Friday, April 20, 2018

The Sharpened Intellect

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

3 comments:

Starhopper said...

I have absolutely zero sympathy for Bunyan's Calvinist theology, but I wholeheartedly agree with C.S. Lewis that his Pilgrim's Progress is a truly astonishing work of literature. I have read it more times than I can count (and not for the last time), and am eternally finding new gems in its rich fields. The book belongs high on any serious list of "Greatest Works in the English Language" alongside Chaucer, Malory, Milton, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman.

It's interesting that many of the truly great Christian literary works are Voyages of Discovery, either literal or metaphorical. Just think of Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, the Grail Legend, Melville's Moby Dick, or J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Starhopper said...

Speaking of Lewis, there appears to be a new documentary coming out this November about Lewis, Tolkien, and the Great War (WWI). The linked trailer looks promising!

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Herbert Marcuse's Critique Science