“It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below.”

In his essay “Transpositions,” C.S. Lewis says “It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.” Since in general atheists and skeptics are those who approach Transpositions from below (more details in a minute), Lewis’s conclusion seems to say that evangelism and apologetics are doomed to be ineffectual or nearly so. I don’t think he was saying that. The word “browbeating” is the key.

Really, you ought to go read “Transpositions.” Any summary I give here will be selective and flat compared with the essay.

Nonetheless, let us say there are two systems, one of which includes or contains the other. An example might be three-dimensional geometry, which includes two-dimensional geometry as a special case in which all magnitudes in the third dimension are zero. Now let us picture representing the higher in the lower. We actually do this a lot — paintings and photographs of the three-dimensional world are two-dimensional. A road going from the foreground to the horizon is on the canvas a triangle (a two-dimensional shape). In Lewis a “Transposition” is the correlation or mapping between the higher and the lower. A key feature is that multiple higher things will be mapped to or embodied in a single thing in the lower. Both a triangle and a receding road in the three-dimensional world will map to a triangle in the two-dimensional world.

Lewis is saying that it is no good “browbeating” a person who is reasoning in the terms of the lower because all his or her facts and  logic are limited to the lower and can yield only lower conclusions. The larger point that Lewis makes is that the material world is mapped to the complete world (i.e., the one that includes God) in this pattern. Hence it is futile to “browbeat” materialists and skeptics hoping to open them up to the complete world.

I think “browbeating” means using discursive reason. Certainly we know that materialists, skeptics, and atheists do become open to the complete world — C.S. Lewis himself is such a case. But I do think that discursive reason by its nature plays only a secondary, supporting role in such transformations.

This overall perspective is behind my idea that our goal as leavenly rhetoricians is to create openings for the Holy Spirit to work in and through. In Star Trek terms our job may be to create little, local transdimensional portals through which the Holy Spirit and a person, the upper and lower, can touch.

God *does* break through to the lower, contained world, in joyously multifarious, multiple ways. We can embody or employ many of those ways. See the upcoming blog posts.