“Mystery.” I encounter this word periodically in my research of the emerging church movement and the emergent conversation. D.A. Carson is correct that a protest posture shapes many of the leaders and shapers of this broad and diverse phenomenon (I think this protest aspect accounts for much of what is most unattractive in the movement and for the most glaring blindspots afflicting its most passionate advocates). But positive aims also animate the movement. The quest to recover valuable neglected dimensions of human and Christian life surface again and again in the relevant literature and on the numberless blogs; dimensions such as community, authenticity, the arts and also mystery. At the same time, C.S. Lewis seems to be a favorite of many of these leaders and within emerging communities of faith.

Take of this passage from the extraordinary Preface to Paradise Lost. In this excerpt Lewis is defending Milton’s attempt to evoke “stock responses through his poetry:

“By a Stock Response Dr. I.A. Richards means a deliberate organized attitude which is substituted for ‘the direct free play of experience.’ In my opinion such deliberate organization is on of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or in general, as perseverance—all solid virtue and stable pleasure―depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or direct free play) of mere immediate experience. This Dr. Richards would not perhaps deny. But his school puts the emphasis the other way. The talk as if improvement of our responses were always required in the direction of finer discrimination and greater particularity; never as if men needed responses more normal and more traditional that they have now. To me, on the other hand, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity.”

I wonder how compatible Lewis’ conception of the purpose of art here expressed coincides with that present within the emerging community. If by the welcoming of mystery we think of the appreciation of the elasticity of truth or a kind of emptying of the mind in the interest of a “free play” of experience and meaning, we certainly part company with Lewis. The longer he was a Christian and the more he learned, the more conservative he became, the more convinced he became of the “concrete” character of the objects of knowledge such as virtue, wisdom and ultimately God himself. The great Christian apologist turns out to be, increasingly I think, a dogmatist to the core.

Take the doctrine of the Trinity for example. For Lewis, the term “mystery” may belong to the confession that human reason cannot exhaust the revelation of the one God in three persons, thus requiring humble submission to what we cannot deny given that concrete revelation. But mystery here implies no invitation to a kind of post-modern meaning-creating “free play” of experience such as one might indulge while listening to Pink Floyd’s Meddle album.