Lewis and Keller

Some people have called Tim Keller a C.S. Lewis for the 21st century. N.T. Wright is apparently also in the running. I disagree on both counts. They both need to write paradigm-shifting fiction before they have a shot, and neither have come within a mile or kilometer of it, respectively.

But here is one considerable tie between Keller and Lewis: critique of religion and irreligion in favor of the gospel. Keller's book The Prodigal God carries the theme. Keller's basic schema is this: my identity is in something religious that I do, or my identity is in something non-religious (or, more likely, or pseudo-religious) that I do, or my identity is lost in Christ. (That is to say, found in Christ.)

In a video Keller references an essay by Lewis called "Three Kinds of Men" that was seminal for his thinking on the topic. Here's the essay in full:

Three Kinds of Men

There are three kinds of people in the world. The fist class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding mand and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them - the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society - and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier's or a schoolboy's life, into time "on parade" and "off parade", "in school" and "out of school". But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them "to live is Christ". These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, Belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disasterous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always an necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no "salvation" by works done accouding to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does no come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort - it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and funally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.