Master mentor #8

This chapter is one of those chapters that makes you scratch your head and put the book down… maybe permanently. What is mean is this: in this chapter, the usually clear and fairly concise CS Lewis begins a fairly simple discussion of Dualism (“the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything in creation, one of them good and the other bad” to quote CS) and then spins into a page and a half of head-scratching discussion on goodness, badness and the origins of it all. I understand… at least I think I do… where CS is going with this. But the casual reader might say, “I was good up until this point… then I got lost.” And they would likely be right. But what I found so interesting was that in his discussion of Dualism, there are likely a lot of Christians who would say that they agree with what dualism believes and is.
What I really liked about this chapter was CS’s illustration at the end of the chapter. It’s not a new illustration, but one that I like nonetheless. It’s the image of Christianity as a civil war in which we find ourselves living the land of the enemy. A story of how the true king who had landed in disguise to call us to be a part of “a great campaign of sabotage.” There’s just something about that that brings chills to my spine. There is something about that that taps into the wild, crazy guy in me. Something that makes we want to go out and do something!!!

Jim