Let's play Chase, Anglican and Puritan version.

July 9th, 2025.

Introduction.

I have an exhilarating task before me.

I want to argue with C.S. Lewis about politics, and I also want to praise him highly

at the same time.

The praise is because he puts his finger on the central sore spot when it comes to understanding the law of God and the laws of men. My argument has to do with his dismissal of certain phrases, phrases that I believe must be maintained and defended if we are ever to get out of the mess we are in. Nevertheless, his critiques of the abuses associated with such phrases is on point, and hence my applause.

By the end of all this, you might not know what side I'm on. In short, we have to grasp the force

and pungency of Lewis's argument before we don't do what he suggests. The passage that put me in mind

of this issue comes from his magnum opus, English literature in the 16th century. Lewis is in the process of

contrasting the Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker, with the Arch Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright.

Earlier in the book, in his discussion of Tyndall and Moore, Lewis's sympathies were clearly

with the early Puritans. He describes, quite wonderfully, what it meant to be freed from all

medieval motive scratchings, and to be freed from all medieval motive scratchings and to be freed

from that bondage by sheer grace alone. But we are now somewhat later in the history. It is in Cartwright,

he says, that we first meet the Puritan of popular caricature, someone who managed to get all of his

scruples while tied around his axle. Confronted with this situation, his only apparent solution

was to gun it again, and everything

around him was starting to smoke a bit. So earlier, Lewis had leaned in Tyndall's direction, and here he

leans in hookers. But whichever way he is leaning, he is really clear-eyed about the bind that both

sides were in, and both sides were in a true bind. I've argued before that mere Christendom is actually

Christendom 2.0. It is not simply a rerun. There were some bugs that needed to be fixed, and this is one of them. And from some of the online chatter that I have seen, it appears that some folks are hell-bent on not fixing anything. At least that would be the conclusion that I would draw if I saw someone circulating an image of Vlad the impaler smoking a heater,

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