Man, the supernatural and the natural

What follows is a series of posts of what C. S. Lewis said about the duality of Man in Miracles:

When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that part which does not: or, if you prefer, between those phenomena of humanity which are rigidly interlocked with all other events in this space and time and those which have a certain independence. These two parts of a man may rightly be called Natural and Supernatural: in calling the second “Supernatural” we mean that it is something which invades, or is added to it, the great interlocked event in space and time, instead of merely arising from it [the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as Counselor sent to believers in repentance by the resurrected Jesus Christ - added by the blog author]. On the other hand this “Supernatural” part is itself a created being - a thing called into existence by the Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or “nature.” . . . There is, however, a sense in which the life of this part can become absolutely Supernatural, i.e. not beyond this Nature but beyond any and every Nature, in the sense that it can achieve a kind of life which could never have been given to any created being in its mere creation. . . . The rational part of every man is supernatural in the relative sense - the same sense in which both angels and devils are supernatural. But if it is, as the theologians say, “born again,” if it surrenders itself back to God in Christ, it will then have a life which is absolutely Supernatural, which is not created at all but begotten, for the creature is then sharing the begotten life of the Second Person of the Deity. . . . Finally, Christian writers use “spirit” and “spiritual” to mean the life which arises in such rational beings when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ. . . . the regenerate man will find his soul eventually harmonized with his spirit by the life of Christ that is in him.

This series of quotations concludes the posts taken from C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, that strongly support the concept of dualist interactionism between the immaterial Mind of God and mind of Man through God’s created neural synaptic networks of the brain.

Stan Lennard
Life in the Sonship of Christ

Most certainly, beyond all worlds, unconditioned and unimaginable, transcending discursive thought, there yawns for ever the ultimate Fact, the fountain of all other facthood, the burning and undimensioned depth of the Divine Life. Most certainly also, to be united with that Life in the eternal Sonship of Christ is, strictly speaking, the only thing worth a moment’s consideration. . . . I allow and insist that the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, can never be, nor have been, confined to any place at all: it is rather in Him that all places exist. But the records say that the glorified, but still in some sense corporeal, Christ withdrew into some different mode of being about six weeks after the Crucifixion: and that He is “preparing a place" for us. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)

As I state in my books, by God’s grace in our repentance we have had the direct, personal communion with the Holy Spirit restored by the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In this sense we “already” have a real glimpse of the eternal Life to come in the Sonship of Christ, but it is “not yet” fulfilled in our present space-time. It is our eternal Hope.

Stan Lennard
Causality of dualism

It is useful to remember that even now senses responsive to different vibrations would admit us to quite new worlds of experience: that a multi-dimensional space would be different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some day obey us as our cortex now does. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)

i refer you to my earlier blog posts entitled, “Waves in Our Brains, Parts I and II,” that extend the findings shared in my books from the neurosciences to those acquired by my continued research that relate to Lewis’ “senses responsive to different vibrations.”

Stan Lennard
C. S. Lewis on dualist interactionism

In my books I consider in detail the concept, and I believe the reality, of what is called dualist interactionism, a concept that materialism and naturalism do not accept. What is it? Simply put, it is the interaction between what is immaterial and what is material, or physical. That which is immaterial can exert causal effects on that which is physical, and the dualist relationship I address through over 20 years of apologetics research is that between the Mind of God and the mind of Man, the human spirit and soul, through God’s created neural synaptic networks and their linguistic neural codes. Let us read selected comments by C. S. Lewis from Miracles that address this interactionism. My blog posts collectively address this concept, expanding on the points made in my books.

In the Walking on the Water we see the relations of spirit and Nature so altered that Nature can be made to do whatever spirit pleases. This new obedience of Nature is, of course, not to be separated even in thought from spirit’s own obedience to the Father of Spirits. . . . One thing at least we must observe. If we are in fact spirits, not Nature’s offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so.

Stan Lennard
Man is a composite being

In Miracles Lewis spoke further about Man’s being a “composite being,” having both a supernatural component and a Natural, physical component:

Man must therefore be a composite being - a natural organism tenanted by, or in a state of symbiosis with, a supernatural spirit. . . . whenever we think rationally we are, by direct spiritual power, forcing certain atoms in our brain and certain psychological tendencies in our natural soul to do what they would never have done if left to Nature. The Christian doctrine would be fantastic only if the present frontier-situation between spirit and Nature in each human being were so intelligible and self-explanatory that we just “saw” it to be the only one that could ever have existed.

My books address this very “frontier-situation between spirit and Nature”, proposing a bidirectional dualist interaction between the Mind of God through His Holy Spirit and the mind and soul of Man through neural synaptic networks.

Stan Lennard
God becoming man

C. S. Lewis discussed in depth God’s becoming man in Miracles. I am sharing a series of comments from his book that speak to this reality. I refer the reader to his chapter entitled, “The Grand Miracle”:

What can be meant by “God becoming man?” In what sense is it conceivable that eternal self-existent Spirit, basic Fact-hood, should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the act of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself “I” and “Me.” . . . In other men a supernatural creature thus becomes, in union with the natural creature, one human being. In Jesus, it is held, the Supernatural Creator Himself did so. . . . We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any man, dwells within his natural organism. What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine is true, is that our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itself - the same theme in a very minor key. . . . We catch sight of a new key principle - the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less.

I address extensively in my books, especially in The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, the “how” of this “composite existence,” drawing upon current findings of neuroscience and information theory to obtain at least a partial understanding. Most of all we now have the ability to understand that the “coming down” of the Holy Spirit to indwell the human spirit to give Counsel to the human soul is a reality in which we can have evidential faith in our time.

Stan Lennard
God, the Absolute Being

I continue with a quote taken from Miracles by C. S. Lewis:

Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be, He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being” - or rather the Absolute Being - in the sense that He alone exists in HIs own right. But there are things which God is not. In that sense He has a determinate character. Thus He is righteous, not a-moral; creative, not inert. The Hebrew writings here observe an admirable balance. Once God says simply I AM, proclaiming the mystery of self-existence. But times without number He says, “I am the Lord - I, the ultimate Fact, have this determinate character, and not that. And men are exhorted to know the Lord,” to discover and experience this particular character.

By the restoration of direct communion between the Holy Spirit and the spirit and soul of repentant mankind through the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ on behalf of fallen mankind we can come to a personal, intimate knowledge of God the Father.

Stan Lennard
God, a concrete fact

But if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events, then God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. . . . If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)

Stan Lennard
Uncreated, unconditioned supernatural reality

In this quote C. S. Lewis speaks to the reality of the supernatural:

For me the Christian doctrines which are “metaphorical” - or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought - mean something which is just as “supernatural” or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be; that this reality has a positive structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not completely, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce; and that this has brought about a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.

The resurrected Jesus Christ sent as He promised the Holy Spirit to indwell believers in repentance, bringing “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality,” to the Holy Spirit, to God the Father, by His grace through Jesus Christ.

Stan Lennard
God the Son, the Word

This quote from C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, speaks to the unity of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Word, to the Father God:

The title “Son” may sound “primitive” or “naif.” But already in the New Testament this “Son” is identified with the Discourse or Reasons or Word which was eternally “with God” and yet also was God. (John 1:1) He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together. (Col 1:17) All things, and specifically LIfe, arose within Him, (John 1:4) and within Him all things will reach their conclusion - the final statement of what they have been trying to express. (Eph 1:10)

Stan Lennard