C.S. Lewis -- Mere Christianity Book II

Earlier in the week I posted some thoughts on Book I of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Today we move on to Book II. This is as far as we are reading in the book for the C.S. Lewis webinar.

1. Book I was titled, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." In it, Lewis basically argues that we can discern the existence of a moral standard in the universe and that such a standard is best explained by something like a mind placing demands on us. However, though this law exists, we find that we thoroughly fail to achieve its demands.

Book II is titled, "What Christians Believe."

2. As Book II begins, Lewis characteristically begins working his way through a decision tree, at each step honing in on a more refined understanding of the moral situation of the universe and on the character of its God. For example, the Christian can accept that there is partial correctness in all the other religions of the world. By contrast, if you are an atheist, then you must conclude that the majority of humans that have lived have been wrong about the existence of deity. Score one for theism.

Then he moves to the question of what kind of God we are likely talking about. Is the deity such that there really is no right or wrong? Is the deity beyond good and evil? Or is there definite good and a God who takes sides? He has already argued that good exists. 

So now he contrasts pantheism with a God who is distinct from the creation as creator. If God is identical to the universe or if the universe is part of God, then the moral ambiguity of the universe also applies to God. "If you think some things really bad, and God really good, you cannot talk like that" (40). I do agree with Lewis that God is distinct from the creation. But I argue for this distinction on the basis of ex nihilo creation rather than from a moral perspective because I am more Aristotelian than Platonic. [1]

3. This leads to the problem of evil. "If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?" (41). Lewis now makes an argument that works with people but I don't think works with logic. It amounts to this. If there is no God then what are you complaining about? "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line" (41). Here is again his sense that an innate human sense of right and wrong implies it exists. "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning" (41).

Now I think it was in Surprised by Joy that Lewis remarked that some people who don't believe in God are very angry with God. I think this is a fair observation. It also is self-contradictory. So Lewis rightly points out, I think, that you cannot fault God for evil and suffering if you don't think God exists. I believe Lewis correctly points out that if there is no God, then there is no evil. This is a reason to want to believe in God--if God does not exist, then evil and suffering have no ultimate significance. We're just road kill waiting to happen.

However, there are plenty of atheists who are ok with being road kill. Not very pleasant, but at least consistent.

4. In the second chapter of this Book, he argues that "this is a good world that has gone wrong" (43). He addresses the person who would say, "That's just odd" or "That's too complicated to be likely." He calls such objections "boys' philosophy" (42). "Reality... is usually odd" (43). "Reality... is usually something you could not have guessed." I'm not real fond of this "credo quod absurdum est" argument (I believe because it's absurd), but it's really a side note anyway.

If God is good and the world has evil, Lewis has argued God must be apart from the creation. (I'm good with this point, but I suspect there is a tinge of Neoplatonism here in Lewis' mind.) So is this a situation of a world that has gone wrong (orthodox Christian position) or is there something like a dualism of good and evil in the universe?

In this section Lewis drips Augustine. "Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way" (44). "No one ever did a cruel action because cruelty is wrong--only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him" (45). "You can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted."

Dualism thus does not work because evil is the twisting of the good. The good is the standard and default. "We have no experience of anyone liking badness because it is bad" (44). This fits, by the way, with his comments on pederasty in Surprised.

Now I am not a dualist either, and I am sympathetic to Lewis' argument here. But I am not a moral ontologist like Lewis either, who almost sees good as something like a thing with its own existence. I am more like that great nominalist the apostle Paul when he said, "Nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean if someone thinks it is unclean" (Rom. 14:14). 

So for me our intentions make an act evil in a particular context, not the act itself. It is the nature of our choices in particular contexts, not the acts or even the consequences, although consequences are important to God because people are important to God. There is a difference between evil and suffering.

At the end of chapter 2, Lewis introduces Satan and the "Dark-power in the universe." He is not arguing for dualism so I don't think he would say Satan's existence is in some way necessary. Nevertheless, "Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war" (45). "Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong."

5. Chapter 3 largely presents the free will theodicy (Augustine strikes again). I am sympathetic to this argument. "Free will is what has made evil possible" (47). "If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad." "The better stuff a creature is made of--the cleverer and stronger and freer it is--then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong" (48).

"God designed the human machine to run itself" (49). This human machine was made to run on God-fuel. "God designed the human machine to run on Himself." But human civilization doesn't use the right gas. "That is the key to history." "Each time something goes wrong." We do not run on the right fuel. "They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans." [3] 

But God has sent in help. The first is the human conscience. See my previous post. The second is Jesus, "a man who goes about talking as if He was God" (49).

6. Here then at the end of chapter 3 and into chapter 4, Lewis presents his signature "Lord, liar, or lunatic" argument. The train of thought goes like this:

• Jesus claimed to be God. Therefore,
• Either he was telling the truth (which makes him Lord) or
• He wasn't and knew it (which makes him a liar) or
• He wasn't and he didn't know it (which makes him a lunatic).

I suspect that twenty-first century Brits are more open to the other options than they were in the 1940s. Lewis says you cannot chose the option that says, "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God" (50). No, if he isn't Lord, he must either be a liar or a lunatic.

Now of course if you read someone like Bart Ehrman, he would deny the first premise. Ehrman would deny that the historical Jesus actually claimed to be God. I've also noted that Josh McDowell has added "legend" to the list of options, addressing mythicists who claim that Jesus wasn't even a real person.

7. Chapter 4 addresses the question of atonement. Here I love the phrase "deep magic" from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Lewis doesn't use that phrase here. Lewis insists that Christians do not have to believe one particular theory on how it works. "My own church--the Church of England--does not lay down any one of them as the right one" (53). But "a man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him."

But Lewis gives his sense of one such theory, penal substitution. He does not take punishment here in the sense of the "police-court sense" (54). Rather, it's about getting humanity out of a hole it got itself into. Humanity is a "rebel who must lay down his arms." "This movement full speed astern is what Christians call repentance."

"Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly" (54). So God becomes human. "He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God" (55). My Western individualism has always made this argument difficult for me to follow. I think Jesus death makes sense broadly as a satisfaction of the justice and "moral order" of the cosmos. 

But the detailed logic of penal substitution seems forced to me, and ultimately I do believe God had the authority and sovereignty simply to pardon humanity. The cross was far more for us than for God. In the end, there is a deep magic done here, but I'm not sure we can put it into a tight syllogism.

He helpfully adds, "Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture" (56).

8. The final chapter of Book II anticipates the next Book on morals, which unfortunately I will not be covering at this time. In chapter 5, Lewis makes an altar call for a decision. I thought of Billy Graham, whose ministry began in earnest at about the same time. 

"The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him" (59)... or her. "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names--Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. At least those are the three ordinary methods" (57-58). 

I am always fascinated in such contexts by the fact that the Holy Spirit is not mentioned so often (e.g., in Richard Peace's, Conversion in the New Testament). The Holy Spirit is the indication that a person is a Christian and the only means to the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is the juice on which baptism, faith, and communion run if they run at all. Nevertheless, I do believe in means of grace.

He ends the chapter and Book with two fascinating side notes. One is that "God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" (60). I am deeply sympathetic to these statements because of the revealed character of God in Scripture.

The final side note has to do with why God doesn't just invade the world to end evil. "Well, Christians think He is going to land in force." (The allusions to WW2 are interesting, which was in process at the original time these lectures were given on the radio). 

"Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it" (61).

[1] And I am more "nominalist" than Aristotelian. Or shall I say Wittgensteinian? I prefer to think of groupings of things by commonalities, "family resemblances," rather than by essences. This third answer to the problem of universals and particulars also fits with what we might call pragmatism.

[2] I doubt Satan has genitalia.

[3] I remembered here that my old colleague Steve Horst is quite fond of Greg Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil. I believe Horst likes Lewis, and Boyd points to Satan as the biggest explanation to the problem of evil.