Monday 5 March 2018

C.S. Lewis on Doing All to the Glory of God


I’ve just started reading Why You’re Here: Ethics for the Real World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), by John G. Stackhouse Jr., which looks like a useful distillation of much of his earlier Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

One of the quotations in the epigraph is from a sermon C.S. Lewis preached in Autumn 1939, entitled ‘Learning in War-Time’, and it goes like this:

‘Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things... Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. He even assumes that Christians may go to dinner parties, and, what is more, dinner parties given by pagans. Our Lord attends a wedding and provides miraculous wine. Under the aegis of His Church, and in the most Christian ages, learning and the arts flourish. The solution of this paradox is, of course, well known to you. “Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”’

No comments: