The following post is an excerpt from chapter 1 of C.S. Lewis's book Beyond Personality. This excerpt argues that a strong faith is dangerous if not accompanied by a strong theology. Scripture teaches this truth as well.
Excerpt . . .
Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I’m going to tell
you in these talks. They all say ‘the ordinary listener doesn’t
want Theology; you give him plain practical religion’. I have
rejected their advice. I don’t think the ordinary listener is such a
fool. Theology means ‘the science of God’, and I think any man
who wants to think about God at all would like to have the
clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are
available. You’re not children: why should you be treated like
children?
In a way, I quite understand why some people are put off by
Theology. I remember once when I’d been giving a talk to the
R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use
for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know
there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the
tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your
neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s
met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and
unreal!’
Now in a sense, I quite agreed with that man. I think he’d
probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when
he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he
was really turning from something quite real to something less
real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic
from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something more real to something
less real: turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But
here comes the point. The map is only colored paper, but there
are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place,
it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have
found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has
behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you
could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single
isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences
together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the
map is absolutely necessary. As long as you’re content with
walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than
looking at a map. But the map’s going to be more use than walks
on the beach if you want to get to America.
Well, Theology’s like the map. Merely learning and thinking
about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and
less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert.
Doctrines aren’t God: they’re only a kind of map. But that map’s
based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were
in touch with God—experiences compared with which any
thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own
are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you
want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what
happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was
certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere.
There’s nothing to do about it. In fact, that’s just why a vague
religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so
attractive. It’s all thrills and no work; like watching the waves
from the beach. But you won’t get to Newfoundland by studying
the Atlantic that way, and you won’t get eternal life by just
feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. And
you won’t be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
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