When we describe God as the three-personal Being, it sometimes seems to suggest that one part of His personhood came first and was followed by the other two; that because God the Father begets God the Son, one existed before the other. But that is not the case. "The Son exists because the Father exists, but there was never a time before the Father produced the Son."
Lewis goes back to the subject of the Trinity in this chapter and begins by asking us to imagine two books stacked on top of each other. The one on the bottom (Book A) is supporting the one on top (Book B) so the bottom book is causing the position of the top one. But imagine that both books have been in this same position for all of time, from the moment they both came into existence. If that were possible, then yes, the position of Book B would be the result of Book A's position, but Book A would never have existed before Book B. "In other words, the result does not come after the cause" but is a simultaneous occurrence. When we describe God as the three-personal Being, it sometimes seems to suggest that one part of His personhood came first and was followed by the other two; that because God the Father begets God the Son, one existed before the other. But that is not the case. "The Son exists because the Father exists, but there was never a time before the Father produced the Son." Lewis then says that maybe the best way to understand it is this. When you were previously asked to imagine the two books, the picture that came to your mind and the act of imagining it were a simultaneous experience. As soon as you imagined it, the picture was there. Even though the act of imagination was the cause and the mental picture the result, they were not isolated events. They occurred together and were linked in such a way that one really could not have existed without the other. So the Father and the Son are two distinct personalities that exist in the same Being and have always existed together. Lewis then goes on to discuss the third personality that makes up the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. He says that if we understand God as being not a static thing or person but rather a dynamic, pulsating activity, we can begin to see "the union between the Father and the Son [as] such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person." The Holy Spirit may not seem as clear in our minds as the other two Persons in the Trinity. It is a little more vague and cloudy than the Father and the Son, but that is to be expected because it is the part that is inside us or behind us, that moves and motivates and shapes us, pushing us along the path laid out by the Son, the path that leads us to the Father. *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
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Lewis begins this chapter by stating that what he addresses here may be helpful to some but may confuse or complicate matters for others, and if the latter is the case for you, you should just skip it altogether. But since he briefly spoke about prayer in the previous chapter, he wants to address a difficulty that some people have when it comes to this topic. He says he hears the following objection from time to time: "I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment." Lewis says the fundamental problem in this statement revolves around the phrase "at the same moment" because we can imagine God dealing with any number of petitions so long as they came one by one and He had an infinite amount of time to deal with them. But how can he fit (or even hear) so many things all in one moment? We cannot think of God as being in Time the same way we are. One moment in time, "and every other moment from the beginning of the world, is always the Present for Him." Lewis tries to help us understand by giving a practical (if not totally perfect) example: Imagine you are writing a book, and in the story-line you say, "Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door." For the character in the story, Mary, there was nothing between the moment she laid down her work and the moment a knock was heard. In her world, the moments happened in succession with no interval between them. But as the author, there could have been a span of three hours between the moment you wrote about Mary laying down her work and the moment you wrote that there was a knock at the door. Or maybe you wrote the sentence backward so that you thought of the knock first then later on wrote that she laid down her work. As the author, you could spend as much time as you desired thinking about Mary and treating her as if she were the only character in the book, and none of this would be at all apparent in Mary's time, the time-line inside the story. But God is also not bound to any other time span, like the author is. He is beyond time. "If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all." This may all seem very complicated and complex, but Lewis feels it is worth trying to grasp because for him, it removed some of the difficulties of Christianity:
So this whole chapter was sort of just a side note in Lewis' train of thought. He basically closes by saying that if these things help you, great. If not, just leave them alone because though nothing in them is contradictory to biblical teachings, they are not actually teachings that we find in the Bible. "You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all." *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
The previous chapter differentiates between 'making' and 'begetting' and explained that anything God begets would be God, and anything God makes would not be God. So Christ, the begotten Son of God, is God, but man is only made in God's image, not actually a part of God. If that didn't twist your brain up a little, these next few chapters will do the trick. Lewis sets out here to discuss one aspect of Theology, the Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) as well as how man can become a part of God, while still remaining man. I'm going to go ahead and admit, this was one of the more difficult chapters for me to understand and to summarize, so if you catch any errors please feel free to let me know. I think Book Four is the most challenging section to process because it deals with such complex ideas, but we'll press on and see how it goes! Lewis starts out by asking us to think about Dimensions in space. These dimensions move in three ways: Up or down, right or left, and backwards or forwards. With one dimension, we could draw a straight line. With two dimensions, we could draw a figure, like a square. With three dimensions, we could go a step further and make a solid body, like a cube. Now, notice that each dimension still contains the components of the dimensions before it, so the two-dimensional square is made up of several one-dimensional lines, and the three-dimensional cube consists of both one-dimensional lines and two-dimensional squares. "In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels." We can apply this principle to the spiritual realm in the idea of the Trinity. The human level is the simpler dimension where each person is one individual being, and two people are two distinct, separate beings. Moving up to the level of the Divine, though, we find there are still distinct personalities, but they are combined in ways we cannot fully comprehend with our human minds. "In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube." But because this dimension is beyond the dimension we know and experience as humans, we aren't completely capable of making sense of or even imagining this type of existence. So why even bother talking about something we can't understand or comprehend? "Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time... tonight, if you like." These are all difficult concepts to try to wrap our minds around and frustrating because even if we do grasp what Lewis is talking about, we realize that in this life, we cannot fully comprehend the scope and magnitude of the Divine. He continues with these subjects over the next couple of chapters, and unfortunately it will not get any easier to understand. But Lewis reiterates that these difficulties in Christian doctrine actually support the reality of Christianity and make it more credible, even while it seems completely incredible: "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about." *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
Today's post begins the fourth and final section of Mere Christianity: "Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity." Lewis uses this section to examine and explain some of the Theological aspects of Christianity and move us into the doctrines and the "science of God" so that our thoughts about Him can be as clear and accurate as possible. Lewis somewhat understands the objections to Theology that people often have. He tells about a man who once took issue with him during one of his presentations because he had a problem with all the doctrine and dogma and neat little formulas about God. The man had personally met God and felt His presence out alone in a desert, and he believed that his experience was the real thing, the thing that mattered. All the Theology stuff was just petty and unreal. It is true that we have these real experiences with God, and when we turn to Theology, we are turning to something less real. Sailing the Atlantic ocean is a different and much more real experience than looking at a map of the Atlantic, but there are two things we ought to remember about the map:
The popular idea of Christianity, the vague elementary philosophy, is that Jesus taught some wonderful moral principles, and if we would just follow his advice we would all be at peace and have perfect social order. This is not necessarily untrue, but it is also not the whole truth of Christianity, and really there are plenty of other great philosophers and moral teachers whose advice we could follow and achieve the same results. "If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference." So if we want to find the entire truth, we must look at the whole of what Christianity claims; we must examine the Theology. And in that Theology, we find Christianity says that...
Lewis says the most shocking statement of Christian Theology is the claim that man can become a son of God by attaching himself to Christ, but in order to really understand this, we must first understand the difference between 'begetting' and 'making'. To "beget" is to bring into existence something of the same kind as yourself: To "make" is to create something different from yourself: So what God begets (Jesus) is God, and what God creates (man) is not God. "That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God. A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way, man has... the 'shape' or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has... in his natural condition, has not got, [the] Spiritual life - the higher and different sort of life that exists in God." *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
The last two chapters of Book Three deal with the third Theological virtue, Faith. I'll summarize both of these chapters here in one post (in order to stay in the 31-day framework) so forgive me if this one is a little longer than some of the others, but hang in there because it's all worth reading! Faith: Part One Lewis says that the virtue of Faith seems to have two senses about it, or two different levels. The first level is merely Belief, accepting or recognizing the doctrines of Christianity as true. But, you may ask, how can simply believing in something be considered a virtue? "Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid." So if, generally, we believe a thing because it has been shown to be true, why would we consider Belief anything more than a reasonable response to the evidence provided? Yes, belief is related to reason (because why would we really believe in something if it wasn't reasonable?), but there is another component of the human mind that must be taken into consideration. We are not ruled by reason at all times; we are also under the influence of our emotions and imagination. Lewis gives the example of having to go under anesthesia for a surgery: "My reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics." So our imaginations and our emotions often battle against our faith and our reason and call into question what we know to be true, what we have believed to be certain. This is where the virtue of Faith comes in. We will have moods when the Christian faith seems improbable; even as an atheist, Lewis admits that he experienced many occasions where he thought atheism seemed unlikely. Our emotions and our imagination can shift our moods and cause us to doubt, so we must have something stronger than those moods that teaches them how far they are allowed to take us. Otherwise, "you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion." So how do we strengthen this virtue? How do we train our Faith?
Approaching the second level of Faith (in chapter twelve), Lewis wants to preface by saying that this higher level or sense of the virtue does not come into play until a man has tried and really done all he could to be a "good man," tried to fix the machine on his own, tried to keep and practice the Christian virtues and found himself failing at all of the above. It is also necessary that the man begins to realize that anything he tries to give to God, anything he might try to do for God is really like a child asking his father for a dollar to buy him a present. The father will probably give the child the money and will probably delight in the gift the child gives him, "but only an idiot would think that the father is [a dollar richer] on the transaction." So once a man is aware of these two realities, that is when the second level of Faith begins. Faith: Part Two Before Lewis begins discussing the next level of Faith, he makes this statement: "If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road." Having said this, he reiterates that before a man can experience or understand this second level of Faith, he must first realize his bankrupt standing before God. We have to get the idea out of our heads that there is some sort of give-and-take relationship we have with God, some sort of exam we only have to pass, or some type of scorecard He keeps on us. This is not a right understanding of ourselves, of God, or of our relationship to Him. "We cannot get into the right relation until [we have] discovered the fact of our bankruptcy." And not 'discovering' in the sense that we merely repeat back what we have been taught, but 'discovering' it by really experiencing it and finding it to be true. It is only by trying our very hardest to keep the moral law that we realize we really cannot ever succeed in doing so. At this point, or after this gradual process of really seeing our inadequacy, we come to the realization that we need someone who will lend us His perfect obedience and fill up our deficiencies and make us like Himself - which is where Christ comes in. "Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing." We come to a point where we see that all of our own efforts cannot save us, so we stop trying to save ourselves and hand it over to Christ. This handing over of ourselves then leads to our trying to do all that He says, trying to obey: This Faith in Christ and our good works go hand in hand. We work out that salvation, for it is God who works in us. The two cannot really be separated or compartmentalized, and we cannot try to break it down into "what exactly God does and what man does when the two are working together." It is likely that, with our human minds, we will never be able to fully understand the relationship between Faith and works or be able to express it with our human language, so Lewis says this is as far as he will go on the topic. In closing the chapter on Faith and the final chapter of Book Three, he has this to say: *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
The second of the Theological virtues is Hope. Some people believe that the Christian virtue of hope, or the expectation of a future eternal home in Heaven, is "a form of escapism or wishful thinking," but it is actually a virtue that is meant to move the Christian forward to action. "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven." So we ought to expect that the man who truly knows the meaning of Hope and is motivated by its truth will do much more in and for this present life than the man who has no Hope. There are reasons, though, that we humans find it difficult to really want Heaven:
The reason nothing in this world or on this earth can permanently sustain and satisfy our deepest desires is because the things in this world were never meant to do so. The pleasures we experience here weren't meant to be the real thing, but rather the things that awaken us to the Real Thing, pointing us forward in Hope. So we should never take for granted or despise the earthly pleasures and blessings we have, but we should also never allow them to distract us or turn us away from the real goal: *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
CS Lewis uses the last four chapters of book three to discuss the Theological virtues that he mentioned earlier in the book. Those three virtues are Love (or Charity), Hope, and Faith. When we think of the word Charity now, we think of giving to the poor, but really it has a much broader meaning, and Lewis refers to it as, "Love, in the Christian sense," not an emotion or feeling, but a state of the will. In the chapter on Forgiveness, he pointed out that loving someone is not always the same as liking someone. In the chapter on Marriage, he discussed how love is about action, not feelings, because actions are the things that we can really commit to. We cannot promise to go on feeling a certain way forever, but we can promise to always act in love and give love and show love, even when we don't feel loving. Even when we don't like someone. We are capable of doing this because this is actually how we treat our own selves. We always love ourselves, even when we do not like what we do. Loving ourselves simply means that we want good for ourselves, we want to see ourselves succeed and do well. Even when we are frustrated at our mistakes or saddened by our shortcomings and failures, we still want to see things turn around for ourselves. This is the same kind of love we ought to have for others. Some people are easier to like than others, and we often have a natural fondness or affection toward certain types of individuals. Lewis says there is nothing wrong with this, just like there is nothing wrong with having certain foods that we like and dislike. The problem comes from what we do with those natural likes and dislikes, how we treat people because of them. Liking someone, of course, makes it easier to be charitable toward them, and it is fine to encourage affection toward people, but "it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings." At first, this may sound somewhat cold or forced, like you are faking it or being disingenuous. We are accustomed to associating love with sentimentality and affectionate feelings, but the interesting thing is that loving others from the will and not just from an emotional state tends to be more sustainable and actually leads to affectionate feelings. "The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning." The same is true in the opposite direction too. The more you injure someone you do not like, the more you treat them unkindly or think or speak badly about them, the more you will come to dislike them until your hate for them and your cruelty toward them become a vicious cycle that feeds itself. This is why Lewis says we must be careful about every little decision we make. The smallest kindness, the smallest loving act we do today "is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of." And the seemingly trivial indulgence in hatefulness or anger or lust today can open up the gates and make one vulnerable to attacks later on that would have otherwise been impossible. Lewis makes one final point about the virtue of Love when it is between us and God. Really, the same principle applies here that applies between us and our fellow man: *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
This chapter introduces what is possibly the most problematic area for the human machine: Pride. Lewis says Pride is the thing that "leads to every other vice, [and it is] the complete anti-God state of mind." Pride is essentially self-conceit, the inward part of a man that sustains itself through comparison and competitiveness. Pride is fed by being better, stronger, smarter, richer, etc. than someone else and is starved by taking away the competition. The ultimate goal of Pride is power, and the opposite of Pride is Humility. Pride is the one sin that will always bring divisions and create opposition and hostility, not only with other people but also with God. Pride pushes us to want more and to be better than everyone else, and as long as there is someone we have not beaten, our Pride will compare and compete until it has the pleasure of being above all the rest. But in God, we find a fundamental problem for our Pride. God is the one Being who will always be superior to us in every way. Even if a man surpassed every human on Earth in every way imaginable, he would still come up short when he compares himself to the Divine Creator. Since Pride would never allow us to acknowledge our inferiority or admit that we cannot be the winner and that something or someone cannot be beaten, we find that Pride actually prevents us from knowing God at all. There are really only two solutions that will protect our Pride:
One might ask, at this point, how is it possible then that there are so many very religious people who say they know God but seem to be consumed with Pride? This is related to number 2 above, but Lewis also says this: "I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men." Pride is so dangerous because we are usually unaware of its presence, and it is often used to cure our other evils; we overcome some vices by learning to see them as beneath our dignity. So we become self-controlled and wise and courageous, while all along we fan the flames of self-conceit. And Lewis says this is all perfectly fine and pleasing to the devil because he would much rather see us fall prey to the cancer of Pride than the ulcer of lust. Before he closes the topic of Pride, Lewis wants to mention just a few things in order to prevent or clear up any potential misunderstandings:
*This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
In the chapter on Sexual Morality, Lewis said that Chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues, but upon reflection he is not sure that he was correct. It may actually be that Forgiveness is the least popular. The command to 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' is all fine until we realize that 'thy neighbor' includes 'thy enemy,' "and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies." People naturally want to give an immediate objection and take it to the extreme with a question like: "How would you feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or Jew?" Of course, this would probably be incredibly difficult, and Lewis admits that he doesn't truly know what he would be able to do in that scenario. But then, this book is not about what he could or would do; it's about what Christianity is. Lewis didn't invent it, but right there in the middle of it all, we find, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." So what are we to do about that? Two things that may make "Forgiveness" easier: A. Start with the simpler stuff.
B. Figure out exactly what 'love your neighbor as yourself' really means. "I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. 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."
Loving your neighbor as yourself, forgiving your enemies - these may sometimes seem impossible or too difficult to bear. How does one love the unlovable? How does one forgive the unforgivable? How do we let go of hate and bitterness toward the people who wrong us? *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
The last chapter examined all that was wrong with man's sexual impulse, but now Lewis turns to look at that impulse when it is exercised properly, in the context of Christian marriage. The Christian idea of marriage is based on the biblical description of man and woman becoming one flesh - a unified, single organism. It is not meant to be mere sentiment or a beautiful expression, but rather a fact about the human nature. Just as "a lock and its key are one mechanism, or a violin and a bow are one musical instrument, the inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined." The Christian views sexual union as a part of the whole union that man and woman experience together, so to isolate the sexual part from the rest is just as strange and unnatural as if someone isolated the pleasure of tasting foods from the entire process of eating and digesting them. This is also why divorce is such a problem for the Christian because it is more like surgically cutting up and dividing a unified organism than merely a change of partners or readjusting spouses when someone falls out of love. The marriage contract or promise is meant to help us take seriously the passions of love and the excitement of being 'in love'. Some may object here and ask why you would force two people to stay together if they were no longer in love. There are significant socioeconomic reasons we could respond with, but Lewis says we also ought to look at 'being in love' in a different light. We like to view everything as good or bad and place them into neat categories, but sometimes it is more helpful to see things as good, better, and best (or conversely, bad, worse, and worst). So if we shift our understanding of love, we find that it is not that being 'in love' is good and anything else is bad, but rather that B is better than C and A is better than both. In this case, "A" is a deeper sense of love, a "unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God." Lewis says part of the problem is that we have spent too much time hearing messages about love and marriage from books, from the theater, from music, and poetry. We have been given an invalid perception of what real, lasting love looks like and it has negatively affected our own love lives. We have learned from books and movies that...
Lewis closes this chapter with two other points: One, on how far Christians ought to be able to force their personal religious views of marriage and divorce on the entire population, and two, on the subject of male headship. I am going to share his first point in a quote. I think the second point is also best read in his own original words, but it is too lengthy to put here, so go and read it for yourself sometime. (Remember, here is a free pdf of the book that I included in the intro post). But on the first point, which actually once again has a great deal of relevance to our contemporary American culture, Lewis says this: "A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own embers. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not." *This post is part of a 31 day series on C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. If this is your first stop along the way, I am so glad you’re here! I would love to interact with you in the comments, or you can email me by clicking on the "Contact Me" tab at the top right of the page. All of the blog posts in this series will be linked together on the intro page if you are interested in reading more. Click here to be taken to the introduction post, and if you want to follow along with the whole series, enter your email address in the box toward the top right corner to subscribe to the blog. Thanks for reading!
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