Belief comes easily for Lewis: "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not: 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'...Of course it's easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent -- non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it frankly, we don't ask for Him?" (Lewis, p. 5) In short, Lewis is tormented by the question of how can one believe in a good God, a God worthy of belief, in a world of suffering, where loss is part of human existence?
Chapter 3
Ultimately, even in a world riddled with loss, Lewis insists on affirming the goodness of the world, and the goodness of the God that created that world. He uses metaphors not simply of heaven, but of the common, human daily activities of eating, drinking, and the memories he spent with his wife. "Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain that makes us feel we...
Lewis writes a Grief Observed Lewis: A Grief Observed In C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, Lewis talks of the process of grief. Specifically, he discusses this process through a long and painful and journey which deals with the death of his wife. While he is not interested in going back he does talk about his love for his wife Joy and how this particular experience of grief meshes with ideas that he
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. (p.57) Throughout A Grief Observed, Lewis rehashes the reasons that his wife was taken from him too soon. He cannot understand why he was given the gift of his wife's life, only to have that life taken from him. Like a coward envisions his own death many times before he dies, so the lover of someone who is dead envisions
In showing the strength of his Christian faith and the rhetoric behind his revelations, Lewis uses the theme of his wife's death as a rhetorical devise. Lewis provides a rationale for the death of his wife in the context of grief. He argues, "[T]here's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under
Suffering Tim Murphy Theology MA2000D The existence of human suffering poses a unique theological problem. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving, then why does suffering exist? Indeed, this difficulty is confronted in scripture itself: perhaps the most important look into the problem of suffering comes in the Old Testament story of Job. Mainstream Christianity continues to have a variety of ways of approaching this theological question, although historically Christians had a much broader
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