Mere Christianity

Posted: Saturday, August 21, 2010 by Morgan in
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I finished Mere Christianity today (finally) and I have some thoughts about it. C.S. Lewis is a very personal writer, and he does a good job of reaching out to the reader in meaningful ways and making his ideas relevant to real people. It was an enjoyable read, and I'm sure I'll read it many more times over the course of my life. There are some beliefs that Lewis seems to hold (evolution, for example) that I struggle to reconcile with Christianity, but after you dig through the layers of logical argumentation for the existence of God, the philosophical evidence for Christianity, sound moral teaching, and witty illustrations that explain some of the nuances of Christianity (all these things are valuable), it all boils down to a simple truth that is found in the scriptures: if you try to find anything besides Christ or find something in addition to Christ, you will never find it, but if you seek Christ primarily and exclusively, you will find everything you really needed.


Like I said, this same concept is found in the gospels in the familiar teaching of Jesus:
And he said to all, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it , but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" (Luke 9:23-25)

Staying true to the first part of Jesus' teaching, Lewis lays lots of emphasis of the putting off of self in the search for Christ, saying that as long as we are looking for ourselves, we will never find Christ. This concept connects to the centrality and danger of pride, which I talked about in my last post. He even goes so far as to say that we don't have personality outside of Christ, and that we only truly have personality when we give ourselves wholly over to Christ:
As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. (226)
So that is his basic message, one which we would all do well to implement in our lives. It seems that humility and selflessness are the keys to finding Christ, both of which are really hard for sinners like us to do/be/have. He has a TON of great stuff to say besides that, but it's really his main point. I've compiled a list of things I underlined as I was reading, and I'll just list some of them.

"God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves his enemies." (31)

"What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could...invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." (49)

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." (50)

"But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us..." (63)

"I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What i do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly." (73)

"One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf of his motorcycle the center of his life...is being just intemperate as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals." (79)

"I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.... If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them." (86)

"Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God." (101)

"That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." (103)

"...the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction." (110)

"The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor, act as if you did." (131)

"The smallest good act 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. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible." (132)

"Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality — the kind of creatures He intended us to be — creatures related to Himself in a certain way." (145)

"Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment in which you can turn to God and say, 'You must do this. I can't.'" (146)

"Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map." (154)

"Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else." (177)

"That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one." (186)

"[Christianity] is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules." (189)

"We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way — centred on money or pleasure or ambition — and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do." (198)

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