Tom Woods podcast with Carl Benjamin.
Good starting point is here (another 27 minutes to the end).
Category Archives: C. S. Lewis
“I will build my church: The missio ecclesiae”
Review of Joseph Boot's "The Mission of God" (Chapter 15)
The following is just a collection of (not necessarily verbatim) quotes from the chapter with the above title from the book “The Mission of God” by Joseph Boot (see his Ezra Institute).
15.1 The Mission of the Church
Definition of the church . . . Greek ekklesia, simply meaning assembly. A compound of the preposition ek (out from ) and verb kaleo (to call).
Thayer’s Greek Lexicon: “a gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place”.
So the church is a universal and organic (living and growing) body of regenerate believers (a new humanity or citizenry) who have been reconciled to God through the death and resurrection of Christ, called out to serve their king, finding regional expression in local assemblies (or embassies) of God’s kingdom people.
God’s people are sent out into all the earth to declare the good news of Christ’s reign and salvation and assert his crown rights in every area of life and thought.
This is a distinctly reformed and Puritan perspective, and a world-changing one.
This vision of the church’s mission in the Western European context took decisive shape during the Calvinistic movements of the Second Reformation in Holland and the Puritan era in England, Scotland and the American colonies.
Richard Marius writes: Luther never tried to make much of the present world, and a worldly age cannot make much of him. The Calvinists expected the world to endure, and they believed themselves to be instruments of God to convert it . . . Calvinism has implanted . . . a perpetual dissatisfaction with our successes and a restlessness with the way things are. [523]
In a truly Reformed theology of mission, the church as God’s kingdom people must not only be concerned with personal salvation, or institutional church affairs, but with the reign of Christ over all things.
Cromwell and many other Puritans were working toward a nation under God’s law and gospel in which there would be a harmony between church and state, both submitted in their spheres to God.
It was simply assumed that people would live a better life once God’s rule was established over thier respective societies.
Because of its theocratic features the Calvinist branch of the Reformation put a greater emphasis than Lutheranism on the rule of Christ in society at large; this distinction also manifested itself in Calvinist missionary practice. [524]
Bosch: “The Enlightenment would shatter the theocratic ideal. Religion would be banished into the private sphere, leaving the public sphere to reason.”
Enlightenment relativized the absolute and exclusive claims of Christianity, thereby steadily pushing it from the public to the private realm. Furthermore, in this rebirth of human autonomy the “self-sufficiency of the individual over social responsibilities was exalted to a sacred creed.”
In our present cultural moment, the Enlightenment, having run its course and exiled transcendence, has left us the meagre crumbs of relativism, subjectivism, political pluralism and a concomitant return to esoteric pagan spirituality that is successfully merging itself with humanistic ‘science’.
The main responses of the churches to this predicament vary from a kind of retrenchment in a ‘reason-based’ Christianity, to religious privatisation, and theological flight and retreat.
The first common response, mostly among Catholics and evangelical rationalists, essentially adopts the Enlightenment paradigm, wedding the ‘age of reason’ to Christianity, claiming that theology is a kind of natural science, the science of God, and that reason, through identifying natural law, can restore man to a truly moral and rational idea of himself, the world and God.
A second reaction . . . divorces faith and reason, seeking to locate the faith essentially in human feelings and experience alone . . . the goal of the Christian life and faith then becomes simply advancing one’s personal spiritual growth. . . . tied to an eschatology of escape and flight from the world as the ultimate hope of the church.
A third and most popular response amongst Protestants has been the radical privatisation of the faith. . . . like to think they can carve out a small domain in public affairs, having a ‘seat at the table,’ whilst leaving the rest of life to be considered a purely personal and individual realm, and allowing most of the public square to go its own way.
A more sophisticated variation on this response has been the development of a ‘Christian’ political pluralism, which essentially embraces the globalist multi-cultural project of the modern left, and baptizes it as the church’s mission in serving the common good – this presupposes the privatisation and relativisation of biblical truth.
The very idea that biblical faith creates Christian culture or civilisation is denied, and the Reformed view of biblical revelation effecting legislation is rejected as totalitarian.
There is no such thing as a neutral culture. ‘Multiculturalism’ is therefore just a contemporary term for polytheism (many gods). But no society can be governed by more than one ultimate source of authority without provoking civil conflict and social chaos.
The Roman world … sponsored cultural pluralism politically, but ensured that ultimate allegiance was to the emperor (the state). … This was true of all the polytheistic empires; ultimate power and authority lay with the king, emperor or ruler, i.e. the state. This pagan idea is the actual hegemonic reality that exists today in the West.
This ‘modified’ privatisation of biblical faith and truth, calling for active support and promotion of political pluralism (public idolatry) in the name of Christianity, is fast becoming the dominant ‘evangelical’ perspective. Its cousin is the right-leaning two-kingdoms theology … that supports the privatisation of the faith with the notion that the public or secular sphere outside the institutional church is a realm of ‘common grace’ where specifically Christian revelation is not necessary to define and shape the common good.
This is largely an attempt to both cope with the Enlightenment’s shattering of the theocratic ideal in Protestant mission theology, and to broker a deal with the crocodile of statism in the hope of being eaten last.
Turning this around is not done by revolution, but by regeneration, and multi-generational faithfulness to preach, teach, serve and obey in terms of the whole council of God. Faithful Christians are called to live godly, peaceable, honourable lives, seeking to live at peace with all as far as it depends upon them without compromising God’s word whilst dwelling in non-Christian social orders.
15.2 The New Puritanism and the Church
The answer to the shattering of the Protestant theocratic ideal by the Enlightenment lies not in the popular responses highlighted previously, but in a simple return to the whole council of God in Scripture and a revival of a Puritan theology of mission detailed throughout the book.
We must neither romanticise the past, nor accept the status quo as normative. “The Church must in every generation be ready to bring its tradition afresh under the light of the Word of God.”
A pocket of theocratic Christianity that survived the Enlightenment was Dutch Calvinism. This movement greatly influenced the new Puritanism (the theonomists)
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), who served as Prime Minister in the Netherlands summarized his Reformed missiological thrust this way:
“One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul . . . It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the state for the good of the people; to carve as it were, into the conscience of the nation, the ordinances of the Lord, to which the Bible and creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.”
The layman does not leave the church when he walks out of the building.
Although this is unlikely to happen overnight, I believe that a recovery of a missional theology of hope, dominion and victory, centred upon the kingdom of God and our priestly service to the king, would lead to a progressive renewal of the church’s mission.
[Rushdoony:] Today, as the world more openly embraces humanism, our religious institutions, schools, families, and callings must see themselves as outposts of Christ’s Kingdom, local gatherings of the citizens of the new creation. In the building for worship, the true church in a local community gathers to hear the word of God, whereby they are to go forth and exercise dominion.
15.3 No Compromise
John Stott: “I now see more clearly that not only the consequences of the commission but the actual commission itself must be understood to include social as well as evangelistic responsibility, unless we are to be guilty of distorting the words of Jesus.”
Why does this kingdom manifesto appear to be revolutionary or even threatening to many in today’s church?
Rejecting compromising the faith. The implications of the Puritan thesis have become clear – uncompromising biblical faithfulness to the Lord, whatever the cost.
The Bible was read, not as God’s law-word, but as a devotional book for pietists. The state (and most of life) was thus freed from God to follow a humanistic course.
However,
“by forcing Christians to grapple with the Old Testament’s contribution to Christian ethics and a just society, and by offering insightful biblical solutions to the problems of the modern world, the Reconstructionists have enriched the church” (J. G. Child)
The quiet and progressive influence of Puritan missiology is also no doubt due to the weakness and evident inadequacy of current Reformed and evangelical missiological thought.
15.4 Idolatry – The Root of Resistance
The modern church is tempted to blame the humanists, pagans and Muslims, Marxists or other groups for the state of our culture and its idolatrous turn, but God calls his people to first take a long hard look at themselves in accounting for the decline of our social order. (See Jeremiah 3:1-23)
In the midst of the people’s rebellion, there is hope. This hope is found in the invitation to return to the Lord. God calls his people to repent and turn to him.
15.5 Divine Jealousy
The word jealous is related to zealous and denotes exclusivity – another word our age has a distaste for!
Love and jealousy are inseparably related and they are intimately involved in one another in the unchanging character of God.
Jealousy, like God, is personal (as is love). Electricity is not personal. The murderer and the saint alike will both get electric shocks if they touch an electric fence because current is impersonal or non-discriminating in action. Thus, when people fail to discriminate in life between good and evil character and actions, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, they are depersonalising and dehumanising persons and life itself.
C. S. Lewis points out that to deny jealousy and wrath to God is misleading and destructive: “All the liberalising and civilising analogies only lead us astray. Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval and you also turn his love into mere humanitarianism. The consuming fire and the perfect beauty both vanish.” God’s love is exclusive which means his love for his covenant people demands the eschewing of all idolatry.
15.6 The nature of Idolatry
The essence of all sin is idolatry and it was so from the first.
Man’s favourite idol is himself and his own will.
The two key forms of idolatry found amongst God’s people in the time of Jeremiah were (and remain in today’s church) syncretism [the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought] and false prophesy in the name of the God of Scripture – and they usually come together.
In the modern church, we have people and movements who claim to want and and worship a God of love; not a God whose nature includes law, jealousy, exacting justice, judgement and wrath. This pretence has always been the cry of those who would liberalize, sanitize, and domesticate the divine. But the love of which they speak is an abstraction, and their god an idol; an idea; a universalistic, and promiscuous god; an antinomian image without law, and therefore without grace: without justice and therefore without mercy. This ‘progressive’ god is evolving and changing as the spirit of the age appoints the creed of time. This is a god of man’s making whose being and ways must conform to the shifting sands of popular culture. This god speaks no infallible word, for that word is now spoken by man for the moment. This profane image is a useless idol. The actual god in this theosophy is man. However much cloaked in theological or missiological verbiage, this evolving god is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
15.7 Going the Way of Balaam
What leads God’s people into idolatry? According to Scripture, the main culprit is false preaching and teaching.
It is not usually the loud humanist and open spokesman for Baal (sexual perversion, homosexual marriage, abortion, abolition of the family, queer culture etc…) who is the greatest danger to the church, but the audacious churchmen, masking their idolatry as faithfulness. Often gifted, eloquent, full of plausible-sounding argument and popular appeal, with media reach and glossy books and even an ostensibly ‘evangelical’ pedigree, such people can spin a new faith with words from the old.
The triune God of Scripture is a faithful, exclusive, loving, inexorable and jealous husband, and it is these very qualities that make him a God of real love.
In recent decades, confidence and hope have been gradually sapped in the western church by a general failure to faithfully preach and apply the whole counsel of God in our churches.
15.8 The Hopeless World
Without the sovereign God in their world, and outside of the covenant, men desperately plan their utopias, dream of creating cybernetic life and downloading their consciousness into a machine to escape death, and wonder how man will avoid the consequences of the evil in his own heart.
It is harder to hope and believe that the mission God has given his church can be fulfilled. It is easier to dress up faithlessness as realism, disobedience as a higher spirituality, or to succumb to hopelessness.
15.9 The Covenant of Hope
We must again in the Western world recover the vital mission of the church that sees its calling as applying the reign of Jesus Christ in all creation. We must revive the spirit and vision of salvation victory that characterised the apostle John and inspired the great hymn writer who penned those potent words “All hail the power of Jesus name let angels prostrate fall, bring forth the royal diadem and crown him Lord of all . . . Let every kindred, every tribe on this terrestrial ball, to him all majesty ascribe and crown him Lord of all.”
It will require courage, fortitude and unwavering biblical faithfulness to rouse the church again to her mission in a generation that has lost its way in idolatry, and where many a prophet and and priest have said ‘peace, peace, when there is no peace”.(Jer. 6:14). Yet in spite of all opposition, wherever a faithful kingdom people are found; wherever the church of Jesus Christ gathers as his embassy to serve as his ambassadors; wherever a willing and humble church will hear and obey, the rule and kingdom of God is present.
On the death of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley
All on the 22nd November 1963
Article by Gary North, titled The Fathers In The Wilderness.
Excerpt:
With the death of John Kennedy on November 22, 1963–also the day of death for Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis–the rhetoric of can-do liberalism was taken up by a crass Texan who knew how to wield power under the old rules, and who proceeded to involve the United States in two losing wars, the Vietnam war and the war on poverty. Can-do liberalism started twisting arms visibly, and by 1968, the humanistic forces of mindlessness, of revolution, and of drugged retreat reacted violently to what little was left of the humanist vision of Camelot. Lyndon Johnson was the invisible man at the Democrats’ 1968 convention, and he remains invisible. Simultaneously, bureaucrats took over the management of the dreams of Camelot, as bureaucrats always do, and “the Great Society” became an economic and foreign policy nightmare.”
Thus, by the early 1970’s, the old liberalism was crumbling ideologically, and by the late 1970’s, it was in full retreat institutionally. The rise of the neo-conservative movement has routed the Intellectual leaders of the old left, and the rise of the New Rights direct-mall politics and the New Christian Right’s voter registration drives among fundamentalists has begun to rout the political leaders. The extent of Mondale’s loss probably sealed the fate of the old left’s Presidential hopes. Some new left vision, some new age vapor, or some crisis-solving blue collar patriotism seem to be the humanists’ only political alternatives. They are in disarray. They control the reigns of power temporarily, but they are no longer being given a free ride by the conservatives.
The Era of Wilderness Wandering
With the rise of the Christian Reconstruction movement in the late 1960’s, and the rise of the Protestant “renewal” movement of the same period, the vacuum of fundamentalism is being filled. On the other side, liberation theology and neo-Anabaptist communalism have arisen to fill the void of the older theological liberalism. Each side looks at its aging leaders and hopes for something better.
What is called for now is a period of rebuilding the foundations. An enormous educational program is called for. The Christian day school movement and the Christian home school movement are the main long-term weapons in this educational counter-attack against humanism. Of secondary importance long-term, but of great importance short-term, are the new T.V. satellite Christian broadcasts and the advent of computerized mailing lists and newsletters.
The New Renaissance And A New Reformation
Article by Gary North from 1985
C. S. Lewis makes the observation in The Abolition of Man (1947) that occultism and humanism appeared in Western history at about the same time, during the Renaissance. They were two sides of the same revival of paganism. Thus, he argued, occultism and humanistic rationalism are not enemies in principle but rather cooperating philosophies that are united against Christianity and Christian civilization. This is the theme of his great masterpiece, the novel That Hideous Strength.
From 1964 onward, a new Renaissance took place–a recapitulation of the Renaissance’s revival of occultism, mysticism, and the quest for power. To this witches brew was added revolutionism. It hit the academic world in September of 1964, when the student riots began at the University of California at Berkeley. That revolution shook the foundations of the older liberalism. It launched a series of “scientific revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” in every social science.
The new humanism and the new occultism of the late 1960’s produced a new world view, which has in recent years begun to be called the New Age movement or New Age humanism. Such phenomena as “holistic healing,” Eastern mysticism, monistic philosophy (the world is one: pantheism), magic, astrology, and outright satanism began to multiply. It started as a campus phenomenon, and in many ways, this new Renaissance ended there, in the spring of 1970.
Continue reading here.
About Julian Savulescu
A "medical ethicist" happy to "reduce liberalism and privacy" in order to "enhance human nature"
The Mythology of Spaceship Earth
Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.
The full article is here.
Excerpts:
The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacrificing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the modern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilemma, and the crisis of modern culture reflects man’s failure to resolve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Commissar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.
The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the external world will take care of itself. His assumption is that science and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.
[. . .]
Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he began to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after editorial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlightened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be obtained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned housing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.
Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the messianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.
Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men acting in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this generation? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wicker’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a noninflationary tax cut not be preferable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and recommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem technology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?
[. . .]
A LEAP OF FAITH
Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular instance of a “successful” government project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory completion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal preferences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the problem he states:
In contrast to the novel and uncluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.
But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large numbers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.
Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the unstated assumption that we can reduce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is precisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon indicate anything except the amazing capacity for spending that governments possess.
SPACESHIP EARTH
Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buckminster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of considering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]
[. . .]
The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those fundamental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dictatorships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world government implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is willing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:
Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.
THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS
I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary system’s increasing inefficiency, corruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the benefits of such a system:
But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from position to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a considerable source of strength.
This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intellectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.
GROUNDING THE SHIP
Dr. William G. Pollard, a physicist who was a part of the Manhattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theological framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:
Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civilization could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently necessary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be permitted.
We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.
At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some permanent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s taking control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.
When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in creating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The theology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progressive technology and planning.
The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in constructing spaceship earth.
C. S. Lewis on “tyranny sincerely exercised”
Found here.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
C.S. Lewis predicted medical tyranny
in this exquisite sci-fi trilogy
Lewis – perhaps best known for his Christian apologetics and Chronicles of Narnia series – wrote a science fiction trilogy that was aptly named The Space Trilogy. The three books that make up the series are called Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Each book can be read independently; however, read as a whole they are more exquisite and meaningful.
The third installation presents a scenario most analogous to today’s world. In it we find a global conspiracy largely led by academics and scientists, who are hell-bent (literally) on ushering in a world that is overtly sanitary and free of any intellectual or biological germs.
I believe that it was Lewis’s Christian sense that allowed him to be more accurate than Orwell. Orwell wrote of the government as an immovable and impenetrable force, whereas Lewis portrayed governments as a bit weak and thus controlled by nongovernmental organizations.
Since Lewis was not an atheist like Orwell, and therefore not a materialist, he understood that the most important thing was not force, but mentality and belief.