In the essay “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger”, found in the posthumous collection God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis responds to the criticism that he does not ‘care much for’ the Sermon on the Mount but prefers the Pauline ethic, ht BT:
“As to ‘caring for’ the Sermon on the Mount… Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledge-hammer? I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of the man who can read that passage with tranquil pleasure.”
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3 responses to “C.S. Lewis Knocked Flat by a Sledge Hammer”
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Ah, maybe this is what Dylan sensed as early as 1974 in “Up to Me”: “We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex/ It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects….” A broken glass smashed by a sledgehammer?
Awesome discovery, this quote from good ole’ Clive!
While the Sermon on the Mount, read as an ethical standard, is certainly a sledgehammer on a personal level…who really loves their enemies, etc., it is also, as Dylan says, “too complex” to be reduced to simply an ethical standard. There is something strangely hopeful about it too, and ironic, and full of a crazy faith that God’s kingdom is the reverse image of everything this world calls “blessed” and a denial of everything the world thinks is necessary, along with being the obliteration of every way the world finds a loop-hole for self-justification. We are the world. I had a Norwegian friend who called himself a “passive Christian anarchist”. Well, he was pretty close, but Jesus really was, and the proof is the Sermon on the Mount.