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Reading Classics - Mere Christianity (V)
- 01/15/09
- 20
We’re continuing to make our way through C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity having reached the final chapters of the third book (out of four). We actually have only a couple of weeks left in this book. Compared to some of the ones we’ve covered in the past, this one has gone by very quickly. But the easy reading is, thankfully, in no way an indication of the value of the content.
Discussion
This week we covered the final six chapters of Book III, “Christian Behavior.” It may well be my favorite reading yet, and especially so through the first four of the chapters.
The first chapter deals with Forgiveness and Lewis’ take seemed to be something like this: “Look, I don’t quite understand or like it either, but it’s just something we have to do.” “I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do—I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgiven those that sin against us.’ There is not the slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do?” When discussing how hard it is to offer forgiveness, Lewis asks this difficult question: “How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?” His answer is brilliant. “Years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. … In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.” Thus Christianity does not require us to reduce our hatred for what is evil, but it does require us to hate properly—to hate the evil but still hope that the person who has committed evil may be cured from it.
We need to remember that this book was written in the context of the Second World War and Lewis has to make his words applicable to that conflict. “Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.”
Lewis turns next to The Great Sin of pride. He is brutally harsh on this sin. It “leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” It is an essentially competitive sin which “gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man” so that “once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.” He, as do so many Christian writers, sets this as the greatest and most dangerous of all sins. A right knowledge of God is what helps us fight against pride. “The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.” When we see ourselves in the light of God’s holiness, there is no place for pride. After all, “He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble—delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.”
The next chapter deals with Charity, one of the three great theological virtues. Charity is more than giving away money but really indicates “Love, in the Christian sense.” It is not an emotion or a state of the feelings, but a state of the will. These words are worth heeding: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you do. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” The opposite is equally true. “The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for ever. Good and evil both increase with compound interest.” The lesson in all of this is that Christian love does not demand that we sit and try to manufacture feelings. Instead, Christian love asks “If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?” and then does it.
Chapter 10 looks to hope. “Looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.” This chapter is filled with some of Lewis’ most memorable words. “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” “The real want for Heaven is present in us, [but] we do not recognise it.” “The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.” He gets beautifully sarcastic when he writes about the stereotypes of heaven in which people spend eternity sitting on clouds playing harps. “The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. … People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
Lewis concludes with two chapters titled “Faith.” I found these chapters slightly more obscure than the ones preceding. He seeks to cover two ways that Christians use the word faith. In the first chapter, faith is “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” In this way, both atheists and Christians exercise faith that may be strong at one time and weak at another. This habit of faith must be trained to persevere through weak times. He asks this good question: “If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?” He also offers wisdom on accepting our own badness. “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” “We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.” In the second chapter he looks at faith in a higher sense. This kind of faith comes after a person has tried to practice the Christian virtues and has still failed. He has discovered his moral bankruptcy and now has to put his faith in another—in Christ—trusting that He will make things right.
I could go on and on. But I will stop here. I am really looking forward to hearing what parts of this chapter you enjoyed the most.
Next Week
I think we’re keeping up a pretty good pace here. So why don’t we read the first six chapters of Book IV for next week. Again, that is only about 30 pages—pretty easy to cover over the course of a week. That will leave us just one more week after that and we’ll be done with Mere Christianity.
Your Turn
The purpose of this program is to read these classics together. So if there is something you’d like to share about what you read, please feel free to do so. You can leave a comment or a link to your blog and we’ll make this a collaborative effort.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (20)
“The lesson in all of this is that Christian love does not demand that we sit and try to manufacture feelings.”
I’m just wondering if this statement is accurate. Seems that God often commands certain “feelings”. i.e “Rejoice in the Lord”, “Serve the Lord with gladness,” “Give thanks with a grateful heart,” “God loves a cheerful giver.” Isn’t the reality that God demands what we cannot give but the Spirit of God can work in us what God demands? (something Augustine said, I think).
Just wondering if others had similar thoughts.
Not having Tim’s gift for brevity, I’ve posted my thoughts in three separate posts (four really, but I posted about forgiveness section last week, a bit ahead of myself). They can be found here:http://lauriemo.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-sin.htmlhttp://lauriemo.blogspot.com/2009/01/charity.htmlhttp://lauriemo.blogspot.com/2009/01/one-part-hope-two-parts-faith.html
“Those who do not understand books written for adults should not speak of them.”
I am so using that.
Cliff,I understand what you’re saying. I think what Lewis was trying to drive home was the importance of going ahead and doing what you are supposed to do even if the feelings are not all there yet. I sort of took him to be saying something along the same lines as what John Piper talks about in his book “When I Don’t Desire God.” Don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but basically Piper is saying, as you did, that affections or feelings are important, but when we don’t have them, we must fight for them - through prayer, Scripture reading, acts of love, etc. I got the idea that Lewis was sort of saying the same thing.
I really liked these chapters also, especially Chapter 8 on pride. All other sins are “mere fleabites.” Why? Perhaps because pride keeps us from knowing God. And can there be a worse fate than not knowing God?
Why else is pride so bad? It not only creates enmity between God and me, but also between you and me. To enjoy pleasure in my pride, I must rank myself higher than you—in looks or intelligence or works or power, etc. I have to be better. Doesn’t do much for a friendship, huh? Lewis says pride, at its very core, is competitive. Comparisons are what feed pride and keep it alive.
I finish my thoughts here: http://lisanotes.blogspot.com/2009/01/and-greatest-sin-is-thoughts-from-mere.html
I agree with Jessica (#4 post)
The question is, should our feelings lead our behavior or the other way around? If we wait for our feelings to be ‘right’ we will be waiting a loooong time! Faith life demands to put them aside and obey God regardless. Most of the sermon on the mount is about doing things that go against our grain. (Really, who ‘feels like’ turning the other cheek?)
If there’s someone at your work to whom you know you should be showing more respect and tolerance but can’t (be it a subordinate or superior), ask yourself this simple question. If I did respect and tolerated that person, what would my behavior toward them be like? I am sure the question should not be difficult to answer. You can break it down to simple things that come to mind. Perhaps you would talk nicely without a ‘tone’ in your voice, have their best interests at heart, smile at them more often, would not participate in libelous gossip and slander about them, help them when they need help etc. Well, if that’s what respecting the person is like why can’t you start doing those things from now? Nothing stops you doing these things even if you ‘don’t feel like it’.
Is this not pretending? It depends how you slice it. If we wear the ‘Christ suit’ we are obeying scripture. After all we are told to ‘imitate Christ’. And here’s a few passages about the metaphor of ‘wearing Christ’ that relate directly to our behaviours.
I understand the New Testament teaching on behavioural matters to ‘indicate’ (for a lack of a better word) that if we obey God in how we treat others, we will end up feeling right at the end. Doing right, is more important than feeling right.
Hope this helps someone.
My favorite part of Mere Christianity is the short chapter on Christian Marriage. I read it before committing to the girl that I ended up marrying. I love his distinction between being in love with something and loving something. His comparison to places and how we are “in love” with where we vacation but learn “to love” the places we live was really astute. I also love how you can read it online for free here: http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt
John Down Under,
Again, not sure I agree with all of your post, although some of it I certainly do. This statement, “faith-life demands to put them (emotions) aside and obey God regardless” suggests that we can obey God with our actions regardless of how we feel. As if God would be satisfied with “uncheerful giving” or “serving the Lord with an ungrateful heart”. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we don’t do the right thing even if we don’t feel like it , but it seems biblical that full obedience to God’s commands includes right behavior accompanied by right emotions. To ignore the emotions attached to right behavior is to ignore a sinful aspect of our souls. And to ignore sin is to minimize the cross ,and thus the worth of Christ. From personal experience, I have seen the depths of my depravity to much greater degrees when I began to acknowledge the rightness or wrongess of my attitudes or emotions that accompanied “right” behavior. In the end, evaluating my emotions and not just my behavior has caused me to taste the bitterness of my sin, which has made Christ all the more sweet.
Really enjoyed this section.
Regarding forgiveness, Lewis got right to it when he said it isn’t that people find forgiveness too difficult but rather, “they think it hateful and contemptible.”
The various ways he chewed on what it means to Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and then thinking in what ways he loved himself was a good exercise.
But especially the chapter on Pride. The fault of which we are most unconscious of in ourself.
“There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves.”
Also, how Lewis likened vanity as the “least bad and most pardonable sort” of pride — you still care about and value what others think. Whereas the “real black, diabolical pride” could care less what others think.
Enjoyed also the “Proud of ones Son” discussion as often what is really meant is not truly pride but having a ‘a warm-hearted admiration for.’ I can think of one Father I’ve seen who is often told ‘you must be proud of your son.’ But that Father not wanting to give pride an accepted place would struggle to reply, ‘I’m well pleased with my son.’ or ‘I am very thankful for what God has done in him.’ It was delightful to me to see Lewis write about the same kind of situation in his discussion of pride.
But above all, Lewis hits a home run when he states: “It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The, other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason. PRIDE CAN OFTEN BE USED TO BEAT DOWN SIMPLER VICES. ”
How easy it is to let pride be the motivation for humility. Or pride to be the motivation to resist a certain temptation. Or to use pride as a motivator to my children. Sometimes it seems a whole industry of self-esteemisms has risen up in my generation to solve a bucket full of behavioral and spiritual problems.
So Lewis says of the truly humble man: “He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
Perhaps the answer then to Low Self-Esteem is NO self-esteem.
And if you ever read David Copperfield, didn’t this quote so remind you of one of the evilest of all literary characters, Uriah Heep: “he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.”
Yet more of Lewis’ theological rollercoaster ride.
Ever since I first read this book back in 1992 and have reread it many times since, my favorite chapter is the one on hope.
Having been physically afflicted since my youth, I have long had a very real sense of the closeness of heaven. His words in this chapter inspire me.
Scott,I didn’t think of it till you mentioned it, but that does rather sound like Uriah Heep - “I’m a very ‘umble person, I am.” Lewis was a literature professor, so perhaps he had him in mind.
Cliff # 8 post
I don’t think we so much disagree but rather presenting a different side of the same coin. I am in no way suggesting to IGNORE our feelings (denial), but put them second rather than first. Ideally we should have both in sync but it doesn’t always work that way. When we know we need to obey in something (especially those no-brainer issues) feelings should not come first. In light of 2 Cor 5:10 the redeemed will be ultimately held accountable for what they DID not what they felt. Same goes for the unredeemed (Rev 20:12)
Another valid reason (I think) why feelings should not be given priority is because they can be misleading. The psychological complexities of our fallen nature are too difficult to fathom, hence Jeremiah’s notorious words, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” I’m sure you’ve come across people who are hypersensitive and experience ‘false alarms’ in terms of false guilt, or those arrogant and proud folk (there’s one in every church I think) who block their conscience out to ‘feel good’ about something they’ve done when they should be feeling the opposite.
The best situation I can think of is the one of forgiveness. It is hard (almost impossible) to ‘feel right’ toward someone who has gone out of their way to hurt you, deceive you or do you harm. Yet the Bible expects us to forgive them unconditionally as God has forgiven us. While our trust may be broken and limited, as far as the heart goes it should be empty of any bitterness and resentment toward the offender as if they had never done anything wrong. Tough call!
I may be justifiably angry with someone who’s caused me harm, yet the Bible tells me to ‘not let the sun go down’ on my anger. God rejects our offerings (in whatever form) until we reconcile with our adversaries. The New Testament presents a sense of urgency in those matters.
The flesh is never ‘naturally’ willing and inclined to neither feel nor do right. The battle is always fought in the domain of the will. Hence the radical pronouncements of the sermon on the mount to go against our natural inclinations.
You can only explain so much when you type these posts on the fly, but thank you for the distinctions you highlighted.
3 things:1. Curtis brother, your opinion is valid and appreciated but at least comment in a way we can all be edified. If you don’t agree with the whole 6 chapters you can very well post why you disagree with Lewis and point to the scriptures that contradict what Lewis teaches here. Or you can post it on your blog and post a link here. It’s kind of like the point of reading these books together. At leas thats my opinion, I like knowing why people disagree with things and what the bible says. Thanks in advanced!2. As for the discussion on [Feelings] I say they are secondary but like John Piper says we should fight for them by Praying, scripture reading, acts of love etc etc. In example: “God loves a cheerful giver”. So should we not give just because we are not being cheerful about it or rejoicing? No I say if we are having a bad attitude about it we go to the Lord in prayer and repent of whatever sinful attitude we’re having, ask God to change our attitude and give anyway until the Lord blesses us with a cheerful heart.3. I really loved this book as well and it is also my favorite so far.There is not much I can add to what has been said already, but I was really relieved by chapt 7 on Forgiveness the part about learning to love our neighbors.Also the part about loving our enemies made me think of Luke 6:27-28 (when we are told to bless those who curse us) which I had been reading this week, when Lewis says in pg.120 “That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.” and then we’re told this humbling thought:”I admit this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it?]As for the chapter on pride I liked how he explained the difference between Pride, as in the sin of pride, and feeling proud of so and so as in “having a warm-hearted admiration for” the person. One very imrpotant thing he said was in the same chapter when referring to God”We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity—as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you himself.”And finally, as for the last chapter of Book III the one on Faith, I was really identified with it, there was a time once before I was a Christian when I tried very hard to never lie, never say curse words, obey my parents always and failed miserably and was truly puzzled as to why I couldn’t stop lying or had to be disobedient. Then years later, during the year I was saved is when I really tried hard not necessarily “to keep the law” but to do my own thing until I “threw up the sponge” and cried out to the Lord and when He did respond and I was saved, immediately after that the “good works”/obedience followed.
I finally got my bit posted here.
A bit late on commenting, but I really enjoyed these chapters. It’s hard to pick a favorite. I did like his comment in the last chapter about how if you come across something in Christian writing that you just don’t get, don’t worry. There may come a day l ater when you suddenly see what it means. I had that experience with Tozer’s Pursuit of God. My pastor recommended it to me pretty early in my Christian walk and I just didn’t ‘get it.’ Years later, in the middle of a crisis, I picked it back up and boy, did it ever minister to both me and my husband then.
Also - these chapters reminded me of Peter Kreeft’s Back to Virtue about Christian virtues and the Beattitudes. He quotes Lewis a good bit.
John (#6), thanks for your comments. They were of help to me today. B.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Lewis a bit of a universailist? I enjoy his commentary and plain english descriptions, but I always feel as though I have to have my gaurd up, and so I don’t absorb as much as I could.
Christ Follower, I think it’s safe to say, that unless we’re reading Scripture itself, we should always have our guard up, and that Lewis is no exception to that rule. If you like, you can look over some of the discussion of earlier sections of the book and you’ll see plenty of scrutinizing, and disagreement with some of his views, and to some extent with one other. Lewis holds some un-orthodox views, but none that would lead me to disqualify him as a Christian or a person worth learning from. I’d venture to say that none of us commenters here believe every doctrine in Scripture identically. I’m certain I hold a view or two that would be heartily debated here. I’m a reformed Baptist by persuasion; but one of my favorite teachers in the world, R.C. Sproul, is Presbyterian. None of us is perfect in knowledge yet. So, I read Lewis like I (hopefully) read everyone else, through the lense of Scripture - my “Guard”, up. I should add, I have been greatly edified in the process.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Lewis a bit of a universalist?
No, he wasn’t a universalist. He certainly believed in a literal hell. He may seem that way because he didn’t pretend to know what provisions God might or might not have made for those who never had the opportunity to believe, or for those whose knowledge of Christ was faulty but whose desire for God was genuine. (Not being a Calvinist, he did believe the latter was possible.)
Joel, I’m sure glad you answered the main point of that question! I somehow managed to talk all the way around it without touching it.