Turning the Tables

Posted by Os Guinness on July 1, 2015

Taken from Fool’s Talk by Os Guinness. Copyright (c) 2015 by Os Guinness. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com.

I had read biblical commentaries and books on systematic theology. But that hadn’t deepened the quality of my faith. I was like someone who had read books about France but had never visited. Or someone who had read about falling in love but had never experienced it.

“O hang the common world!” The large, somewhat sullen undergraduate couldn’t take it any longer. He slammed his fist on the table and rudely interrupted the professor’s speech.

“Let’s give it a bad name first and then hang it,” the professor went on, not realizing the mood had suddenly changed. “A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.”

“Why doesn’t he strike us dead?” the student asked.

“He is dead himself,” the philosopher said.¹

So unfolds G. K. Chesterton’s dramatic story of Innocent Smith and the professor of philosophy at Cambridge University in Manalive—a brilliant example of one style of apologetics that we need more of today. It is a sad if understandable fact that the extraordinary popularity of C. S. Lewis in the English‑speaking world of apologetics has led to the eclipse of other great Christian advocates who deserve equal attention. And surely among the foremost would be Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard and G. K. Chesterton. Lewis himself would have been the first to admit where he relied on them, but we also need to appreciate where they each have strengths that complement Lewis’s own great arguments.

Dr. Emerson Eames in Chesterton’s story is the distinguished professor of philosophy and warden of (the fictional) Brakespeare College, Cambridge, and the world’s leading authority on pessimistic philosophers such as Schopenhauer. He had finished a busy day of undergraduate affairs and was relaxing in his rooms, and as always was open to his friends and favorite students, one of whom was Innocent Smith.

Holding his glass of port, the warden went on talking about the philosophies of pessimism until suddenly he started. Dr. Eames was looking down the cold, small, black barrel of a cocked revolver.

“I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,” Smith said with a rough tenderness. “I’ll put the puppy out of his pain, as you suggested.”

For several hours they (more)

Categories: Teologice