Sermon for All Saints Sunday (2021) by Rev. Michael J. Christensen

Sermon for All Saints Sunday on Youtube channel of The Waters' Edge UMC, San Diego, CA.

Bromance: Romantic Theology Today

Apple Podcast on "Romantic Theology: Bromance Inklings Style" 

with Dr. John Bash, host of ChurchHurts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/romantic-theology-today-with-dr-michael-j-christensen/id1517919664?i=1000524708711

Background story: 

“My happiest hours are spent with three or four friends,” C.S. Lewis said about JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and other practicing poets in Oxford in the 1930-40’s.  They met together twice weekly—on Tuesdays at the Eagle and Child pub, and on Thursday nights in Lewis’ Magdalen College rooms to read and discuss each other works into the wee hours “taking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea and pipes.  There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”  

Together, the Inklings produced a body of fiction and fantasy worthy of the name “Romantic Theology.” 

After reading my book, C.S. Lewis on Scripture, and hearing that I had designed a doctoral program of study on Romantic Theology for  NorthwindSeminary.org , Dr. John Bash (a former Presbyterian pastor and current radio talk show host, contacted me about being on his weekly show, ChurchHurts.org  “Romantic Theology Today” was our topic, and he took me to places I had not expected to go.   

I had assumed we would focus on the power of myth, poetry, and story to transport us to the field of dreams’, the place ‘where the streets have no name’, and other spaces of in romantic imagination.  Knowing that Lewis wrote the book on the four Greek words for Love (Eros, Storge, Philia, Agape), John went straight to Eros (romantic love) and led with a story about being a 13-year-old boy who was told by church leaders not to hold hands with girls lest it lead to sex and hickeys!  

"Yes, John," I said with a blush, "Romantic Theology has something to do with sex.  Our sexual instincts, adolescent explorations, romantic relationships, erotic and romantic love, sexual energy (libido)—all that.  After repenting of the ways that our behaviors have hurt others and ourselves, we can look back to our sexual experiences, our natural impulses, and all earthly pleasures, through what Lewis calls a “baptized imagination” and see them as yet another spiritual path to the love of God—who transforms our longings not by negation but by fulfillment." 

Here’s the link to our lively, half-hour, discussion on Romantic Theology Today: how youthful lust can lead to holy longing (sehnsucht, Lewis called it).  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/romantic-theology-today-with-dr-michael-j-christensen/id1517919664?i=1000524708711

After the interview, we kept the mics on for the AFTERSHOW and continued talking about sex, and the church.  

The Romantic Theology of C.S. Lewis and the Inklings provide much to chew on, including what Charles Williams called the "Way of Negation and the Way of Affirmation" of the senses.  C.S. LEWIS in letters to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves (a gay man) compared notes about the difference between love and lust, the path of sexual addiction and holy desire, spiritual embodiment and sensual fulfillment, the feeling-intellect and romantic experiences in love and nature, the proper role of the passions in the baptized imagination, and the paradoxical expressions of the mysteries of life. 

For example, Lewis writes to his best friend Arthur Greeves about their own adolescent sexual trespasse soon after Lewis's conversion to Christianity: “The delights of those days were given to lure us into the world of the Spirit.” (Letter to Arthur Greeves, 1 Oct. 1931).  What Lewis came to believe is that our romantic experiences, sexual longings, and earthly pleasures, are yet another path to the love of God—who desires us from another realm.  

In another letter to Greeves, Lewis writes: “God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness.  He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it…”  If “God has made us for himself,” as the theologians have declared; and if “our chief aim is to love God and enjoy God forever,” then it makes sacred sense that God is a jealous Lover who desires us, woes us, and embraces us as the Lover of our souls. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, 12 Sept. 1933). 

“In looking back on my past sexual sins,” Lewis again writes to Greeves, “in the very heart of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but more. Take the sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was good and even divine…” It need not be recanted, but it will never be quenched. “If I refrain—if I submit to the collar and come round to the right side of the lamp-post—God will be guiding me as quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or substitute.” (Letter to Arthur Greeves, 12 Sept. 1933).

In The Great Divorce, Lewis describes how a tormented man had a little red lizard on his shoulders, always whispering things in his ear and leading him further into his addiction.  Until the man submitted to the Spirit who offered to kill it. Once it was killed, the lizard thing was transformed into a beautiful white stallion who carried him all the way to the mountains.

The Spirit of Christ considers the Church his beloved Body and Bride, and seeks to be in spiritual union with our hearts, our deepest selves, as the Scriptures teach, and all the best poets have beautifully said:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.—John Donne

Now when we reflect on the energy of romantic love, the holy longing to be enraptured, the intimacy of human relationships, and the purpose of sexual expression; the path of addiction, sacrament of marriage or the gift of celibacy; the proper role of the passions, and the baptized imagination (and even the tensions of unfulfilled sexual longing) …. we are doing Romantic Theology, as Lewis and Charles Williams (his fellow Inkling) describes it: 

“A romantic theologian does not mean one who is romantic about theology, but one who is theological about romance, one who considers the theological implications of those experiences which are called romantic.”—C. S. Lewis in Essays Presented to Charles Williams—the Inkling who coined the term and wrote Outlines of Romantic Theology.

For more on this topic, enroll in one of my courses on C.S. Lewis on Romantic Theology and Charles Williams on Theology of Romantic Love at   https://www.northwindseminary.org/romantic-theology-degree