Obstinate Toy Soldiers by C.S. Lewis Doodle (BBC Talk 22, Mere Christianity, Bk 4, Chapter 5)

“Think how delighted any child would be if he knew some magic word that would turn all the wooden animals out of his Noah’s Ark into real little animals, and all his toy soldiers into little real men; all walking about on the nursery table. I want you to get that picture well fixed in your minds before I go on” (‘The Listener’, 1 March 1944).

(4:17) Jesus’ poverty did not just include not owning a home, but also other types of poverty. He was unmarried, and died childless - "who can count Christ’s spiritual descendants?" (Isaiah 53.8) They are million upon millions...

(6:36) This section below was spoken in the original broadcast but was removed from the book version of the broadcasts and then expanded and made into a new chapter (‘Two Notes’). I have not re-added the below paragraph to the soundtrack, but have added the new and improved
chapters in the comments section.

“...is ‘keeping him going’. *When I say that humanity is a single organism you must not imagine that I mean the individuals are unimportant. In politics, we have to neglect individuals and deal with
people in bulk. And then the make up for that, in our private life we tend to think of ourselves and our friends as things quite separate from humanity in general. Both those points of view are really
false. Individual people are immensely important, but are not separate. God intended them to work in together as the different organs in one body work in together; but also to be different as the different organs are, as your lungs are different from your liver. Being different has nothing to do with being separate. Twenty pennies are all the same and quite separate. A root, a branch & a leaf are quite different but may all belong to one tree. A mother, father, and child are much more closely bound together than three men sitting in the same ‘bus; but they may be much less alike. When God entered the human race He entered a thing of that sort – a thing like a tree or a family or an orchestra, an organism of different parts which all ought to make one thing. And what He formed inside it was again a thing of the same sort – the Christian brotherhood – the first patch of the new life beginning to spread.* Consequently, when Christ becomes man...” ('The Listener', 1944).

(8:34) "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 3.29).

(9:49) The music here was taken from “Toymaker and Son”, a drama, dance & mime which was the story of the creation of Toyland and its toys, its descent into Sorrowland, and its saving through the Toymaker’s Son. The production has a similar theme to this talk from C.S. Lewis. Below is the link to the interpretive dance recalling the creation of Adam, where the Toymaker and Son create the first toy in Toyland - and who could not do with more 70's interpretive dance in their lives?

The original broadcast had the following words italicised which add to understanding (shown in CAPS): “...fight tooth and nail to avoid THAT”, “He WON’T be made into a man if he can help it”, and “For the first time we saw a REAL man. One tin soldier – REAL tin, just like the rest of us – had come fully and splendidly alive”.

Sub-Titles in 'The Listener' article:
“For the First Time – A Real Man” and
“Appropriating Salvation”

[CSLewisDoodle]

C.S. Lewis: In order to avoid misunderstanding, I here add notes on two points arising out of the last chapter (Obstinate Toy Soldiers).

Note 1: One sensible critic wrote asking me why, if God wanted sons instead of "toy soldiers, " He did not BEGET many sons at the outset instead of first MAKING toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process. One part of the answer to this question is fairly easy: the other part is probably beyond all human knowledge.

The easy part is this. The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.

The difficult part is this. All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one "Son of God." If we insist on asking "But could there have been many?" we find ourselves in very deep water. Have the words "Could have been" any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing "could have been" different from what it is, because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on.

(The letters on this [book] page would have been red if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on.) But when you are talking about God—i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend— it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. It is what It is, and there is an end of the matter. But quite apart from this, I find a difficulty about the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In order to be many they would have to be somehow different from one another. Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying different places and containing different atoms. In other words, to think of them as different, we have had to bring in space and matter; in fact we have had to bring in "Nature" or the created universe. I can understand the distinction between the Father and the Son without bringing in space or matter, because the one begets and the other is begotten. The Father's relation to the Son is not the same as the Son's relation to the Father. But if there were several sons they would all be related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several "sons." But when I think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about something that exists before any universe was made, I was really smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something INSIDE it.

When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father begetting many sons "before all worlds" I find I am not really thinking of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. (Was Nature—space and time and matter—created precisely in order to make manyness possible? Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then spiritualising them? But of course all this is guesswork.)

Note 2: The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing —one huge organism, like a tree—must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are "no business of yours, " remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.

I feel a strong desire to tell you—and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me—which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them" (Mere Christianity, Bk 4, Chapter 6 'Two Notes').

[benjamintan]

Please don’t stop making these explanatory videos. They are wonderful 🎉

[allanlindsay]

Its always a good day when there is a new CSLewisDoodle.Thank you yet again!

[CSLewisDoodle]

(6:42) This section below was spoken in the original broadcast but was removed from the book version of the broadcasts and then expanded & made into a new chapter (‘Two Notes’). I have not re-added the below paragraph to the soundtrack, but have put the new and improved chapters in the comments section below.
“...is ‘keeping him going’. *When I say that humanity is a single organism you must not imagine that I mean the individuals are unimportant. In politics, we have to neglect individuals and deal with people in bulk. And then the make up for that, in our private life we tend to think of ourselves and our friends as things quite separate from humanity in general. Both those points of view are really false. Individual people are immensely important, but are not separate. God intended them to work in together as the different organs in one body work in together; but also to be different as the different organs are, as your lungs are different from your liver. Being different has nothing to do with being separate. Twenty pennies are all the same and quite separate. A root, a branch & a leaf are quite different but may all belong to one tree. A mother, father, and child are much more closely bound together than three men sitting in the same ‘bus; but they may be much less alike. When God entered the human race He entered a thing of that sort – a thing like a tree or a family or an orchestra, an organism of different parts which all ought to make one thing. And what He formed inside it was again a thing of the same sort – the Christian brotherhood – the first patch of the new life beginning to spread.*
Consequently, when Christ becomes man...”

('The Listener', 16 March 1944).

[CSLewisDoodle]

(9:49) The music here was taken from “Toymaker and Son”, a drama, dance & mime which was the story of the creation of Toyland and its toys, its descent into Sorrowland, and its saving through the Toymaker’s Son. The production has a similar theme to this talk from C.S. Lewis with a tin soldier coming to life. Below is the link to the interpretive dance recalling the creation of Adam, where the Toymaker and Son create the first toy in Toyland - and who could not do with more 70's interpretive dance in their lives?
More notes in the video description above.

[gingrai]

Such good work regarding such a good work! I am confident that we will be quite surprised when we come to see what God has done for us in Christ. Lewis was such a sage, a blessing.

[markletourneau]

Dude, as a animator and artist. I praise god because of you. Thank you

[jdasign]

Amazing production. Thanks so much for this.. C. S. Lewis was a brilliant thinker and writer.

[jonathanz.]

These are always so extraordinarily high quality. I wish they had these type of videos for theology majors

[CSLewisDoodle]

(3:26) “What happens in ordinary generation? What is a father's function in the act of begetting? A microscopic particle of matter from his body fertilizes the female: and with that microscopic particle passes, it may be, the colour of his hair and his great grandfather's hanging lip, and the human form in all its complexity of bones, liver, sinews, heart, and limbs, and pre-human form which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked within it is no small part of the world's future. That is God's normal way of making a man - a process that takes centuries, beginning with the creation of matter itself, and narrowing to one second and one particle at the moment of begetting. And once again men will mistake the sense impressions which this creative act throws off for the act itself or else refer it to some infinite being such as [the pagan fertilite god] Genius.

Once, therefore, God does it directly, instantaneously; without a spermatozoon, without the millenniums of organic history behind the spermatozoon. There was of course another reason. This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true Man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process.

There is a vulgar anti-God paper which some anonymous donor sends me every week. In it recently I saw the taunt that we Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter. The answer to that is that if you describe the action of God in fertilizing Mary as 'adultery' then, in that sense, God would have committed adultery with every woman who ever had a baby. For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life. Thus the filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory” (Miracles, essay version)

[musiccraftsman]

Wonderful work! I just wanted to praise God for all that he has done for me and us. Thank you!

[EmmanuelLambertCanada]

Amazing has always they are amazing teaching tools

[dr_dave]

I love the animations! 🤩🤩🤩 and CS Lewis!

[sennest]

🙏🙏 my internal clock told me a video was due soon!!🙏🙏 thank you so very much!! Your work and effort are beautiful! Blessings!!

[bradsipila]

Thank you Cs Lewis Doodle! These works are great stuff!

[heartrocketblast]

The best presentation of the gospel there ever was! Thank you for this. 👍

[BobbyMiller]

Thanks for the great video! The additional notes in the comments help too.

Masterful as always.
Thanks from the heart, for keeping the good work up. Nowdays it is even more necessary. Thanks!

[ladyred]

Amazing! Thank you CS Lewis Doodle for bringing this to life!

[caprimercenary]

I never click on videos faster than yours.