Rebecca's Reviews > Mere Christianity

Score for literary merit and enduring cultural importance: 5+
Score for actual theologizing: 3 tops

“Theology means ‘the science of God,’ and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available.”

“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.”

I’d read this piecemeal through high school and college (including a Lewis tutorial in Oxford during my year abroad), then the ladies of my extended family did an online book discussion through five months of last year. The chat fizzled out, as these things so often do; I think many struggled, not with the ideas but with the language, finding it dated and inaccessible. Meanwhile, I was the devil’s advocate, with much the most liberal and ‘heretical’ views.

Now that I’ve finally gotten around to finishing, I’ll condense some of the thoughts I sent via e-mail into a general response. This second time around, about a dozen years after I first started broadening my idea of what Christianity could be, I was surprised by how inadequate I found much of Lewis’s thinking to be. His stated aim is to illuminate the least common denominator of Christian doctrine, but the effect of this is to produce a flat picture of a faith that doesn’t evolve to fit changing circumstances.

Lewis relies on what, to me, seem like over-simplified dualities. For instance, in his discussion of pantheism and monotheism he offers a caricature of the viewpoints and doesn’t discuss the subtleties of a middle way known as “panentheism” (everything rests in God, as in Acts 17:28: “For in him we live and move and have our being”). I also find the dichotomy between the powers of good and darkness – and especially martial metaphors like “enemy-occupied territory” – both unhelpful and outdated. Likewise, I was disappointed by Lewis’s unfair dismissal of “Creative Evolution.” He misrepresents the serious attempt to reconcile undeniable scientific fact with a belief that there is purpose and value to human life.

I’m not sure I agreed with his discussion of the term “Christian” and how it has been devalued. A comparison with the term “gentleman” didn’t resonate. He tries to argue that whereas “gentleman” once had wealth and class meaning, it now refers to behavior only, and the same is happening with the term “Christian.” Yet if faith without works is dead, and many people outside the Church are more Christ-like than those inside, perhaps the very word “Christian” should only be applied to those who really merit it. For this reason, Irish theologian Peter Rollins says that being a Christian “means entering into a journey of becoming one” – acknowledging that we will never reach the ideal of modeling Christ.

I’ve always thought Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” argument a rather weak one. He’s assuming that Jesus thought himself to be God, whereas Paul writes “Jesus did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:6). However, I appreciated the discussion of how Christianity is not intuitive and that this in itself is support for it being true: principles like “whoever seeks to keep his life will lose it” don’t make logical sense, but are the way of God’s Kingdom.

I liked the idea that nature can give us a picture of God – and that it suggests both beauty and terror. I also appreciated his mention of the “good dreams” of a dying God that prefigured the way for Christ (though I find his language about “heathens” patronizing) – this is something I read a lot about in college religion classes, particularly Joseph Campbell’s book of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

A few more points I found particularly useful were:

• theories of atonement are just pictures and needn’t be taken too literally
• Jesus models for us a new way to be human (a great Switchfoot lyric, that), even a next step in human evolution
• the sacraments are ways of entering into the life of Christ
• the incarnation was God entering the world by stealth, “starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil” – a quiet revolution rather than a forceful takeover (I’ve thought a lot about this – see, e.g. The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren)
• Christian creative work is not in some separate class: “Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists—not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time”; “no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

Book III, Chapter 3 (“Social Morality”) is terrific, and very provocative. Lewis ponders what a society based on the Golden Rule would look like: a place where every politician, economist and artist was committed to seeking the common good and treating people as they would wish to be treated. Imagine – no advertising, no charging interest, none of the trivial and superficial matters that make up so much of society today. Call it socialized or communist or whatever you like, but it’s supported by the way of Jesus and the model of the early Church. I was especially challenged by his opinion that our charitable giving should be putting constraints on our lifestyle, and if it’s not, we just aren’t giving enough.

Chapters on sexual morality and marriage are also very good. I think he’s right that while chastity is an unchanging virtue, notions of modesty and propriety are culturally relative and change over time. I especially loved this line: “But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village.” In other words, it’s ludicrous to think that our every sexual desire could or should be satisfied. I also loved the metaphor of putting a lamb chop on display under a cover and slowly revealing it – like a striptease, but with food. This would seem both ridiculous and unhealthy to us, a sign of both starvation and obsession. Indeed, our relationship with sex in this porn-drenched day and age is similarly sick and addictive.

It’s interesting to read Lewis’s ideas about Christian marriage, knowing that he wrote this book in 1944 but didn’t marry until 1957. I wonder what he would have changed, if anything, if he’d written this as a married man. I agree with him completely that marriage is a decision and a promise that long outlasts “being in love.”

Perhaps my biggest objection relates to Lewis’s position on capital punishment and just war. Lewis states, “It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.” Lewis himself fought in WWI and was writing in the throes of WWII, so he lived in a different time, one where war seemed justified and necessary. Now, in our age of “preventive” warfare and anti-terrorism, this is not the case anymore, nor is capital punishment ever right. The ‘right to life’ is the right to life for everyone, criminals included – because who among us is truly innocent? Jesus didn’t set parameters on peace; he simply said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “love your enemies,” and “if a man strikes you, turn the other cheek.”

My favorite lines may well have been about not looking to religion for comfort: “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...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 soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”

The fact that the book originated as a set of radio broadcasts is reflected in the style – it’s less formal and more conversational than your average theology book. If at times it seems a touch patronizing – like a Sunday school primer – that speaks to his desire to make this comprehensible for new Christians and questioners alike.

There are so many memorable metaphors here: souls as tin soldiers coming to life, the image of religion as a hallway with many rooms, the idea of God being ‘sixpence none the richer’ whenever we give our talents back to him. In terms of introducing useful examples and analogies, you can’t fault it.

This is an important book for any Christian to read, if only because C.S. Lewis has had such a huge impact on Evangelical theology (especially in America) through to the present day. It was even voted best book of the twentieth century by Christianity Today magazine in 2000. It’s definitely worth reading (or rereading after years or decades), even if just to see what you think is helpful and salvageable and what strikes you as outmoded.