John Piper went from zero to 60 in nothing flat on Twitter. He tweets a lot of really good stuff, much of which I retweet. Part of why I retweet as much as I do is because I use my blog to capture my tweets and retweets so I can find things later. Usually when I’m working on a sermon or working on something I’m writing I remember something I read and think “oh, I need that, that will be helpful” so I turn to my blog to find it. After a while I notice that I turn to some of the same things over and over. This is a kind of solitary thought-cloud sourcing that helps me find really good tools on my shelf.

@johnpiper tweeted this CS Lewis “quote” that I had never heard of, but it was very much in keeping with what I knew of Lewis.

@JohnPiper: Our era too is “a period in history, with many unquestioned assumptions that later generations will find absurd.” CS Lewis

I thought of it a few times, almost referenced it on some things I was working on, then decided to so I figured I should find where in Lewis this comes from. I Google searched the phrase only to discover (thank you Google books) that the quote isn’t from Lewis but rather from Alan Jacob’s terrific biography of Lewis “The Narnian” which I own and had read (and loved). The quote is true to Lewis but not of Lewis. Here is the paragraph containing the “quote” in its entirety.

The first obstacle to a proper appreciation for “old books” is this common failure to understand that our own world is also merely a “period” in intellectual history, with many unquestioned assumptions that later generations will find absurd. It is certain that those later generations will look back at the ancestors that we despise or mock and conclude that they got many things right that we got wrong. (And after all, do we not sometimes say that there was wisdom in ancient Greece or Rome or China or India that the modern Western world has neglected or forgotten?) But this is a very hard lesson to learn in an age that believes that its rapid technological development must be accompanied by like progress in morality and wisdom. Lewis was not even convinced that technological changes should regularly earn the label of “progress”—he thought that buttons served far better than zippers to keep the fly of his trousers closed, and he dipped a pen in an inkwell to the end of his days—and was thoroughly skeptical of any claim that we morally exceed our ancestors. In his first book of Christian apologetics, The Problem of Pain, he argues that human cultures are prone to “lopsided ethical developments”: they have their “pet virtues” but also their “curious insensibilities” to other virtues. Why should our time be any different? Or perhaps we believe that the “pet virtue” of our time—which in this book Lewis identifies as “humaneness,” though soon afterward he settles on “unselfishness” as the better word for it—is such a great virtue that “God might be content with us on that ground.” If you are inclined so to think, then Lewis suggests that you “ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity…. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling of how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God.”

“The Narnian” by Alan Jacobs pg. 165-166