C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 6: Why?

We all know the Biblical story of Jesus being crucified and dying on the cross. We've seen it re-enacted in numerous movies. But have you ever asked yourself why He died on the cross?  Or why would God sacrifice his only Son in that way?

C.S. Lewis tackles these and other questions in "Mere Christianity". Here's what he has to say:

"What do we mean when we talk of God 'helping us'? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think:  He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters; that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. 

Now, if we had not fallen (Adam/Eve sinning), that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all - to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could die perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can only do it if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all."

C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 5: Who was Jesus?

In this excerpt from Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses the subject of who Jesus is, how the people at the time He was on earth perceived Him, and whether we should believe what He says:

"And then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He as always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these works would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivaled by any other character in history.

I am here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him (Jesus): 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God'. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

We are faced then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend; and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next blog:  Making better sense of why Jesus died the way he did: "....we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man".

C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 4: What is God Doing?

One question many people have is if Satan is heavily influencing the world today, as the Bible says, why doesn't God just destroy Satan and put an end to it?  C.S. Lewis discusses this critical topic in Mere Christianity:

"Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. 

But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does? When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage, the play is over. God is going to invade all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? It will be too late then to choose your side.

That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next blog:  Making better sense of who Jesus was: "This man (Jesus) we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse".

C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 3: Self

C.S. Lewis on "self":

 "The moment you have a self at all, there is the possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the center - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan; and that was the sin he taught the human race (beginning with Adam and Eve).

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make them happy.

The reason we can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other."

That explains a lot, don't you think?  Why humans evolved like they did. Why there is evil. Why bad things happen like poverty, greed, war, hate, etc. It was never God's intention. Since God is perfect (Matthew 5:48 - "....as your heavenly Father is perfect.") and God created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27- "God created man in His own image"), logic indicates that everything prior to the episode in the Garden of Eden had to be perfect.

Some time before that, Satan became selfish and challenged God and lost. Then he took Adam and Eve with him. Sin was introduced, perfection lost, and now we're paying the price. As a result, we shouldn't be blaming God for every little bad thing that happens. Mankind only has itself to blame.

And God even reminds us that in Proverbs 19:3- "People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the Lord."

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next blog:  Making better sense of what Jesus did and why: "God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form".

C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 2: Free Will

How many times have you heard statements like "If there is a God, why would he allow so much evil in the world", or  "How could God let that happen"? Although there is more than one biblical answer to why, the simple answer to both questions is that He didn't. Does he let bad things happen sometime? Yes. Can he stop bad things from happening?  Yes.  (Have you ever thought how many times He has stopped bad things from happening, not only in general, but to us personally, that we don't even know about?) So what is the answer? Unfortunately, most of the time it's because of us.

God has given us humans a trait that we can either use for good or bad ....free will.  God had given us the power to make our own choices. Sure, He could have prevented all bad from happening in our lives, but how would we learn from our mistakes or mature and grow as human beings? It would be like a parent making all of the decisions for their child. The child would never learn or grow on their own.

Free will was first illustrated in the third chapter of the bible. Genesis chapter 3 describes how Eve (and Adam) were tempted by Satan (in the form of a serpent) and decided, on their own, to go against what God warned them about and eat from the "tree in the middle of the garden". They were perfect and had everything, but willfully chose to commit a sin, and mankind has never been the same. This story also shows how our free will is continuously caught between a battle of good and evil influences. When a bad thing happens, it's normally because the evil influence has prevailed. The Biblical books of Ezekiel and Isaiah also describe Satan as having been created a cherubim, apparently the highest created angel. He became arrogant in his beauty and status and at some point decided he wanted to sit on a throne above Gods. Satan’s pride led to his fall. Just like Adam and Eve, Satan made that decision on his own. 

C.S. Lewis dedicated part of a chapter in his Mere Christianity book on the topic of free will, and here is what he had to say about it:

"God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why then, did God give them (humans) free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

Of course, God knew what would happen if they (humans) used their freedom the wrong way:  apparently He thought it was worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all reasoning power comes:  you could not be right and He wrong any more than a steam can rise higher that its source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe is worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it it is worth paying."

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next blog:  Self.....a four letter word that turned around the human race: "The moment you have a self at all, there is the possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the center - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan; and that was the sin he taught the human race (beginning with Adam and Eve)."

C.S. Lewis and 'Mere Christianity' - Part 1: Introduction

I've recently been reading a book by author C.S. Lewis, best known for his work on the "Chronicles of Narnia" stories, called Mere Christianity, in which he sets out to explain and defend the Christian faith in a way that would impact and make sense to everyone – including those who do not believe in or agree with Christianity.  I'm actually only about half way done, but I thought I'd begin sharing some of what I've read, as I think some people might find it interesting. But before I do that, here's a little introduction to C.S. Lewis and the origins of Mere Christianity.

C.S. Lewis: A Brief Bio

Born in 1898 in Belfast Ireland, Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis began writing Mere Christianity in 1942 when he was 44 years old. But what made this book even more intruiging to me is that Lewis didn't become a Christian until 1931 at age 33. In fact, prior to that, he was an atheist for nearly 20 years who at one time even developed an interest in the occult.

So why write a book on Christianity only 11 years after becoming a Christian?  Lewis answers that question himself:

"It’s not because I’m anybody in particular that I’ve been asked to tell you what Christians believe. In fact it’s just the opposite. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have asked me, first of all because I’m a layman and not a parson, and consequently they thought I might understand the ordinary person’s point of view a bit better. Secondly, I think they asked me because it was known that I’d been an atheist for many years and only became a Christian fairly recently. They thought that would mean I’d be able to see the difficulties – able to remember what Christianity looks like from the outside. So you see the long and the short of it is that I’ve been selected for this job just because I’m an amateur and not a professional, and a beginner not an old hand. Of course this means that you may well ask what right I have to talk on the subject at all."

The Origins of Mere Christianity

Mere Christianity was adapted from a series of BBC radio talks Lewis made between 1942 and 1944. After the talks were concluded, Lewis decided to publish the summaries of each lecture into three pamphlets:

• The Case for Christianity
• Christian Behavior
• Beyond Personality

Not long after that, Lewis decided to publish the work as one book, and in 1945 Mere Christianity was born.

In his book, Lewis attempts to point out that Christianity is the only thing that makes sense. He uses the very basics of the sense of wrong and right to prove his point, first by pointing out that many atheists (including him when he was one) say they do not believe in God because the world is so bad.

But how, asks Lewis, can one know the world is bad? What gives one a sense of justice, morality or decency? Lewis says the answer is God, and that if people would give their lives to the God of Christianity that they would be able to find peace and contentment because a life of walking with God is how humans were created to live.

Accolades

Several decades after the book was first published, it is still considered one of the premiere works on the subject. In 2006, Mere Christianity was placed third in Christianity Today's list of the most influential books amongst evangelicals since 1945.

In addition, evangelist Charles Colson's conversion to Christianity reportedly resulted from his reading Mere Christianity, as did the conversions of physician-geneticist Francis Collins (current Director of the National Institute of Health), musician/song writer Josh Caterer, and philosopher C. E. M. Joad.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next blog:  Free Will - "God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible."