We worship a bi-polar deity, most of us anyway.  Our God is the very definition of love . . . but, like the killer bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “he’s got a vicious streak a mile wide.”

We are taught that God is love.  We are taught that God consigns the wicked to hell for eternity.  Surely both can’t be true?

C.S. Lewis (who, like Jack Kennedy, died fifty years ago today), captured this dilemma beautifully in The Pilgrim’s Regress.  It was his first crack at Christian apologetics written shortly after his conversion to Christianity in 1929.  The allegory is set in the land of Puritania where a young boy named John is taken, as all young boys eventually are, to meet the Steward.  Puritania is owned by “the Landlord”, a shadowy figure who has gone abroad and left his vast domains in the hands of a caretaker.  Lewis was always at his best writing about children, and his description of John’s visit to the Steward is so good I will give you the whole story just as he wrote it: (more…)