most of us don’t recognize what unbiblical beliefs we still hold, and we need godly preachers to show us how God’s truth applies to life. We need them to show us the patterns of a Christian mind.

Bible knowledge—in fact, straight, dry, matter-of-fact biblical knowledge—can make these connections if the Holy Spirit would graciously apply it to us, but often we need to hear a godly preacher or teacher reflect on a text with illustrations and applications for us. This is the way the body of Christ works. We aren’t copies of each other. Some of us don’t think well. We are hung up on ourselves. If we have passing familiarity with the Bible, we don’t understand how to get from what we know to an application like The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question.

What is thy only comfort in life and death?

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, both in life and death—unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with His precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.

What end of the year links do we have?

Poetry: A little on Thomas Gray’s other poems, not “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but since you brought up Gray’s famous poem, here’s Dr. Iain McGilchrist reading it.

Charles Williams: C.S. Lewis had high praise for one of Williams’s novels. “A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer,” said Lewis in his letter. “I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.”

Williams and Lewis became friends shortly after this.

Every day we must make countless decisions about whether we will allow ourselves to be trained in habits of acontextualization, distraction, and incoherence. Resistance requires awareness, persistence, and intentionality. Dr. Keith Plummer is Dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University.

Christmas: On Jan. 2, 1927, Arthur Machen wrote about Christmas traditions of his youth. “It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. . . . to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.”

Photo: andreas kretschmer on Unsplash

‘The Fellowship,’ by Philip and Carol Zaleski

The Fellowship

Though surpassed in poetry and prose style by the very modernists they failed to appreciate, though surpassed in technical sophistication by any number of distinguished academic philosophers and theologians, the Inklings fulfilled what many find to be a more urgent need: not simply to restore the discarded image, but to refresh it and bring it to life for the present and future.

Last night I was complaining about the length of this book, but it turned out as I speculated – about 35% of its body is end notes. Still, it’s a big book. But it’s well worth reading, if you’re interested in the social and intellectual matrix that produced some of the 20th Century’s most influential Christian writing.

The Inklings began as an Oxford student literary group in 1932, but when the students had graduated and moved on, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other friends who had been invited to join carried it on as a sort of cross between a writers’ criticism group and a social club. They met once a week in Lewis’ rooms at Magdelen College for the writing phase, and again at the Eagle and Child pub for the more social part. They carried on, with some changes in membership, until the 1960s.

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski, concentrates on the lives of the four best-known Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. Much of the material covered will already be familiar to fans, but Williams’ and Barfield’s lives are far less known, and there’s plenty of material that will be new to most readers (there certainly was for me). I did not know, for instance, the Tolkien had suffered an injury to his tongue in his youth, which caused him to mumble when speaking (this impediment disappeared when he was “performing,” as in his famous LOTR readings recorded by George Sayer). I didn’t know that Owen Barfield was baptized as an adult into the Anglican Church (though he continued to believe in reincarnation and other Anthroposophist doctrines). Remarkably, there’s even some movie trivia – one discovers connections between the Inklings and David Lean, Julie Christie, and Ava Gardner. Continue reading ‘The Fellowship,’ by Philip and Carol Zaleski

‘The Greater Trumps,’ by Charles Williams

Back in the 1970s, in the flush of an upsurge of interest in C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Eerdmans Publishers brought out American editions of Charles Williams’ novels. One that came later than the others and (if my perceptions were correct) did not stay in print long, was The Greater Trumps. Williams is not a writer for everyone, and this book in particular was especially unsuited for Eerdmans’ market. I borrowed it from a friend and read it at the time. I recalled it over the years with bemusement and some affection. Recently I acquired a complete Kindle edition of all Williams’ novels (which oddly seems to have now disappeared from Amazon), and read it again. My reaction is mixed.

Prof. Bruce Charlton, of the invaluable The Notion Club Papers blog, has been posting about Williams quite a lot recently, and has brought out some information that was not well known in the past – even, apparently, to Lewis himself. Charles Williams was not the saintly, highly spiritual character his friends thought he was. Without judging his salvation, he seems to have carelessly crossed a number of moral and theological lines. He was serially unfaithful to his wife, and he dabbled in the occult. And that’s where the first, obvious problem with The Greater Trumps makes itself apparent. The Greater Trumps is a Christian fantasy centered on the Tarot, the occult system of fortunetelling through cards.

Mr. Coningsby (his given name, to his lifelong distress, is Lothair) is a Commissioner in Lunacy – if I understand correctly, that is a civil service position delegated to evaluate the competence of people in the commitment process. He is a stuffy and unimaginative man, but not malicious. He has a sister, Sibyl, a middle-aged maiden lady who long ago renounced the flesh and devoted herself to loving everyone and everything around her, as expressions of the great Love (that is, of God). He also has a daughter, Nancy, who recently become engaged to a strange young man named Henry Lee. Henry is descended from Gypsies (spelled “Gipsies” here), and – although he genuinely loves Nancy – he has an ulterior motive in their relationship. Mr. Coningsby recently inherited, from a friend, a valuable collection of antique playing cards. Among these packs, unknown to him or to anyone except for certain Gypsies, is the very first, original Tarot pack. This pack was created by a great mystic ages ago, and partakes of the very nature of the universe itself, along with the mystical powers that control it. For that reason, the cards not only can tell the future, but can be used as magical talismans to manipulate nature. Continue reading ‘The Greater Trumps,’ by Charles Williams

The Fellowship of the Inklings

The Eagle and Child

“In general, the all-male group shared a longing for that half-imaginary time before man’s alienation from God, nature and self, the time before the chaos and materialism of the post-industrial era had displaced the elegantly organized cosmos of the Middle Ages. In their ­various ways, each hoped to spearhead a rehabilitation, a re-enchantment of our fallen world.” Michael Dirda reflects on The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. He says the book focuses largely on the men’s religious lives and thoughts.

The Fellowship looks to be a great, detailed introduction to Barfield and Williams, two men close to Lewis and Tolkien but unfamiliar to most of their fans.