What Christians Believe

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.

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

Lewis left off in my last post demonstrating why he believes that there is a “Something” above and outside of man, something who or which has given man some sense of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. He now moves to describing why he finds that the Christian view of God best fits the facts, the reality we see and live in.

He begins by separating the world into two main groups: those who believe there is God or some sort of god or gods, and those who do not. In the world today and throughout history, the former group was and remains in the majority. Of those who believe that there is some sort of God or gods, just what sort of God or gods do they believe in?

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything your find in this world is a part of God.

But if you believe some things are good and others bad, then you cannot think like this. You must believe God is, or the gods are, separate from this world – not consumed by or animating both the good and the bad. Christians believe this: God made the world, but many things have gone terribly wrong – yet God insists on putting them right.

And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong?

If He is God, how could things go against His will? As an atheist, all answers Lewis received seemed cruel and unjust. Yet, from where did he get this idea of just and unjust? If the Christian world didn’t make sense or was not rational, from where did Lewis get this notion that there are things we call just and things we call unjust?

Yet, if he could draw one conclusion, it was this: He concluded that one thing about reality did make sense, and that was his idea of justice – that there is just and unjust.

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….

If there is no such thing as just and unjust, of what meaning is any action? Lewis knew this was nonsense. We see a universe that contains much that is bad and apparently meaningless – yet, at the same time, it contains creatures such as ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. From where would we get such a notion? There are two possibilities: it is a good world that has gone wrong, or there are two independent powers fighting it out – one good and one bad.

Two such independent powers both existed from eternity: neither making the other, neither with any more right than the other to be “God” – supreme or superior over the other. Each thinking he is good and the other one bad. Yet, from where would we get the language that one is good and one bad? Both of these independent gods think they are good.

So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.

This means we have to have a third thing – a thing above these two – that determines good and bad. Some law or standard that goes further back or higher up – after all, the two are being judged by some standard independent of each of them. From where does this standard come?

…He will be the real God. In fact, what we mean by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.

So then, from where the bad? To be bad, this lower being must have existence, intelligence, and will. Yet these are all good things in and of themselves; the “bad” then being in either the ends or means (or both) for which these “goods” are used.

And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel?

Evil is a parasite, living off of the host. The devil is enabled by powers given to it by goodness. He is a creature, enabled by that which was given for good: existence, intelligence, and will. We are not living in a war between independent powers, but a civil war, a rebellion. And we are living in enemy-occupied territory.

This presents a further issue: Why? How? If there is one supreme God, how can anything go against His will? Lewis explains (and keep in mind, no analogy ever perfectly captures that to which it is pointing): it is a mother’s will that her young children keep their room clean; yet, having free will, the children don’t always comply. They are free to be untidy. “Untidy” is not what the mother willed; at the same time, it is what her will made possible.

Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad.

Of course, there are materialists who suggest that we do not have free will. But then we return to the issue: from where do they get the idea of good and bad, right and wrong?

A free will is what has made evil possible.

At thew same time, without free will, love is not possible, goodness is not possible, joy is not possible. In other words, there would be nothing worth having in this life – life would be meaningless.

Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.

I understand Lewis’s point, but I don’t think it is sound doctrine; I don’t think it represents God properly. God knew, before He created (setting aside that I cannot really say “before” when it comes to God), where things would head. He knew that He would have to deal with the fall, before there ever was a fall.

Returning to Lewis: so, where did things go wrong? How, or why, did this dark power fall? We see the story repeated in Adam’s fall: wanting to be the center, wanting to put himself first. In other words, wanting to be God. This was Satan’s sin, and it is the sin he taught man.

We could be like gods – inventing our own happiness outside of God, apart from God. It was and remains a hopeless attempt – call it our Tower of Babel. Every human misery has its roots right here: man searching for something other than God to make him happy.

The reason why it 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.

God is the fuel our spirits were designed to run on. There is no happiness apart from God, because we were not designed to run apart from God. Satan has tricked us into believing we could run on something other than God.

God would do something shocking to resolve this fall: He sent one who talked as if He was God, claiming to forgive sins, saying He always existed, saying He will return at the end of time to judge the world.

And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

Lewis describes the claim of forgiving sins as perhaps the most shocking. Sure, I can forgive another who sinned against me. But who other than God can forgive sins without the one sinned against being involved?

Yet this is what Jesus did…[He] 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 offences.

This could only make sense if He was, in fact, God – if He was forgiving the fact that it was God’s laws that were broken. And who besides God could forgive this? Which leads to the opening quote: if He was merely a man (and, I will add, if He was just another creature – no matter how much divinity was pumped into Him), then He had to be a lunatic or the devil.

I would like to return to my earlier post, at the time (before the addendum), I wasn’t sure where Lewis stood regarding the Trinity. Yet here, he writes quite clearly on the matter. This is a reminder to me: no matter how well I feel I have read a book in the past, two things are true: first, I have grown and changed in the intervening time; it has been over five years since I wrote the single post from my previous encounter with this book.

Second, more importantly, I gain much value by writing about what I am reading; even if I wasn’t sharing this on a blog, the value to me is immeasurable. I see this clearly in Lewis now, yet without writing about it before, I couldn’t recall clearly his view.

Now, returning to Lewis’s point: who besides God could forgive in this way? Allow me a bit of speculation. One will argue that God gave Jesus this authority. True enough. But is it plausible that God trusted a creature, one with free will (because no matter how divine, He was also man), with such authority? It doesn’t seem likely to me. But if I am way off base, keep in mind that I, like many of you, am learning.

Returning to Lewis: whatever you call Jesus, set aside the patronizing nonsense that He was a great human being. He did not leave that option open.

So, how did Jesus, this God-man, set things right? Everything points to His death and resurrection – that this was the primary purpose for which He came to us.

Before he became a Christian, Lewis believed that there had to be one particular theory about why and how this worked – how His death and resurrection put us right with God. He came to conclude that no one theory was the one theory – the main point is that His death and resurrection was the main point, putting is right with God…somehow. We need not understand exactly how it works it for it to be efficacious.

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works…

Lewis offers; by dying, He disabled death. I will only add: it took the resurrection to fully achieve this: He turned corruption into incorruption.

Conclusion

So, now what? Yes, we must follow Christ’s teaching. But there is more. Call it practice, participation. Lewis focusses on three practices that all Christians share. Let’s say, this is his aforementioned hallway: baptism, belief, and that which we all refer to by different names – Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.