May 3, 2026 · 50 min · 20 segments
In this episode, we turn to CS Lewis and Archbishop Richard Trench to understand how exactly Christ is the fulfillment of the nations. I hope you enjoy!
C.S. Lewis has this lovely quote that I just kind of want to share with you guys here in his work on miracles from the essay, The Grand Miracle.
Lewis in this passage is describing how it is that the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus stand as that central puzzle piece of world history that makes sense of everything else.
And he writes the following, "Let us suppose that we possess parts of a novel or a symphony.
Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, 'This is the missing part of the work.
This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned.
This is the main theme of the symphony.' Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illumine all the parts we had already seen and pull them together.
Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong.
The new passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and hardel, harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter.
But if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home, eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected.
Even though the central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine, provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere.
Something like this we must do with the doctrine of the incarnation.
Here, instead of a symphony or novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge.
The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illumine and integrate that whole mass.
It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible.
We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer, not because we can clearly see the sun, in fact we cannot, but because we can see everything else." So here's what's going on.
C.S. Lewis has this lovely quote that I just kind of want to share with you guys here in his work on miracles from the essay, The Grand Miracle.
Lewis in this passage is describing how it is that the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus stand as that central puzzle piece of world history that makes sense of everything else.
And he writes the following, "Let us suppose that we possess parts of a novel or a symphony.
Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, 'This is the missing part of the work.
This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned.
This is the main theme of the symphony.' Our business would be to see whether the new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illumine all the parts we had already seen and pull them together.
Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong.
The new passage, if spurious, however attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and hardel, harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter.
But if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home, eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected.
Even though the central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine, provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere.
Something like this we must do with the doctrine of the incarnation.
Here, instead of a symphony or novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge.
The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illumine and integrate that whole mass.
It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible.
We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer, not because we can clearly see the sun, in fact we cannot, but because we can see everything else." So here's what's going on.
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