Christ and Man

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.

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

Who is this Christ, and how is He related to God? What of this third person, the Holy Spirit? Lewis attempts to explain how these persons are connected, and immediately he falls to words that sound as if one came before the others.

The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son.

The First begets, He does not make. Still, “Father” is the only word to use – in fact, the Son uses it Himself. But it implies that the Father was first, existing before the Son. But “I and the Father are One.”

The Son exists because the Father exists; but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.

Lewis uses the word “produces” or “produced” when describing the Father’s action toward the Son. It does fit with “begetting,” but it strikes me as discounting what it means to be the Word. Yes, the Father produces the Word, but is it possible that the Father existed without the Word?

Lewis clarifies just this point:

…we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father – what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.

It really is difficult to use human words to describe this relationship. Every phrase, every metaphor, seems to be lacking something, or seems to be pointing slightly askew. So even here, Lewis suggests that his description is lacking. It sounds as if the Father and Son are two things, instead of two Persons of one Being.

Then, Lewis focusses on the Christian statement that God is love. If God was a single person, He could not be love. For God to be love, there must be someone or something to love. As God is unchanging, this someone or something had to exist simultaneously with God – not in time, but outside of time, in no sense “before” or “after,” but always and everlasting.

[Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

So, what of the Spirit? Whenever human beings get together, in a family, a club, a school, a trade union, one speaks of the group’s “spirit.” The individuals in the group have a way of talking to each other, interacting – as if another entity is in the room, in the relationship. There is a Spirit between the Father and Son; the two cannot exist – and can have never existed – without the third (yes, getting dangerously close to the filioque controversy).

So, here is God. Three persons in one being. But what does this matter? Per Lewis, it matters quite a bit. We are to enter this pattern:

If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into the thing that has them.

And this is how we enter the life of Christ. If we do, we enter a life that is begotten, not made; a life which always existed with God and was God.

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

So, what of this man who is to become a little Christ? In his natural condition, he wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of others, to exploit everyone and everything – even the whole universe. Especially he wants to be left to itself.

It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right.

It knows that the spiritual life will kill his self-centeredness; it will die to self. It sees as the example, Jesus Christ, the one being who knows everything and created everything, who demonstrated this dying to self by becoming a man. And before this, a baby, and before this a fetus.

If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.

So, this Creator, Jesus Christ, died to self and by doing so showed us the way to God – to the begotten life.

The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point.

There it is. The tough part has been done for us. The spiritual life is not something we have to climb up to by our own effort; it has come down to us. But, in Lewis’s words, “We individuals have to appropriate that salvation.” In other words, we must participate.

Lewis lists many ways that Christians describe this work: Christ died for our sins, the Father has forgiven us through Christ, we are washed in the blood of the Lamb, Christ has defeated death.

They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.

Here, I will agree with, and disagree with, Lewis. Stop arguing about how, exactly, to describe what happened on the cross. Yet, when Lewis ties these statements to the term “salvation,” I don’t think he goes far enough – although he does elsewhere in his commentary (and as can be seen in the second of the two opening quotes).

As Lewis has previously said, whatever happened on the cross “somehow” set us right with God. But salvation doesn’t end there. We are “saved from,” but we are also “saved for.” I find that the Western Church (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) emphasizes the “saved from” part, while the Eastern Church emphasizes the “saved for” part.

As mentioned, Lewis will develop this “saved for” part later, so maybe I should have patience. However, this will come in a future post, and I don’t want to leave this point unsaid for a week or two.

Conclusion

So, why didn’t God just create us this way in the first place – force us to be what we were intended to be? It comes down to free will:

He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.

Could it have been any other way? Lewis finds this a nonsensical question. After all, you are talking about God, the irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend; it could not have been otherwise.

I am reminded of a Jonathan Pageau conversation with, I think Alex O’Connor. O’Conner asked Pageau the same question – couldn’t God have done it another way? Pageau was unable to even comprehend the question, let alone give an answer. Well, he did answer: this is the way it is, what kind of question is that?

God created Adam and Eve with the freedom to turn one way or the other. They chose one way; Jesus Christ came to open the path for us to turn toward the other way. I find it a great story – the greatest story. It also happens to be true – in every sense of the word.

God couldn’t have done it any other way, at least not in a way that offered the possibility of a meaningful life.