Reviews for Mere Christianity
Review - Mere Christianity
I don’t think I read all of Mere Christianity the first time. It was for my freshman English class at Moody, and I think the test was just on the first five chapters. I’m pretty sure that, even then, I would have noticed the final chapter. C.S. Lewis gets weird. I’ll let you see what I mean in a bit.
First, here’s what I liked about this book.
— The arguments on the moral law and how it universally points to God.
— The insistence that we need to recognize our own sin before we can begin a relationship with God.
— The point that without God, our existence has no meaning.
— The conclusion about why we have free will and what it means.
— This statement: “God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”
— This statement: “God … lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another.”
— Lewis’s insistence that marital love is an act of will, not a feeling.
— The argument that we should forgive others, in part, because we never even live up to our OWN standards and have no right to expect others to always please us.
— The conclusion that a person who is living for Christ will not be focused on himself.
— The chapter on how God is outside of time.
— Lewis’s ability to state complex ideas in clever, straightforward language.
— And a lot of other stuff.
Here’s what I didn’t like about this book.
— The idea that salvation is somehow starting life over without mentioning the imputing of Jesus Christ’s righteousness to us.
— The argument that Christ’s life is given to us through baptism, belief and communion (in that order).
— Lewis doesn’t believe in eternal security. He even states at one point that there are Christians who are “slowly ceasing to be Christians.”
— The concept that life is the process of turning our “central being” into either a “heavenly creature” or a “hellish creature” (which seems to deny the fact that we are all born sinful).
— He misses the point that hope (as a virtue) is faith in the future.
— I was confused by his portrayal of the Son’s relationship to the Father. While saying the Son is God, Lewis seems to appoint Him a lesser status somehow. And the Spirit, while a person, is just somehow the union of the Father and the Son. (I’m not sure I grasped Lewis’s point here.)
— The almost total lack of Scripture. Lewis approaches Christianity almost entirely as a process of logic.
And then there’s the really weird part at the end. Is he saying here what I think he’s saying?
“I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded.”
“Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that that Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction — a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago. In a sense, the change is not ‘Evolution’ at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events but something coming into nature from outside.”
“I have called Christ the ‘first instance’ of the new man. But of course He is something much more than that. He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the species, but THE new man.”
“Century by century God has guided nature up to the point of producing creatures that can (if they will) be taken right out of nature, turned into ‘gods’.”
“The new step has been taken and is being taken. Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. … Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. … And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognize one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great FUN.”
OK, there it is. A lot of us have read this book, and most of us who have read it have rated it highly. So help me out here. What is Lewis saying in this passage? Do you agree with him?
First, here’s what I liked about this book.
— The arguments on the moral law and how it universally points to God.
— The insistence that we need to recognize our own sin before we can begin a relationship with God.
— The point that without God, our existence has no meaning.
— The conclusion about why we have free will and what it means.
— This statement: “God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”
— This statement: “God … lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another.”
— Lewis’s insistence that marital love is an act of will, not a feeling.
— The argument that we should forgive others, in part, because we never even live up to our OWN standards and have no right to expect others to always please us.
— The conclusion that a person who is living for Christ will not be focused on himself.
— The chapter on how God is outside of time.
— Lewis’s ability to state complex ideas in clever, straightforward language.
— And a lot of other stuff.
Here’s what I didn’t like about this book.
— The idea that salvation is somehow starting life over without mentioning the imputing of Jesus Christ’s righteousness to us.
— The argument that Christ’s life is given to us through baptism, belief and communion (in that order).
— Lewis doesn’t believe in eternal security. He even states at one point that there are Christians who are “slowly ceasing to be Christians.”
— The concept that life is the process of turning our “central being” into either a “heavenly creature” or a “hellish creature” (which seems to deny the fact that we are all born sinful).
— He misses the point that hope (as a virtue) is faith in the future.
— I was confused by his portrayal of the Son’s relationship to the Father. While saying the Son is God, Lewis seems to appoint Him a lesser status somehow. And the Spirit, while a person, is just somehow the union of the Father and the Son. (I’m not sure I grasped Lewis’s point here.)
— The almost total lack of Scripture. Lewis approaches Christianity almost entirely as a process of logic.
And then there’s the really weird part at the end. Is he saying here what I think he’s saying?
“I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded.”
“Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that that Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction — a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago. In a sense, the change is not ‘Evolution’ at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events but something coming into nature from outside.”
“I have called Christ the ‘first instance’ of the new man. But of course He is something much more than that. He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the species, but THE new man.”
“Century by century God has guided nature up to the point of producing creatures that can (if they will) be taken right out of nature, turned into ‘gods’.”
“The new step has been taken and is being taken. Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. … Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. … And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognize one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great FUN.”
OK, there it is. A lot of us have read this book, and most of us who have read it have rated it highly. So help me out here. What is Lewis saying in this passage? Do you agree with him?
Reviewed by Roger on 2004-02-20 11:40:22