I learned from speaking in Ft Collins, CO, last week that people have a hunger for heaven. They may not know that–and perhaps call it something else. But just as Jack suggested in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” people cannot quite be educated out of their deep longing for the real, the permanent, and the glorious.

The testimony of dozens of folks who came to talk to me between sessions of my seminar was that Jack–and the fellowship that discussion of his work and seminars like mine create–helps them name the longing and embrace the source of that longing, the lighted pathway to the “true country” that he identifies in the “Hope” chapter of Mere Christianity:

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”

Ours is the story of three worlds:

• The world we left behind in shame, Eden
• The world we occupy in struggle and doubt and turmoil, Earth
• The world that impinges in fleeting glimpses of wonder, glory, and joy, Heaven

Jack helps us understand all three, and he does so by his winsome exposition of the story of the fall, our rescue and redemption, and the coming weight of glory in which “the pure in heart shall see God, because they are the only ones who want to. . .”

Peter Kreeft calls this the “argument from desire,” and I call it “the gospel of homesickness.” (Walker Percy understood this too, and anyone who reads his Lost in the Cosmos and The Message in the Bottle will be delighted, if not challenged.) We don’t feel “at home” here. Why–if we are the product of a blind watchmaker, i.e., evolutionary process. What, in our scientific explanations of ourselves, accounts for this wanton sense of homelessness? Their conclusion (Lewis and Percy): we were “made for another world.”

Jack had a heavenly GPS and his readers are finding their way home with his help as their navigator. Brooke Fraser, New Zealander Christian songwriter, tries to capture this longing in this song from her album, Albertine.

Welcome, those of you interested in kind of following along next week for my weekend seminar in Ft. Collins, CO, here is a (tantalizingly cryptic) outline for the four sessions I will be doing with the kind help of David Guyor, Colorado Christian University and Brent Cunningham, Timebrline Church. Hope you can do it in person! Meanwhile, my live sessions are sandwiched around (can things be sandwiched “around” something without destroying the meaning of “sandwiched”?) break-out sessions for small group discussion and practical training in how to smell heaven all around you!

October 3, 2008, FRIDAY NIGHT, 6:30-9:30PM: “I CAN HARDLY IMAGINE”—
C. S. LEWIS’S HEAVENLY GPS

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

FIRST SESSION
Who Is C. S. Lewis That We Are Mindful of Him? (EPH. 3:14-21)

1. Jack Lewis’s “True Country”—and how he got there.
2. “Enlightening the eyes of your heart. . .”: Jack as our Voice-over Narrator
3. Lewis on Heaven: where to look, what to see

SECOND SESSION:
Imagine There’s No Heaven? Impossible! (1 COR. 2:6-16)

1. The Source of Our Longing: Lewis’s “argument from desire”
2. Images of Eternity/Intimations of Immortality: how music, movies, momentous moments tell our true tale
3. Cultivating Heaven: Jack’s (orthodox) imagination: mining metaphors, appropriating analogies, treas-uring trichotomies

HOMEWORK: READ (& MARVEL) OVER THE CONTENT, CONTEXT, AND AUDIENCE RESPONSE IN MATTHEW 5-7.

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October 4, 2008, SATURDAY MORNING, 8:30AM-NOON:
“NOT A STATE OF MIND”: WITH JESUS AND JACK IN THE WORKSHOP OF LANGUAGE

“But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken, and only the unshakable remains” (C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

FIRST SESSION:
Speaking of Eternity: Jesus and Jack on the Vocabulary of the World to Come (JOHN 5:19-23)

1. Why Jesus Astounded the Crowds: Jack’s Take
2. The Vocabulary of Heaven: parable, paradox, puzzle, prophecy (MATTHEW 5-7)
3. Guarding Our Hearts: Why we need the Mystery of truth and the Truth of mystery

SECOND SESSION:
“Narnia on the Mount”: Re-enchanting the Our Universe

1. “Logic! What Do They Teach Children These Days?” Professor Kirke & the Logic of Never-never Land
2. Reepicheep at Sea: Seeking the Utter East
3. The Last Battle: How to Pack for Our “Railway Accidents”

An expanded bibliography:

C. S. Lewis on “Heaven” Reading List

Works by C. S. Lewis
(Note: Lewis’s affection for, interest in, and insights about heaven are not confined to these works and passages, but they tend to capture the heart of his lifelong longing for his “true country.”)

The Great Divorce. Macmillan, 1946.
A Grief Observed. Macmillan, 1961.
“Hell,” “Heaven,” (Chapters 8, 10) in The Problem of Pain. Harper, 1960.
“Hope” (Chapter 10), in Mere Christianity. Macmillan, 1952.
The Last Battle (Book 7, The Chronicles of Narnia). Harper, 1956.
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. Harcourt, 1964.
“Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock. Eerdmans, 1970.
Reflections on the Psalms (Chapters 10-11). Harcourt, 1957.
Surprised by Joy. Harcourt, 1955.
“Transposition” and “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory. Macmillan, 1949.
The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (Book 3, The Chronicles of Narnia). Harper, 1952.

Secondary Sources
Alcorn, Randy. 50 Days of Heaven. Tyndale, 2006.
Edwards, Bruce L. Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of Narnia. Tyndale, 2005.
Kreeft, Peter. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven But Never Dreamed of Asking! Ignatius, 1990.
—. Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing. Harper, 1980.
—. Love is Stronger than Death. Harper, 1979.
Martindale, Wayne. Beyond the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell. Crossway, 2005
McGrath, Alister. A Brief History of Heaven. Blackwell, 2003.

No one has done more to “rehabilitate” heaven among modern Christians (and nonChristians alike) than C. S. Lewis, and I invite readers in driving distance to join me, Brent Cunningham (Timberline Church) and Dave Guyor (Colorado Christian University) for a two-day exploration of lewis’s insights and their impact on how the hereafter impacts have we live here.

Details here.

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What should one read to be informed and inspired by Lewis on heaven? Try these deliciously provocative works:

• “The Weight of Glory.”
• The Great Divorce
• “Heaven” and “Hell” chapters of The Problem of Pain

Copyright 2008 by Bruce L. Edwards. (Click here for Permissions information)

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The genre of fiction, by modern reckoning, consists of invented stories of various lengths that depict the actions and monitor the thoughts of imaginary characters in their engagement with the conflicts and circumstances that ensue. Novels, tales, vignettes, novellas, short stories, are among the names given to the individual products of the human imagination referred to as “fiction.”

The word fiction itself is derived from the Latin, fictio, which means simply to make or shape. The term fiction begins to appear in English texts around 1412 with the sense of “invention of the mind,” and, by 1599, is in common use as a term to describe generally any imaginative prose literature, distinguishing it from putatively non-fiction works, and from “poetry” as such. (It is obviously possible to tell stories through poetic discourse as well, but fiction is typically expected to be ordered by plot, dialogue, characterization, setting, etc., in a deliberate and recognizable pattern, rather than by the building-blocks and conventions of metre, rhythm, diction, etc. that comprise the art and reception of poetry.)

Anglo-Irish author and critic, C. S. Lewis, draws attention to fiction’s core element succinctly when he says stories simply are “accounts of events that did not take place” (The Personal Heresy [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1939], 120). The question then becomes, why do human beings in general and Christians in particular create narratives depicting “events that did not take place,” instead of just rendering straightforward reports of real deeds done in their own time and place—or recalling past deeds and personages with as much accuracy and integrity as they can muster?

There is no civilization on record that does not have its own stories, its fictions; in fact, to qualify as a “civilization,” even to be recognized and/or recorded as one, in some sense requires from that civilization recoverable stories that can capture what it was like to be part of that society and culture at such-and-such a time. What we know of antiquity, and of what we tend to call the “pre-modern” ages, we know through stories as much as we do “histories”—stories that are to be heard, read, reflected upon, and thus responded to, as humans trying to understand themselves and others, including others far away and long ago.

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In light of the “new” controversy over the “recent” discovery of references to the resurrection in Dead Sea Scroll materials, keep in mind:

In the New Testament, the thing really happens. The Dying God really appears—as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. . . . The old myth of the Dying God . . . comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ [in other religions]: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

—C. S. Lewis, “Answers to Questions about Christianity”; “Myth Became Fact” in God in The Dock, 58; 66; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.

Copyright 2008 by Bruce L. Edwards. (Click here for Permissions information)

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The genres of biography and autobiography refer, literally, to writing (“graphing”) a life (“bio”), one’s own or someone else’s. In the West, they are regarded as fact-driven works created to capture and preserve the life—and usually the times—of notable individuals.

Biographies are presumed to be the product of research, the submersion of their authors in the milieu of their subjects, built upon the canvassing and collating of events, interviews, conversations, diaries, letters, and other related historical documents, accounts, and artifacts contemporary with their period.

Such primary research is often refined as well by reflection upon the subject outside of her or his own historical context, that is, in view of the subject’s reputation earned, corrected, or abandoned by other fellow biographers.

The motives of biographers may vary; one may wish simply to try to assemble the facts of a human life in chronological order: what, where, who, when, how, and why—but minimizing “interpretation”; another may choose to explain and thus focus a historical period through the lens of a single life deemed as significant and “telling” beyond its immediate context and period; still others may choose to assess the value and impact of an individual simply in order to praise or condemn the person’s contributions to history.

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