Essay

Grant Jobkar
January 25, 2010
Professors Adriana & Paulo
Ribeiro
DCM- C.S. Lewis
1262 Words
Reflections on my first Interim
I want to start by admitting that going into interim I wasn’t all that thrilled about rotting in class for three hours each day. After the first class period and our discussion of Meditation in a Toolshed, I quickly realized that this class wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. The discussions we had in class about Engaging God’s World and the works of C.S. Lewis really opened up my Christian perspective and they helped achieve what Calvin College wanted me to accomplish during Interim, develop a Christian mind. Now I may not have developed the ideal Christian mind that they were aiming for but I can tell you that I have a new outlook on everyday life.
Over the course of the three weeks we covered Lewis in many different situations ranging from education to learning in war time to rings of friendship. It really is amazing the way he writes and how he can just captivate a reader. I also thought that his conversion from Atheism to Christianity was just remarkable and I found proof of it in The Poison of Subjectivism, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God” (1). This quote struck me because God is good and God is great. He is loving and caring and accepting. In the modern society I really think that some people forget that God is always with us and always loves no matter what. We also need to remember that we are His creation.
There were parts of the Plantinga book that I really enjoyed and other parts that I objected. I thought Plantinga did a great job of explaining the essence of the Reformed faith. The three main points that he brought up were Creation, Fall, and Redemption. A couple parts of these points that caught my attention were the concept of total depravity and common grace. Total depravity was one of the topics that I had an objection with. The concept of total depravity says in other words means that humans are totally corrupt from Original Sin. This struck a bad chord with me because I think that humans aren’t completely corrupt from sin, granted all of us have sinned but that doesn’t make us unable to find God. God is always there for us even when we have sinned and I think that to be completely true.
Common grace was a pretty simple topic for me to grasp about the Reformed faith. Common grace states that God loves everyone regardless of faith (2). This is simple for anyone to understand and I think it contradicts total depravity a little bit in that it states “consisting in natural blessings, restraint of corruption” (2). This enforces the point I made in the last paragraph, and again I will state, God loves everyone and everything He created.
As we went through the C.S. Lewis material and watched his transformation from Atheism to Christianity I kept thinking about how tough it must be to pick or find a faith. Some people are born into a religion that the parents already practice but some people switch. For example my mom was a Methodist all of her life then she met my dad and turned Roman Catholic and was baptized and is now a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Lewis at one point described himself as “angry with God for not existing” (3). I think that it must have been very challenging for Lewis to discover God having been without Him for his whole life up to that point.
Lewis conversion to Christianity is something truly remarkable that he did during his life, what’s even more remarkable is the kind of Christian he became. Even in the description for the other C.S. Lewis course it says “C.S. Lewis was one of the greatest champions of the Christian faith in the twentieth century” (4). Hard to believe he was Christian for only thirty- two years of his sixty-five year life. That is half of his life and people call him a champion of Christianity, that is amazing. That it proof aloneof his commitment to Christianity, he didn’t just become a Christian, he showed it in the way he acted, the way he taught, the way he wrote. This ties into Developing a Christian Mind in that through the years, and without the aid of this class at Calvin College, Lewis did it himself, granted with the influence of a couple close friends, but still I find it amazing that he found Christianity.
One of the most prevalent things I learned from C.S. Lewis was the concept of looking at and looking along. This was the first essay we read for class and I thought it was the most effective in “hitting home” so to speak. This concept was truly captivating for me because it distinguishes the difference between analyzing an action and doing an action and I thought it was really cool how Lewis explained it. That’s merely what life is, a series of either looking at or along things in daily life. You look along that juicy hamburger as you’re eating it, you look at and analyze a couple kissing on the park bench. This is a simple concept of life and I credit Lewis for helping me realize it.
Another thing I learned from Lewis was the price of education and how valuable it is. Reading Our English Syllabus opened my eyes about college and the next three years of my life. I can consider myself a member of the audience for this lecture because I applies to me. I really want to broaden my horizons but I only have four years to do it so I need to pick and choose what I really want to do. “The proper question for freshman is not ‘What will do me most good?’ but ‘What do I most want to know?” (5). This is an important question on many other fields other than education. I came into DCM thinking, “What do I most want to know about C.S. Lewis and Christianity?” I found during reading the essays of Lewis that he is not only a teacher and intellectual but also what could be considered a life coach.
Going into DCM I had mixed emotions about the whole thing, I thought it would be boring, drawn out, and no fun. Paulo, Adriana, Plantinga, and Lewis quickly changed that within the first week of class. They had a way of getting me to engage myself in class and really truly made it fun for me. In the end my theory of the class was proven wrong, my colleagues and myself, I can say, really learned a lot. Lewis and Plantinga paired up to teach us about the Lord our God and to show us His divine ways. God really does love us all, my friends, it is up to us to remember that. “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). Everything they wrote was written for us to learn and grow in grace to God. I think it is rather funny Lewis didn’t consider himself a theologian because, in the three weeks I spent learning about him and the way he writes and thinks, I became closer and more informed about God, and in my mind, that is a theologian.



Bibliography
1. Lewis, C.S. “The Poison of Subjectivism.” 25 January 2010.
2. Plantinga, Cornelius. “Engaging God’s World.” Page. 59. 25 January 2010
3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 28. 26 January 2010
4. Calvin College Interim Course Catalog. Page 8. 26 January 2010
5. Lewis. Our English Syllabus. Page. 87. 26 January 2010