Mere Christianity explores the core beliefs of Christianity by providing an unequaled opportunity for believers and nonbelievers alike to hear a powerful, rational case for the Christian faith.

What I love about C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity:

• He is an Artist - He puts complicated concepts in powerful, easy to understand, images.

• Wise enough not to judge easily, well aware of his own fallibility and the difference in temptations everyone faces.

  Ever since I served as an Infantryman in the first World War I have great dislike for people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line.

  I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed. No man is tempted to every sin.

• He was an Atheist for the longest time of His life - He is driven by reason and a search for truth - not a man for simple answers

• He has a powerful understanding of Gods grace and love and especially his chapter outlining that morality is not at the center of Christianity and not the sins of the flesh, but pride is the most destructive sin, is remarkable.

• There is an unbelievable amount of wisdom to be taken from this book, which is almost impossible to summarize

I will, however, for myself and for everyone who is interested in the key points of his work, attempt to give a brief overview of Mere Christianity in the following sections.

Table of contents

The law of nature

Mere Christianity is not only full of theological wisdom, but also contains a part of the reasoning on how Lewis himself became a Christian. The first part of the book deals with more general questions Lewis faced. One interesting thing he observed is that there seems to be a law of nature, a universal understanding of right and wrong, in all of us.

These are the key truths he observed regarding this law of nature:

• Morality of different nations, independent of each other, are all strikingly similar
• There seems to be a universal understanding of right and wrong in human beings
• For example: Selfishness has never been admired
• Not made up by ourselves, yet present to all of us
• Important: Nobody lives up to the law of nature

Today we have most likely failed to practice ourselves the behaviour we expect from others

Instincts

A popular question surrounding the human being is: Are we good or bad? Are our instincts good or bad?

Lewis argues that no instinct is purely bad or purely good, everyone has its place and can be harmful in another.

He argues that our instincts and desires are like piano keys - there are no good or bad notes - everyone is right at a certain time.

• The moral law is the tune (we call goodness) directing the instincts

Changing for the “better”?

To be able to change for the better we need a standard to strive to.

This standard is impossible to define without a clear set of moral ideas, but it is important that we have a standard, because we know that:

-> Something being imperfect has logical consequences

The law as a road to Christianity

• Omnipresence of this understanding (the law of nature) is a proof that somebody or something is directing the universe
• Lewis argues that as we are created in His image the moral law is a reflection of Gods wisdom

In an age striving for progress he reminds us that sometimes, to get closer to where we want to be, we might have to look back.

Progress -> getting nearer to where we want to be

• If we are on the the wrong road - the one turning back the soonest is the most progressive one!

The problems surrounding absolute goodness

If God is like the moral law He is not soft.

• He must hate most of what we do (as we are not absolutely good)

  God is the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from

• If God is not good - everything in the long term is hopeless

• If we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day - we are just as hopeless

Goodness is either a great safety or a great danger

Where Christianity begins to talk

Christianity has nothing to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of, and do not feel a need of forgiveness.

Now that we have established, that there is a law that proves the guidance of the universe, that we all have broken the law, that we can only hope for a God of absolute goodness, but also have to face a God of absolute goodness - that is where the message of Christianity is getting relevant:

With the realization of the moral law and a power behind the law, and the knowledge that you have broken that law (we do not even live up to the standards we ask of others) and that you put yourself wrong with that power - that is where Christianity begins to talk.

Only when you are sick you will listen to the doctor

Christianity is comfort - but it begins in the dismay

It is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without going through that dismay

We have to face the facts - they are terrifying - none of us is good.

Often times I do observe people with a great hunger for harmony, peace and comfort - which is undoubtedly beautiful, but are at the same time, tempted to compromise on the pillars of true harmony - and might loose, at the cost of temporary comfort, the chance of lasting peace.

That is why I love the following quote of Lewis:

In religion as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end:

If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soup and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion.

We must be ready to face uncomfortable truths to get to true comfort.

If a God made the world why has it gone wrong?

How do we even know that the world has gone wrong?

If there is no light, we know no darkness

There must be a standard for goodness for us to know that something has gone wrong.

The problem: The Universe is containing much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless.

It poses the question what is right or wrong, what is just and unjust.

Possible answers:

Atheism is too simple!

If the universe would have no meaning we should never have found out that it has no meaning

Christianity: Good world gone wrong -> remaining memory of what it ought to have been.

Dualism: Two equal and independent powers - good and bad - and the universe is the place of their war - But how would we determine which one is good or bad? - there must be a judge / law - the real God.

Free will - the possibility of evil

God created things which had free will.

-> With the potential to go right or wrong (This introduces the possibility of evil)

Whilst free will introduces the possibility of evil, it is also the only thing that makes love, goodness, joy worth having. Without a free decision none of them would hold any value.

The joy of God is: us freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight.

How did it go wrong?

Arguing against God (who is the source of all reasoning power) is like a stream trying to rise higher than its source.

• Self / Identity - “Idea of being just like God” - Original Sin / Sin of satan
• Goal to be their own masters / source of happiness

This will fail as God designed the human being to run on Himself - He is our fuel.

Gods Response

• He has given us a conscience of right and wrong
• Good dreams and desires
• Example set by Jesus

Is it just - that all sins are forgiven?

We could pose the question if it is not incredibly unjust that the damage done by sin is not repaid to the perpetrator.

-> Jesus did not consult the people who were injured by sins.

Why? - He, the God who loves is wounded with every sin, he is the one chiefly offended in all offences. That is why we need His sacrifice to be forgiven:

We need Gods help to do something He would never do: to surrender, to suffer, to submit and to die!

He can not do it unless he becomes man - Jesus is God in human form on enemy occupied world - He washed out sins and disabled death.

What we ought to do is to surrender and repent - killing self-will and self-conceit. We can not do it ourselves:

The same badness that makes us need it, makes us unable to do it.

He lends us a little of His reasoning powers -> The Holy Spirit.

He puts a little of His love into us.

We can only do it with His help, God can only do it if He becomes man.

The only choice is to call Jesus a madman or fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.

A new creation

Christ reconciled Man and God with the perfect surrender and humiliation.

By sharing them we also become a part of the new creation.

The three things that spread the Christ-life to us:

• Baptism
• Belief
• Holy Spirit

A Christian must make an effort to keep His life. We can go wrong, but we have the capacity to repent through Him. And we must remember that our natural, as well as our Christian life, is given to us as a present, not based on our merit:

Neither our natural nor our Christian life were given to us by choice, it is given to us by others not on our merit.

-> Ephesians 2, 8-9

We are not “Doing Good”

Compared to other religions, we are not attempting to do good to please God or to try to get the approval from men. We know, that we ourselves can not do anything absolutely good, but any good we do, comes from God himself, who acts through us.

God does not love us because we are good, but God will make us good because He loves us.

Morality

Morality is:

• Relationship between men and men
• Things inside each men
• Relations between men and the power that made him

We do agree that we need rules to prevent greed, cowardice, ill temper, self conceit from us hurting each other.

But:

You can not make men good by law.

Different approaches to morality

• Whom do we belong? - God our ourselves?
• How long do we live? - 70 Years or forever?

With different answers to these questions we might have no common ground for morality.

Another problem arises in the truth that people fighting for opposite things, somehow can both say they are fighting for Christianity.

What is a good man?

This is an amazing part of C.S. Lewis book!

• Concept of raw material:

  Lewis says that every human being is presented with his own temptations and challenges, which leads to the feelings his psychological outfit presents him with.

  Bad psychological material is not a sin, but rather a disease, a particular human being might suffer from.

• Choosing:

  Morality is concerned with the decisions we make based on the feelings our Raw Material presents us with.

The important take-away:

Men look at actions - God at hearts

We do not know the raw material another has to work with:

-> That is why Christians are told not to judge

Little acts of kindness for men raised in darkness might be more than you and I are doing

It is important to have empathy and to know that we might not act different if we would have to deal with the raw material of another:

Can we be certain how we would act if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, the bad upbringing and the power of Himmler?

We do only see the choices of men independent of their raw material, but God sees what a man does based on his raw material.

Most of a mans psychological make-up is due to his body, when he dies it falls off him and the real man, the thing that chose will stand naked -> Only then we’ll see who everyone really was.

The better a man gets the more clearly he understands the evil inside of him.

A thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.

The Enemy

We are free to hate the sin, but not the sinner, instead we should have hope for him to find relief and to be cured of them, to be human again.

We must feel about our enemies how we feel about ourselves - to wish that he were not bad, to hope that hey may, in this world or another be cured; to wish his good.

How to love the unlovable?

Asking this question immediately poses the follow up question: Are we ourselves even that lovable?

Remember, this is how God loves us:

Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves, for really there is nothing else in us to love.

Pride

This is another crucial part of this book!

-> One vice of which none is free

Morality is not at the center of Christianity, even though sins of flesh are bad, they are the least of all sins. The worst pleasures are purely spiritual.

For example the pleasure of: Putting people into wrong, bossing, patronizing, back-biting, pleasure of power, hatred.

A cold self-righteous prig might be closer to hell than a prostitute

Pride is the center of sin as it is an Anti-God state of mind, it always means enmity between man and man and to God.

As long as you are proud you cannot know God - as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you

It leads to every other vice:

-> Greed and selfishness are truly a result of pride, as even if we have enough, we still desire more just to have more than another.

Pride only gets pleasure by having more than others and it turns does who have what I want into enemies.

Proud Christians

-> Imagining how God approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

The terrible danger:

-> The worst of all the vices can snuggle itself into the very center of our religious life.

If we say “lust, cowardice, etc are beneath your dignity” we are trying to overcome them by pride - we might become self-controlled, chaste and brave, but at the same time the devil is setting up the dictatorship of pride.

Pride is spiritual cancer - it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense

-> We have no reason to be proud of anything - everything is given to us by God - we cannot give Him anything that is not already his. We have to discover our bankruptcy, our failure to keep Gods law and put all our trust in Christ. If we get any better, anymore “Christ-like” it is not by our own powers, but by the Holy Spirit within us.

-> The necessary change can only be done by God

We, at most, allow it to be done to us.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good

Charity

Love in a Christian sense is not primarily an emotion, not powered by feelings, but a state of the will. If we love based on emotion it will lead us to only help the people we like.

-> But there is an amazing reality: If we invest in people, even tough they are seemingly unlikeable we will like them more and more.

Unfortunately this circle also works the other way around, and we have to be aware of that. The Nazis ill-treated the jews, treated them as if they were not human, which led them to hate them more and more.

-> That is why little decisions are of infinite importance and they determine who we are going to be

Many ask - how much are we supposed to give?

Lewis defines charity as follows -> give more than you can spare: There should be things we would like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

• Not greed or desire for a luxurious life keeps us from giving, but our fear of insecurity

Hope

Looking forward goes hand in hand with working today.

What if there is infinite happiness waiting for us?

As a part of his testimony C.S. Lewis realized that nothing in this world can truly satisfy his desires, and that there might be no real reason to hope for something at all. If we know that at some point the earth will cease to exist, and therefore everything we do - if this is the certain outcome anyways, will not really make a difference in the end.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

-> Earthly pleasures are meant to arouse a desire for the “real thing”

We must keep up a desire for the true home, but this should also affect the way we are acting here today:

Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside of you

New men

Christ does not expect us to be perfect, but the only help He offers is help to become perfect.

You may want something else, but He will give you nothing less.

This can be a though challenge as God might change us in ways we did not see coming, or did not think to be necessary.

• We are totally dependent on God.
• Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
• The very first step is to forget about self altogether.

-> You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.

Give up yourself and you will find your real self.

Lose your life and you will safe it.

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and you will find eternal life.

Keep back nothing.

Nothing you have not given away will be really yours.

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.

Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay.

But look for Christ and you will find Him and with Him everything else thrown in.

Amen!