Mere Christianity
Author: C.S. Lewis
Publication Year: 1952
Started on: 2021-06-27
Finished on: 2021-07-22
How is the Book Organized?
Book 1. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
The existence of the Law of Human Nature, which all men fundamentally agree on, implies there is a mind beyond the physical universe, which called the universe into being and demands we behave in a certain way. We know we are unable to keep the law fully, so we have put ourselves at odds with that mind, which is a serious problem.
The Law of Human Nature
We all operate as if we agree on the Law of Human Nature, and none of us are really keeping it.
Some Objections
The Moral Law is different from mere instinct and is not mere social convention but real truth.
The Reality of the Law
When considering inaminate objects, you have only the facts; however, with humans you have both the facts (how men behave) and something else (how they ought to behave). That something else is a real law, which we haven’t made, pressing in on us, and our inability to keep it yields consequences.
What Lies Behind the Law
The universe can be viewed through either a materialist lens, in which case matter is all that existed and what we observe is essentially a fluke, or through a religious lens, in which case there is something behind the universe that is more like a mind than anything we know. If such a mind existed, it would be beyond the powers of observation alone, but we could expect it to show itself inside ourselves as an influence trying to get us to behave in a certain way.
We Have Cause to be Uneasy
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.
Book 2. What Christians Believe
God made the universe and it was good. He gave us free will to choose good, which came with the freedom to choose evil, and we chose that instead. That fundamentally broke creation, but it somehow remembers what it was meant to be. Christ came to be the human life run fully on God as intended, such that his death could somehow make right what we messed up, and our call is to spread his life to others.
The Rival Conceptions of God
Pantheists believe God animates the universe, while Christians believe God made it.
The Invasion
We have a universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but contains creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. Christians believe this is a good world that’s gone wrong, but still remembers what it’s supposed to be. Dualists believe there are two independent and opposite powers warring it out here, but the “independent and opposite” notions falls apart on further examination. Rather this is a civil war or rebellion, and we are living in enemy-occupied territory.
The Shocking Alternative
The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the center—wanting to be God, in fact. God designed the human machine to run on himself, but when we try to run without him, the machine breaks down. Jesus arrives in history claiming to be the mind beyond the universe.
The Perfect Penitent
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start, and we can accept this without knowing how it works. Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement; he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Jesus could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because he was man; and he could do it perfectly because he was God.
The Practical Conclusion
Baptism, believe, and the Lord’s supper somehow spread the Christ-life to us.
Book 3. Christian Behavior
Questions of morality ultimately boil down to the question of the purpose of man’s existence, which is why they wind up being so contentious. If we life the way we were designed to function, it will go better both for us as individuals, and for society as a whole.
The Three Parts of Morality
Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown in the running of the machine, and every moral failure is going to cause trouble to both you and others. Morality is concerned with (1) fair play and harmony between individuals, (2) tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual, and (3) the general purpose of human life as a whole. We can all cooperate in the first, disagreements begin with the second, and become more serious with the third.
The ‘Cardinal Virtues’
- Prudence
Practical common sense; taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.
- Temperence
Not abstaining, but going the right length and no further.
- Justice
The old name for everything we should now call “fairness,” which includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life.
- Fortitude
Both kinds of courage—the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that “sticks it” under pain.
Social Morality
Scripture was never meant to replace or supersede human arts and sciences; rather it is a director that will set them to the right jobs, and energizer that will give them new life. We won’t have a Christian society until most of us really want it. We can’t carry out the golden rule until we love our neighbors as ourselves, which we can’t do until we love God, which means obeying him.
Morality and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is concerned with giving man better raw materials for making his choices; morality is concerned with the choices themselves—the free choice of man, on the material presented to him. With every choice you are changing the central part of you into either a more heavenly or more hellish creature. As you get better, you better understand the evil that is still left in you; as you get worse, you understand it less.
Sexual Morality
The choice of marriage, with total faithfulness, or complete abstinence is so difficult and against our natures that either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct has gone wrong. It’s neither the case, as we’re led to believe, that the sexual desires we experience are natural and healthy, or that the Christian path is impossible.
Christian Marriage
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. Those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises, so the Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature; it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do. Love, as opposed to “being in love,” is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.
Forgiveness
Loving my neighbor (or enemy) as myself doesn’t mean liking them or thinking them nice, but it does mean forgiving them as we do ourselves, choosing to look past their prior mistakes and assume the best of them. The something inside us that feels resentment must be killed, and we do so with God’s help through practice, forgiving first in small things, and building up to bigger things.
The Great Sin
Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind. It means enmity, both between you and someone else, and between you and God. It is spiritual cancer.
Charity
Charity, meaning “love in the Christian sense,” is a state of will, rather than feelings, which we naturally have about ourselves, and must learn to have about others. Good and evil both increase at compound interest, so the little decisions we make every day are of the utmost importance. Ask youself, “What would it look like if I loved [my neighbor, or God],” and go and do it.
Hope
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
Faith
Faith, in our context, is accepting and regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. A battle is underway within each of us between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. We must train the habit of faith and continually remind ourselves of what we believe.
Faith
“Work out your own faith with fear and trembling, for it is God who worketh in you.” If you are right with him, you will inevitably be right with all your fellow creatures.
Book 4. Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
God is three persons in one being. He wants us to share in the life he has had in himself since before time began. To do so is to deny our own desires and wills, and instead take on his. It’s hard, but he helps us to do it, and intends for us to help others do the same.
Making and Begetting
Theology is practical, especially now. A great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To beget is to become the father of; to create is to make. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself.
The Three-Personal God
The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God. Theology is, in a sense, an experimental science.
Time and Beyond Time
God is not in time. In that case, what we call “tomorrow” is visible to him in just the same way s what we call “today”. In a sense, he does not know your action till you have done it, but then the moment at which you have done it is already “now” for him.
Good Infection
I think it important to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because the Father exists, but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and the Son is a real person, is in fact the third of the three persons who are God. Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have his way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as he does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became man in order to spread to other men the kind of life he has—by what I call “good infection”. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
The Obstinate Toy Soldiers
The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself, to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small.
Two Notes
God gave us free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness. When you’re talking about God—i.e., about the rock bottom, irreducible fact on which all other facts depend—it is nonsensical to ask if it could have been otherwise. It is what it is, and there is an end of the matter.
Let’s Pretend
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. When you are “dressing up as Christ,” you will quickly see some way in which the charade is most apparent, and then you know something that you and God must work on. You are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a person. Men are mirrors, or “carriers”, of Christ to other men. Sometimes unconscious carriers. This “good infection” can be carried by those who have not got it themselves. God looks at you as if you were a little Christ; Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.
Is Christianity Hard or Easy?
If you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. Laziness means more work in the long run. The church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.
Counting the Cost
God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. No possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what he is determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life, but he mans to get us as far as possible before death.
Nice People or New Men
If Christianity is true, why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians? Our careless lives set the outer world talking, and we give them grounds for talking ina way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself. There are many people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things, but to convert rebellious wills cost his crucifixion. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know, and it is the only one whose fate is place in your hands.
The New Men
Becoming a Christian is not mere improvement but transformation.
Questions to Answer
This book is really a collection of four books. What are they?
- Book 1. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
The existence of the Law of Human Nature, which all men fundamentally agree on, implies there is a mind beyond the physical universe, which called the universe into being and demands we behave in a certain way. We know we are unable to keep the law fully, so we have put ourselves at odds with that mind, which is a serious problem.
- Book 2. What Christians Believe
God made the universe and it was good. He gave us free will to choose good, which came with the freedom to choose evil, and we chose that instead. That fundamentally broke creation, but it somehow remembers what it was meant to be. Christ came to be the human life run fully on God as intended, such that his death could somehow make right what we messed up, and our call is to spread his life to others.
- Book 3. Christian Behavior
Questions of morality ultimately boil down to the question of the purpose of man’s existence, which is why they wind up being so contentious. If we life the way we were designed to function, it will go better both for us as individuals, and for society as a whole.
- Book 4. Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
God is three persons in one being. He wants us to share in the life he has had in himself since before time began. To do so is to deny our own desires and wills, and instead take on his. It’s hard, but he helps us to do it, and intends for us to help others do the same.
What makes this book so accessible to so many people is the origin of the messages. When and for what was this content first communicated?
It was originally a series of lectures given over BBC radio in the midst of World War II. In a time when people were naturally asking, “What is wrong with the world?” on a regular basis, Lewis was asked to explain to the people of Great Britain what it is that Christians believe. His original audience was about as broad as it gets, and that, combined with his conversational tone (as is fitting for a radio broadcast), makes it such that the work has a minimal (perhaps nonexistent) barrier of entry.
As you read, notice the flow of Lewis’s arguments. Highlight 10–15 key ideas/quotes from each of the four major sections of the book. Share some of these here and with your cohort.
See the outline above.
How has Mere Christianity helped you understand and articulate the Christian worldview? Would you recommend the book to others?
I definitely appreciated Book 1 the most, as Lewis starts with no Christianity—no religion even—only human nature, and methodically works his way from there to the logical conclusion that there must be something outside of the natural world that caused it to come into being, that acts as the source of the human nature within us, and that we have fundamentally and irreparably offended (and we know it), and that is a very big deal. I would hope non-believers would be willing to engage his logic and argumentation and try to figure out where he goes wrong (if he does).
I would heartily recommend Book 1 to others; the remaining three I would recommend with some caveats. I was surprised by how much Lewis was persuaded to view evolution as incontrovertible fact, and was disappointed by the extent to which that informed some of his views. I’m also curious to learn how exactly he understood that one could lose one’s salvation. I wouldn’t necessarily argue against it, but I was surprised to see it pop up a few times in a book on the bare-bones basics of Christianity.