Sunday, January 10, 2010

An Introduction to Mere Christianity

In the coming weeks and months, I will be focusing on passages from C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity." Here is an introduction of the book from www.wikipedia.com:

"Lewis spends most of his defense of the Christian faith on an argument from morality, a point which persuaded him from atheism to Christianity. He bases his case on a moral law, a "rule about right and wrong" commonly known to all human beings, citing the example of Nazism; even atheists believed that Hitler's actions were morally wrong. On a more mundane level, it is generally accepted that stealing is violating the moral law. Lewis argues that the moral law is like the laws of nature in that it was not contrived by humans. However, it is unlike natural laws in that it can be broken or ignored, and it is known intuitively, rather than through observation. After introducing the moral law, Lewis argues that thirst reflects the fact that people naturally need water, and there is no other substance which satisfies that need. Lewis points out that earthly experience does not satisfy the human craving for "joy" and that only God could fit the bill; humans cannot know to yearn for something if it does not exist.

After providing reasons for his conversion to theism, Lewis goes over rival conceptions of God to Christianity. Pantheism, he argues, is incoherent, and atheism too simple. Eventually he arrives to Jesus Christ, and invokes a well-known argument now known as the "Lewis trilemma". Lewis, arguing that Jesus was claiming to be God, uses logic to advance three possibilities: either he really was God, was deliberately lying, or was not God but thought himself to be (which would make him delusional and likely insane). The book goes on to say that the latter two possibilities are not consistent with Jesus' character and it was most likely that he was being truthful.

Lewis claims that to understand Christianity, one must understand the moral law, which is the underlying structure of the universe and is "hard as nails." Unless one grasps the dismay which comes from humanity's failure to keep the moral law, one cannot understand the coming of Christ and his work. The eternal God who is the law's source takes primacy over the created Satan whose rebellion undergirds all evil. The death and resurrection of Christ is introduced as the only way in which our inadequate human attempts to redeem humanity's sins could be made adequate in God's eyes.

God "became a man" in Christ, Lewis says, so that mankind could be "amalgamated with God's nature" and make full atonement possible. Lewis offers several analogies to explain this abstract concept: that of Jesus "paying the penalty" for a crime, "paying a debt," or helping humanity out of a hole. His main point, however, is that redemption is so incomprehensible that it cannot be fully appreciated, and attempts to explain how God atones for sin is not nearly as important as the fact that he does."