Very few authors have influenced, strengthened, penetrated, challenged and shaped my faith more than C.S. Lewis. His writing either sings to you or he doesn't, but boy does he sing to me!
I will examine some of Lewis's other books another day but here are some of my favorite excerpts from Mere Christianity. This is the stuff I thought I already knew. But I didn't-not really, not clearly.
"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."
Lewis says that Christian's believe an evil power has made himself (for the present) the Peace of this World. Lewis then asks is this in accordance with God's will and says "if it is, He is a srange God...and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?"
Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that God created things with free will. Free will means those things can go right or wrong. Free will makes evil possible.
"... Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -- of creatures that worked like machines -- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free...of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently he thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong and more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will -- that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings -- then we may take it it is worth paying."
"We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from the outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be — the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man may eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept Christ without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it."
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death washed away our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. This is what has to be believed.
"...repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen."
Lewis' genius is his humility, his self-forgetfulness before truth. Mere Christianity is so powerful because it's not about Lewis' faith, it's about THE Faith.
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