A thought that has really intrigued me lately is the idea of continuity. To give you a better understanding of what I'm talking about give this a little thought: Owen Barfield once said of C.S. Lewis that what he thought of everything was contained in what he said about anything (Doug Wilson wrote this in some blog I think). What a compliment! You could get a pretty good understanding of what C.S. Lewis thought about everything in general by the way he talked about anything in particular.
This sort of thing only comes from a mind that sees everything as connected. I can certainly agree with Barfield when it comes to Lewis. When you read Lewis' work broadly there is no doubt that he had a broad vision of the world that was like a sprawling tree. No matter which part of the tree he was talking about, if you are paying attention, you can trace how it is connected to the rest of the tree. Truly remarkable.
As remarkable as this is I do not think it is overtly novel. What I mean by this previous statement is that if we truly believe in the God of the Bible then we should all strive to be more like Lewis in this matter. "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." If this is true then, in the words of Abraham Kuyper, "There is not one square inch of this world over which the risen Christ does not say 'mine'." This means that we cannot be naive in our thinking. We must understand that in everything we do and in every relationship we find ourselves in we are operating in a way that is either congruent or incongruent with the way Christ is ruling the world.
This is the basic principle of the antithesis. God created everything, everything has been infected by human rebellion, in Christ, the new creation, everything is in the process of being redeemed. The Church is Christ's body and therefore we are participants in this redemption. This all happens in space and time. We cannot be gnostics who place importance only in etherial realms. We live on a physical Earth that God made and inhabited in Christ and we are going to take place in a physical redemption, in fact we are in that process right now.
Everything is connected.
Food for thought!
Michael
