Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis

3/5

"I liked it"

A Foreword to My Review

Among all Christian books, Mere Christianity sits atop a high pedestal. It’s an incredibly famous work, which I find always makes books feel… weird to read. It’s hard to honestly analyze and objectively critique a book I’ve heard mentioned and praised so many times, without being myself biased in some way as a result. As I read this book, I kept analyzing my own opinions of the book, wondering “am I being too hard on this book because it’s popular?” or “am I impressed by this sentence because it was written by C.S. Lewis, and I feel like I should be?” So I’d just like to remind you to please remember, as all my book reviews are, this review is biased.

Review

Like other C.S. Lewis books, I found Mere Christianity to be a difficult read, largely because of the way he writes— something about the grammar, ordering of words, and the general style of his prose feels dense and slow for me to grasp. It’s not my favorite type of writing.

The book is primarily a defense and explanation of Christianity, and its beliefs and purposes. It attempts to answer questions that people still ask today, like:

• Why would God create evil? (i.e., “The Problem of Evil”)
• Where does our morality come from?
• What is the definition of a “Christian”?
• What do Christians believe?
• Why are some “Christians” terrible people?

I went into this book blind, but I think some context would be helpful for those that are yet to read Mere Christianity. In the foreword, Kathleen Norris writes:

This is a book that begs to be seen in its historical context… in 1942… Great Britain was at war again. Now it was ordinary citizens who suffered… As a young man, C.S. Lewis had served in the awful trenches of World War I… [he was] invited by the BBC to give a series of wartime broadcasts on Christian faith. Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as Mere Christianity.
—Kathleen Norris

All in all, C.S. Lewis demonstrates a great understanding of the Christian faith, offering answers to many questions that non-Christians pose about the religion. I don’t necessarily agree with every single one of his answers, and I think there are plenty left unanswered, but it was shocking to see how little the world has changed in its perspective of Christianity. Most of the questions he answers in the book are still being asked today, and for this reason, the book is still highly relevant to our culture an impressive ~80 years after it was written.

For those Christians who consider themselves “strong” in their faith, I think this book has less to offer- it is mostly written to an unbelieving audience. That being said, I still think there are important reminders of Christianity that C.S. Lewis discusses (see my notes).

I wanted to be blown away by Mere Christianity, and I think I gave it a fair shot, but I ended up just liking it. I prefer some of his other writing a bit more.

Notes

For my notes, rather than write the book’s arguments and points in my own words, I chose to mainly include snippets of the book to support each idea. Given this book’s weight in the Christian world, I think it would be unwise to suggest the book says something without showing you exactly what it says.

Morality

• C.S. Lewis establishes that an objective morality exists:

  • Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly… they do not in fact behave that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

  • If you say society makes moral progress (e.g., USA banning slavery, or Germany moving past Nazism), you are comparing our society’s morals against some undefined objective morality.

• C.S. Lewis makes the classic Christian defense for the Problem of Evil: God chose to give us the freedom of choice between good (Him) and bad (not Him/sin), for some reason (C.S. Lewis says God did this because to not do so would be like creating worthless “automata”). Because some people choose evil, the world contains evil.

  • God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free, but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, although it makes evil possible, it also the only thing that makes possible any goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata— of creatures that work like machines— would hardly be worth creating.

• C.S. Lewis argues that Jesus was either God, a lunatic, or some form of evil. I’ve read this before in other books (likely written after Mere Christianity). According to Wikipedia, “Lewis did not invent [this argument] but rather developed and popularized it”.

• C.S. Lewis suggests that people who have never heard of Christ may still be able to be saved:

  • Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about 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. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself.

• Why does God choose not to overtake the devil now? C.S. Lewis would say it’s because God wouldn’t think much of people who took his side when he’s obviously about to “win”:

  • God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream… this will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time to discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.

• Every Christian likes to pick parts of Christianity they like and leave the rest:

  • …each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity.

• He pushes a generous perspective of charity:

  • 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.

• Christians should recognize the distinction of church and state:

  • A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives.

Marriage and Sex

• Extramarital sex destroys the unity God designed for us in marriage:

  • The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.

• Marriage is about more than “being in love”:

  • The idea that ‘being in love’ is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made… the promise… to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way.

• You shouldn’t expect to feel “in love” forever:

  • People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change— not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one.

The Purpose of Christianity

• C.S. Lewis says that the entirety of Christianity can be put like this: it is about becoming like Christ.

  • …the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

• When we become Christians, our goal is to be perfect. We acknowledge that we cannot be perfect, but it remains the goal, and God is there to help us attain that.