Purify Your Bride

God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one band, or organs in one body.

Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science—the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap—he may be cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but be is not giving himself a chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still going on.

I hadn’t read them since I became Catholic so I guess I have different eyes now. He does not mention the word “church” but he is really saying you need the church to do theology right. I have understood this primarily in terms of having an authority to shut down bad avenues of theological speculation. What Lewis is getting at is deeper. That individuals cannot comprehend God on their own. They need to draw on the experience of others. He talks about how impossible it would be to make a map of the Atlantic on your own. You need to bring the observations of many together to make any map. God is even bigger and more complex than the Atlantic. You cannot possibly know Him on your own.

But why do we require the “the whole Christian community”? Look at protestant theology. How many traditions are truncated in some serious way? How many are connected with a certain ethnic group or a certain religious or cultural movement? How many are centered around a certain liturgical style or around social action or around evangelism. These can all be good things but they are not the whole church. So it causes the perspective of those theologians to be skewed. They can tell us about their favorite beaches but they cannot tell us about the whole ocean.

He also remarks on the tendency of modern thinkers with a truncated tradition to repeat some of the same errors that Christians made centuries ago. These idea are often labeled “progressive” but they are about as progressive as the flat earth society. Somehow questioning settled matters is considered progressive theology but is considered regressive in other areas of study.