The Life and Legacy of C. S. Lewis #2
“Mere Christianity” (part 1)
Mark 8.27-31
C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity was originally delivered as a series of radio talks over BBC during the height of World War II. The idea for the broadcasts came from J. W. Welch, an Anglican priest who was religion director at the BBC. He had been impressed with Lewis’ book The Problem of Pain. Lewis agreed to do the broadcasts because, in his words, “Ever since I became a Christian, I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” That last phrase (likely borrowed from St. Vincent of Lerins whose 5th century Vincentian canon sought to articulate “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all”) explains why the book based on these talks is called Mere Christianity. The word mere isn’t being used in the pejorative sense insignificant, but in the broader sense of Basic Christianity.
Lewis’ plan for his first series of talks was modest but brilliant, to make a case for simple right and wrong. So he began– remember that he is speaking to a large audience of unbelievers– by appealing not to Christianity but to reason. “Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say.” Lewis points out how people who disagree don’t just say that the other person’s point of view doesn’t please them, but rather appeal to a standard of behavior they expect the other person to know about. There seems, in other words, to be a law or rule of fair play or morality about which people all agree. In his book The Abolition of Man Lewis will call this universal Moral Law the Tao and catalog a list of ethical principals about which people in different times, places, cultures, and religions all agree. While there may be variations, none of them, he points out, amounts to anything like a total difference. No culture considers cowardice a virtue, for instance.
While you may find a person who wants to suggest that morality is relative and culturally conditioned, when that person is treated unfairly they will tell you so and every time they will appeal to a sense of fairness or right or wrong. “It seems, then,” Lewis writes, “we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.” At the same time, none of us perfectly lives up to the ethical standards upon which we all basically agree. That’s why, when someone points our moral failures out to us, we instinctively come up with reasons or excuses… which simply reinforce the fact that this basic Law of Right and Wrong really exists. We can summarize Lewis’ argument up to this point in two simple sentences: (1) Everyone believes we should behave in a certain way. (2) At the same time, no one actually does it (at least not consistently).
After that first talk, Lewis received a number of letters from his listeners and his next talks addressed some of their questions and objections. Lewis then proceeded to address the Reality of Moral Law and What Lies Behind that Law. He notes that there are essentially two worldviews, one naturalistic or materialistic which argues that matter and space just happen to exist, the other the religious view which holds that there is something behind the universe. He notes that you can’t find out from science which view is correct since science is concerned only with facts inside the universe. “If there was a controlling power outside the universe,” Lewis writes, “it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe– no more than an architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?”
Lewis argues that there are two compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of a Somebody behind the moral law. First, there is the universe itself; second, there is the Moral Law He has placed in our minds, from which we can conclude that “the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct…” “The trouble is,” he says, “that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate what most of us do. This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again.”
It is only now that Lewis comes to discuss the Christian faith. He says, “Christianity simply does not make any sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know that they have anything to repent of and who do not realize that they need any forgiveness. It is [only] after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power, it is [only] after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.” This first series is pre-evangelism. Lewis wisely brings people to the point where, if they’ve been listening, they’ll want to hear more. So Lewis was invited to deliver a second series of broadcasts in which he describes What Christians Believe.
This is among my favorite sections in Mere Christianity, partly because of the way Lewis addresses Christianity’s relationship to other religions. He begins, “I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course,” Lewis adds, “being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic– there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer right than others.”
Lewis then goes on to describe the rival conceptions of God in terms of a series of great divisions. You might picture his argument in terms of a decision tree. The first great division is between the majority who believes in God and the minority who does not, i.e. modern Western European materialists and their philosophical descendents. The next great division among those who believe in God has to do with the kind of God they believe in. Here the choice is between Pantheism which believes in a God who is beyond good and evil because everything that is is God (much like New Age), and the Christian idea of a God Who is separate from but who created a good world. “Confronted with a cancer or a slum,” Lewis writes, “the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’” BTW, when one listener complained that Lewis had used the word ‘damned’ he replied, “I mean exactly what I say– nonsense that is damned is under God’s curse, and will (apart from God’s grace) lead those who believe it to eternal death.”
Of course those of us who believe that a good God created the world have a question we need to answer. If a good God made the world, why is there evil? Lewis admits that for many years he refused to listen to the Christian answer because he kept feeling that “whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power?” “My argument against God was that the universe seemed cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man doesn’t call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” He says, “In the very act of trying to prove that God does not exist– in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless– I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality– namely my idea of justice– was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”
Lewis then describes how the Christian faith makes sense of the facts by contrasting it to Dualism which posits that there are two separate and equal powers in the universe, one good and one bad, that are battling for supremacy. But again, where does the idea of good and evil come from? There has to be a third thing, a higher law or standard or rule of good to which one of these powers conforms and the other does not, which means that Dualism really doesn’t work. The Christian faith, in contrast to Dualism, tells us that there is a Dark Power at work in the universe that was “created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong.” Like the land of Narnia under the rule of the White Witch, Lewis explains to his war time listeners, “Enemy-occupied territory– that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing to our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery…”
Is the state of the world in accordance with God’s will or not? Yes and no. Yes in that God created us with free will which, if it is free, must be free to choose anything. But no, he says, in that God gave us the gift of free will to make wise choices, which we do not. “Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going bad; I cannot.” Lewis writes. “If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
Lewis then describes what God has done to address the situation, in a brief but brilliant history of religion. (1) God gave us all a conscience, the sense of right and wrong. (2) God sent the human race “good dreams” ie, stories scattered all through pagan religions about a god who dies and comes to life again, and by his death somehow gives new life to us. (3) God selected one particular people to show what He is really like, and spent centuries hammering into their heads the kind of God He was. (4) Among those people a man appears who acts and speaks as if he is God. He is not a Pantheist who could say he is god because everything is god. He is a Jew and as a Jew what he said about himself is the most shocking thing a person could say. “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 were broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.”
Lewis concludes with what is arguably one of the most important passages he ever penned, in which he raises his famous trilemma as it seeks to answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?” I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘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 great 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 up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Lewis’ words point us to the great question Jesus asked his followers at Caesarea Philippi, “Who do you say I am?” Who is Jesus? Was he a crazy person? Was he a liar? Or should we, like Thomas, acknowledge him, “My Lord and my God!” That question is the most important question we will ever be asked, and our answer to that question will have repercussions that will last the whole of our lives and into eternity. Don’t postpone or procrastinate answering. I want to invite you to make a choice today to acknowledge him as your personal Lord and Savior and allow Him the opportunity to change your life for the better and forever.
