Halloween, Apparitions, and Re-enchantment

J.B. Phillips was a well-known English Bible scholar and author of the mid-20th century (his 1962 book, Your God is too Small, was a best seller). As a minister in southeast London during World War II, he worked with a “flourishing group of young people known as the King’s Own.” At the end of each meeting, in an attempt to help the deal with the anxiety they experienced from living under wartime conditions, Phillips would read to them from Paul’s epistles. Sadly, the results were disappointing. As Phillips puts it, “I was met by polite but complete lack of comprehension. These youngsters, who were by no means unintelligent, simply did not understand Bible language.”[1]

With encouragement from C.S. Lewis, with whom he corresponded, Phillips set about writing a new translation of the New Testament in vernacular English. Unfortunately, the work did not progress as he had hoped. Instead, shortly after Lewis’ death in 1963, Phillips found himself in the grip of a suffocating clinical depression, struggling to finish his translation of the New Testament. One day, as he sat dejectedly watching TV, something wholly unexpected and stunning occurred .

A few days after (Lewis’) death, while I was watching television, he ‘appeared’ sitting in a chair within a few feet of me, and spoke a few words which were particularly relevant to the difficult circumstances through which I was passing. He was ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face and, as the old-fashioned saying has it, positively glowing with health. The interesting thing to me was that I had not been thinking about him at all. I was neither alarmed nor surprised…. He was just there — ‘large as life and twice as natural’!

Lewis looked at Phillips and said, “It’s not as hard as you think, you know,” and disappeared. A week later, as Philips lay in bed reading before going to sleep, Lewis “appeared again, even more rosily radiant than before, and repeated the same message.” This experience helped Phillips snap out of his depression and gave him the motivation he needed to complete his translation. It would come to be known as the Phillips Translation, go on to become a bestseller, and reach a whole new generation of young people in language they could understand and relate to.

A few days later, trying to make sense of these experiences, Phillips mentioned them to a retired bishop who lived nearby. The bishop replied, “My dear J…., this sort of thing is happening all the time.” I would have to agree.

Even during my time at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the 90's, when the possibility of such experiences was studiously ignored by my professors and dismissed off-hand when brought up, they had a way of intruding. Our last year in seminary, my wife Betty and I served as resident advisors in our dorm. In the spring of that year, an Asian student committed suicide. A couple of weeks later, the head of student housing held a meeting for RA's in her office. After filing in and taking our seats (and after the door was closed), she started the meeting by asking us not to tell anyone what she was about to share. As RA's, she felt it was necessary for us to know that over the past couple of weeks she had been approached by a string of Asian students claiming they had seen the recently deceased student standing in the corner of their apartment weeping.[2]

Experiences such as those described by the Dean of Student Life at Gordon-Conwell, and by JB Phillips, can make many of us quite uncomfortable. Why? Because we live in a modern age whose defining characteristic is what sociologist Max Weber called disenchantment. Richard Jenkins explains:

For Weber the disenchantment of the world lay right at the heart of modernity…It is the historical process by which the natural world and all areas of human experience become experienced and understood as less mysterious; defined, at least in principle, as knowable, predictable and manipulable by humans; conquered by and incorporated into the interpretive schema of science and rational government. In a disenchanted world everything becomes understandable and tameable…Increasingly the world becomes human-centred and the universe—only apparently paradoxically—more impersonal.[3]

Thus, according to Weber, before the rise of modernity individuals saw themselves as living in a world suffused with myriad spiritual beings, where concourse between the natural and supernatural was common, and where matter itself often became a vessel for supernatural or divine power; in fact, creation was in some sense imbued with God’s presence. However much humanity might grow in knowledge there remained unknowable nooks and crannies of the universe shrouded in mystery. This process that C.S. Lewis referred to as  the “aggrandizement of man” and the “desiccation of the outer universe”[4] ultimately led to the rise of a worldview in the West in which the universe as swept clean of all mystery and devoid of the supernatural: a universe where God was distant and the universe was left to run itself. Although, as Christians, we’re heirs to an older worldview that leaves room for “enchantment,” we’re often affected by the reigning cultural worldview more than we’re wont to admit. As Os Guinness asserts, many American Christians are functional atheists in the way they live their day-to-day lives.

What can we do to expand our worldview, to open ourselves more to the mystery of life, and train our eyes to see that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God?” One place to start is the fiction of C.S. Lewis. This may seem surprising to some who think of Lewis primarily as a children’s author, but one of his chief desires in regards to his fiction was to create literary worlds that allowed readers to inhabit a pre-modern, enchanted world, one closer to that presented in the Bible than the materialistic, flat world inhabited by so many moderns. Why? Because he felt it could open his readers to the claims of the Gospel in ways that circumvented their modern rationalistic defenses.[5]

This is one of the reasons at that Cambridge House we seek to set a table with the riches of the historic Christian tradition—an older tradition—and why the works of C.S. Lewis play such a large part in our programming. We want to help people unshackle themselves from the cramped confines of a cold materialistic worldview, and see them set free to run through the broad open fields of a worldview that comprehends that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God [a grandeur that] flames out…like shining from shook foil.”

[1] Phillips, J.B. The Price of Success, PRH Christian Publishing.

[2]Over twenty years serving as a pastor, I heard many similar stories and personally experienced not a few myself.

[3] Jenkins, Richard. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” MWS (Max Weber Studies) 1 (2000), 11.

[4] Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press, 1964, 2013, 42.

[5] Baxter, Jason M. The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, IVP Academic