#necturusmaculosus

Aside from the racism and ignorance about other religions, my main problem with Chesterton is his tendency to reject systemic evil as a source of ills in favor of personal evil (e.g. “Dear Sirs, I am”) and to place an emphasis on assuming traditions are benevolent unless otherwise demonstrated (which is closely tied to his frequent rejection of systemic evil, imo).

I want to credit/blame CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, but I’m fairly sure he’s not the one who originated Hell as separation from God and the door being locked on the inside so much as popularized it. I also haven’t read it, so I can’t speak authoritatively about it.

Putting the rest under the cut due to length

So the thing about the Early Church is that there were hundreds of them. In the first few centuries of its history Christianity was so diverse that the modern churches look almost uniform.

But even if you limit yourself to the First Century churches that can be somewhat legitimately traced to modern churches, they were nothing like evangelicalism. For one thing, they didn’t have a Bible. They had the Septuagint, but it had more books than the modern Protestant Old Testament, and they had a bunch of epistles, gospels, and other documents in circulation, but they weren’t seen as scriptural (I’ve often wondered how mortified Paul would be if he knew that people were reading his letters as though they were written for billions of people living two thousand years after his death--and not just because there wasn’t supposed to be a two thousand years later).

CS Lewis is a mixed bag. Sometimes he says things that are beautiful and profound, sometimes he says things that sound profound until you think about them, sometimes he says things that are inane, and sometimes he writes “The Shoddy Lands.”

By and large I think Lewis is overrated, but at the same time, his main supporters (evangelicals) don’t understand him at all and so when they report on him he ends up coming off worse than he actually was.

I’ve only read two of his books: The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling. In both, Kierkegaard basically sees the human condition as one of fundamental isolation: there is the individual human, there is God, and the human is sundered from God and must, by faith, trust in God’s awesome power to bring the human out of isolation and to God. Other people? Well, they exist. Mostly they suck at being Christians. We should generally act ethically towards them, but our orientation should be entirely focused on God, not other people. So yeah, in those two works at least (and Kierkegaard’s actual views are hard to pin down because he liked to get into alternative mindsets), Kierkegaard’s view of the human condition is horrific.

But

What Kierkegaard has to say is important and deserves consideration. He cannot be dismissed. His opinions are well-argued and appeal to the sense of isolation and brokenness I think most of us encounter at least some of the time in our lives. His solutions to those problems are awful, but his recognition of them is better articulated than almost anywhere else; even if you disagree with his interpretation of how they manifest, you have to recognize that they come from a willingness to face existential dread that almost no one else has. Kierkegaard is courageous in a way that few philosophers are.