Cataphatic Prayer

Seeing Is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer by Dr. Greg Boyd takes a look at Cataphatic, or imaginative prayer as advocated by many in Church Tradition, such as St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit Order.

Boyd's argument is that many Christians struggle with faith because if they are joyless or unsucessful in not sinning in particular ways, the clergy often responds with a 'try harder' response. Since a Christian ought to be joyful, if you are not joyful then you're just not exerting enough effort.

What this results in is Christians hiding struggles from one another and putting on a guise of holiness while often feeling empty inside.

Rather, we ought to seek Jesus and just be honest with Him in our struggles. The process of "Resting in Christ," as defined by Boyd is that we use our imaginations to vividly conceptualize Christ and just exist with Him, that a common understanding of how much He cares for us and wants us to be aware of that becomes evident. Only then might our Christian walk be advanced to its biblical prescriptions.

Obviously, there are objections to this process. One must not give up on 'trying' altogether, but rather an understanding that trying alone will not accomplish much of lasting value. The idea of envisioning Jesus may seem like make-believe, but Boyd argues that this has more to do with our Western science-based culture defining anything non-physical as not real.

Other issues are addressed in the book, along with several stories of people who have undergone dramatic benefits from the process.

So read it with an open mind. As CS Lewis noted in one of his books - if it's useful to you, use it, if not, don't give it a second thought.

Matt

C.S. Lewis on Scripture

"We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduced them to a system." - CS Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms, p. 95.

C.S. Lewis, widely regarded thinker on all manners of Christianity, is the focal point in this short book written by Michael J. Christensen. The text conveys Lewis' rationale behind a number of issues is modern Christianity, including the inerrancy of the Bible. The book projects that while liberal theologians are apt to dismiss the Bible as being largely inaccurate and written by man, fundamentalists view the Bible as 'divinely inspired' with some, such as Calvin, regarding the process of being one of divine dictation.
Lewis, aware of these devisive camps, falls somewhere in the middle. His rationale was one of his scholarly pursuits in literary legends. Finding that the Bible is in part literature that conveys the ideas God wanted to tell mankind, Lewis also makes room for several numerological discrepancies between different accounts of the same stories. These differing accounts do little to undermine the message being conveyed. Thus, Lewis viewed the Bible as one consistent with the life that Jesus lead - he wanted to tell the people how to live, but left a lot open to interpretation.

Review of "The Screwtape Letters"

Greetings and salutations Andy, et al.
I know you're all excited for my next video entry, but I'm annoyed by the microphone on my webcam, so more research is needed there. I did snap a picture of me with the book cover to make things more interesting.


"The Screwtape Letters" is a book by C.S. Lewis (the fellow that brought us the Chronicles of Narnia), a fictionalized account of one demon writing to his nephew in the advice of how best to tempt the souls for which he is responsible for drawing away from God. This work differs substantially from the last Letter-based book I reviewed. Lewis noted that this book was difficult to write, as getting into this frame of mind was both easy and distasteful to him. That said, the both is full of insight.

The book reads with the design of a counterpoint - that is, Lewis writes from an opposition standpoint, so when Uncle Screwtape advises his nephew to encourage the poor soul he is tempting to do things such as become argumentative with his mother about all sorts of nonsense, Lewis is really saying we ought not to do this.

As such, there is insight in the lot of the common man, his thought processes and rationalizations in the face of Christianity. Although it may take some readers time to wrap their minds around the pretext of the work, it comes off as interesting reading.

This is very eye-awakening at the traps we sometimes fall into by our own - or what we think are our own - reasoning. I'd recommend this.

Until next time,
Matt