Editorial note before we get started: my apologies that it has been so long since I last published one of these. Our family has had some upheaval, as we found out my company was moving me back to Alabama, put our house on the market, sold it, and moved south all in an 8 week span. God was good and gracious and made that transition as smooth as it could have been, but I am glad to have it behind me. I hope to be more consistent with updates going forward.
When last I wrote, we had been using this metaphor of a journey to explore our way through C.S. Lewis's classic Mere Christianity. Jack has argued his way to a conclusion that man is bound by some Moral Law, a feeling that he ought to be better than he is, and that some Force or Being (or maybe even Person) is behind this Moral Law. Something is directing the world and ensuring that every man feels the weight of the Rule of Human Nature.
In chapter five, Lewis takes a moment to sum up his arguments thus far. His summation takes the form (as usual) of a response to an imaginary objector. At the end of chapter 4, Lewis broached the idea that the Something behind our universe might possibly be a Someone. Lewis imagines his interlocutor objecting that Lewis has performed some sort of unfair sleight of hand.
Lewis responds with the almost absurdly obvious response - I say almost absurdly obvious because I wouldn't have thought of it but after reading it, Jack has clearly articulated the best possible answer - that if a clock is wrong, shouldn't we set it back to the correct time? If Bob were to look at the news headlines in the past few weeks (the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook shooting), he would be forced to conclude that our world is very very broken. Something, somewhere has gone horribly, drastically, dreadfully wrong. If we are on the wrong road, the quickest way to our destination might just be to backtrack to where we made the wrong turn and get on the right road.
Jack also points out to Bob that he hasn't, strictly speaking, introduced religion yet, much less has he introduced Christianity. He has not yet quoted any Scripture, and he has not come anywhere near a God of any particular religion. But, he points out that we can figure a few things out about God (or the Lifeforce or whoever it is behind the Moral Law) by looking inside ourselves. Based on the Law of Human Nature, we find that whoever this Being-behind-it-all is, He/She/It seems very interested in having us be unselfish and courageous and honest. We might even go so far as to say that this God is "good," but Lewis cautions us to be very careful about what we mean by "good. When we say that the Moral Law and the Being behind it are "good," we cannot in any way mean that God is "indulgent or soft or sympathetic" (30). If the Moral Law is anything, it is severe and difficult and demanding. The Being-behind-it-all does not seem to care in the least that sometimes it is hard to be unselfish or honest. And if we are going to be realistic, we must admit that we have not always played on the same team as this Good. As Lewis puts it:We know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. Our case is hopeless again. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror. He is our only possibly ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger - according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way. (31)We seem to find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We have to admit that something about us is fundamentally broken, but we seem unable to fix the problem. We seem called and bound to obey this Moral Law, but we don't seem to be very good at keeping it. What then shall we do?
Lewis concludes his chapter by formally introducing Christianity. He explains that he was not trying to trick his readers by leading them to Christianity via a roundabout road. The problem is that Christianity makes no sense to a listener who has no sense of his own brokenness. Christ said as much when He pointed out that only those who know that they are sick need a doctor. It is only once we admit that we are broken that we are in a position to understand Scripture's explanations of how we got this way and how we can be fixed. At this point in the book, Lewis switches gears and begins to discuss what it is that Christians believe. That is, how would a Christian answer the quandary of the Moral Law? He gives away the ending to the story by reminding us of "how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God" (32), but he will spend the next few chapters discussing just who this God is and how He has worked to save mankind from a burden far too big for us to bear. Look for more posts in the coming weeks concerning God, sin, man, and redemption.
