Julian of Norwich (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As I relate in what follows, I have been in many Pentecostal /charismatic services in which someone has spoken a prophecy that is a direct message of love, hope, and assurance from God. I don’t pretend to know how prophecy works or whether in all cases it really is God communicating. But I remember when I first read the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, thinking “the way God speaks to her seems familiar!” Then later, when I found out that Julian was one of C S Lewis’s favorite medieval authors, I thought “Lewis must appreciate this particular ‘voice’ of God too.” In the “affective devotion” chapter of Getting Medieval with C S Lewis, I dig a bit further into Julian’s revelations and Lewis’s interactions with them:
Julian of Norwich (1342 – ca. 1416)
Possibly Lewis’s most favorite devotional writer—certainly one of the ones he quoted the most (in a half a dozen of his books)—was the English Anchoress Julian of Norwich. “Julian’s visions made a deep impression on Lewis, and he refers to her in half a dozen of his books. In a letter written in 1940 to his friend Sister [74] Penelope, he spends more than a page talking about Julian’s vision of holding the whole universe in the palm of her hand [like a hazelnut] and of Christ’s reassurances that ‘All shall be well.’ He thought it just the right balance to say that the material world is not evil, as the Manichaeans taught, but merely little. He particularly enjoyed the ‘dream twist’ of describing the whole created universe as ‘so small it might fall to bits.’ Lewis concluded his sermon ‘Miracles’ with Julian’s vision of the hazelnut and referred to it again in The Four Loves as a vivid image to help Christians understand how far beneath the majesty of God are even the most magnificent things in his created order. Lewis quoted Julian on Christ’s reassurance that ‘All shall be well’ in The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain and again in his essay ‘Psalms,’ collected in Christian Reflections. Clearly, Julian is the sort of person Lewis had in mind when he described mysticism (in the same paragraph where he discusses the hazelnut vision) as ‘wonderful foretastes of the fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly life.’”[1] Continue reading
This headline seems to fall in the “man bites dog” category. From a professor (also dean and VP) of Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, we expect precise articulations of Reformed doctrine. Defenses of biblical inerrancy. Disquisitions on the priority of theology over experience.
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 