Notes on "Mere Christianity"

written by C. S. Lewis

published by Harper Collins 1952 and  1980

notes by Dwayne Phillips, November 2009

Preface
The contents were given on air on the BBC radio during the early
days of WWII.
"When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have
chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If
they are wrong they need you prayers all the more, and if they are
your enemies, you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of
the rules common to the whole house."
AND THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS ABOUT. The world is a
great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going
round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life. p. 159
Suppose I am writing a novel. I write "Mary laid down her work; next
comment came a knock at the door!" For Mary who has to live in the
imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down
the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary's maker, do not
live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of
the sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and
think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were
the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the
hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary's time (the time
inside the story) at all. pp. 167-168
God is not hurried along the time stream of this universe any more
than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own
novel.
He (Jesus) came to this world and became a man in order to spread to
other men the kind of life He has - by what I call "good infection."
Every Christian is to become a little Christ. THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF
BEING A CHRISTIAN IS SIMPLY NOTHING ELSE. p. 177

BOOK ONE: RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE

1 THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE
Two parts
1. Human beings ought to behave in a certain way.
2. They do not behave that way.
2 SOME OBJECTIONS
3 THE REALITY OF THE LAW
4 WHAT LIES BEHIND THE LAW

5 WE HAVE CAUSE TO BE UNEASY
"Christianity... therefore has nothing to say to people who do not
know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that
they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there
is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have
broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power - it is after
all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.
When you have reliazed that our position is nearly desperate you
will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about.
1 They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state
of both hating goodness and loving it.
2 They off an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind
at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person.
3 They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I
cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a
man to save man from the disapproval of God."

BOOK TWO: WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE

1 THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD

2 THE INVASION
That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion
you could not have guess.
Enemy-occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity
is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say
landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great
campaign of sabotage.

3 THE SHOCKING ALTERNATIVE
Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for
the present the Prince of the World.
I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish
thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as
a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.
A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said
would not be a great moral teacher.
He (Jesus) would either be a lunatic...or else he would be the
Devil of Hell.

4 THE PERFECT PENITENT
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.
The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put
us right with God and given us a fresh start.
He (Jesus) could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because He
was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.
5 THE PRACTICAL CONCLUSION
There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism,
belief, Holy communion.

BOOK THREE: CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOR

1 THE THREE PARTS OF MORALITY
In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human
machine.
Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things:
(1) fair play and harmony between individuals
(2) with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things
inside each individual
(3) with the general purpose of human life as a whole
We can all co-operate with (1). Disagreements begin with (2) and
become more serious with (3).

2 THE 'CARDINAL VIRTUES'
These were called cardinal virtues because they are, as we should
say, pivotal.
1. Prudence - practical common sense, taking the trouble to think
out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.
2. Temperance - refers to all pleasures, and means not abstaining
but going to the right length and no further.
Abstaining from something he does not condemn and which he likes
to see other people enjoying.
bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting
every one else to give it up. That is not Christian.
3. Justice - fairness, honesty, give and take, truthfulness,
keeping promises.
4. Fortitude - includes both kinds of courage - the kind that faces
danger as well as the kind that "sticks it" under pain.

3 SOCIAL MORALITY
(1) as it relates to man-to-man, Christ did not come to preach any
brand new morality.
(2) Christianity does not have a detailed political program for
applying to a particular society at a particular moment.
Christian union member, Christian teacher...just as Christian
literature comes from Christian novelists and Christian dramatists
not from the bench of bishops trying to write plays and novels in
their spare time.
All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives
us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be
like.
We have all departed from that total plan in many ways, and each of
us wants to make out that his own modification to the original plan
is the plan itself.
If our charities do not pinch or hamper us, I should say they are
too small.
4 MORALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
But psychoanalysis itself, apart from all the philosophical
additions that Freud and others have made to it, is not in the least
contradictory to Christianity.
God judges us by our moral choices.
Anger and other things leave a mark inside us regardless of the
actions we carry on the outside.
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly
the evil that is still left in him.
Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know
about either.

5 SEXUAL MORALITY
A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make
others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problem.
Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which
thoroughly approves of the body.
The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you
are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal.
Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings
fog.
If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme
vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are
the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely
spiritual. (hatred etc)

6 CHRISTIAN 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.
Justice, as I said before, includes the keeping of promises.
Love...is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by
the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in
Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive,
from God. They can have this love for each other even at those
moments when they do not like each other.
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
think not...There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: once
governed by the State...the other by the Church.

7 FORGIVENESS
For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means
making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when
it is quite plain that they are.
Does loving your enemy means not punishing him? No.
Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish
him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality
and the ordinary view? All the difference in the world. Remember, we
are Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really
matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part
of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a
heavenly or hellish creature.
We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating.
That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good,
bot feeling fond of him nor saying his is nice when he is not.

8 THE GREAT SIN
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue
opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.
Pride is essentially competitive.
It is the comparison that makes your proud.
It is purely spiritual.
Pleasure in being praised is not Pride.
Being "proud" of something is more like "having a great admiration"
for something.
If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited
indeed.

9 CHARITY
But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a
state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will
which we have naturally above ourselves, and we must learn to have
about other people.
Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act
as if you did.
Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, "If I were
sure that I loved God, what would I do? When you have found the
answer, go and do it.

10 HOPE
Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual
looking forward to the eternal world...one of the things a Christian
is meant to do.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and
you will get neither.

11 FAITH
Now faith...is the art of holding on to things your reason has once
accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

12 FAITH
Christ offers something for nothing; He even offers everything for
nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting
that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point
of recognizing that all we have done and can do it nothing.
Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but
inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint
gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

BOOK FOUR: BEYOND PERSONALITY: OR FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE
TRINITY

1 MAKING AND BEGETTING
That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is.
They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not of the same
kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
AND THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS ABOUT. The world is a
great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going
round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

2 THE THREE-PERSONAL GOD
A person praying in their room.
(1) God is the thing to which he is praying.
(2) God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on (the
Holy Spirit) - the motive power.
(3) God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed
[all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ]

3 TIME AND BEYOND TIME
pp. 167-168
Suppose I am writing a novel. I write "Mary laid down her work;
next comment came a knock at the door!" For Mary who has to live in
the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting
down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary's maker, do
not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first
half of the sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours
and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she
were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and
the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary's time (the
time inside the story) at all.
God is not hurried along the time stream of this universe any more
than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own
novel.

4 GOOD INFECTION
He (Jesus) came to this world and became a man in order to spread
to other men the kind of life He has - by what I call "good
infection." Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole
purpose of being a Christian is simply nothing else.

5 THE OBSTINATE TOY SOLDIERS
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. We
do not know...how things would have worked if the human race had
never rebelled against God and joined the enemy.
The Eternal Being ... became a man, a baby, a foetus...If you want
to get the hang of it, THINK HOW YOU WOULD LIKE TO BECOME A SLUG OR A
CRAB.
6 TWO NOTES

7 LET'S PRETEND
Our Father who art in heaven...OUR FATHER
You are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it
bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ.
You will find several things going on in your mind which would not
be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them.
And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always
talking about. It talks about Christians "being born again"; it talks
about them "putting on Christ"; about Christ "being formed in us";
about our coming to "have the mind of Christ".
They mean that a real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very
room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is
not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a
living Man.
God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands
beside you to turn you into one.

8 IS CHRISTIANITY HARD OR EASY?
That is why THE REAL PROBLEM OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE comes where
people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake
up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you
like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in
shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking the
other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter
life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your
natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

9 COUNTING THE COST
As we say "I never expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a
decent ordinary chap." But this is a fatal mistake. But the question
is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to
be when He made us.

10 NICE PEOPLE OR NEW MEN
If Christianity is true, why are not all Christians obviously nicer
than all non-Christians.

LET ME SUMMARIZE some here. God gives to every person. We call this
"talent" or "natural ability" or "personality." We don't see in the
heart. One person may seem to be really nice, but is only using 10%
of the heart God gave them. Another person may seem ugly, but is
using 98% of the heart God gave them. We only see the outside. If the
seemingly ugly person were not a Christian, they might only use 10%
of the heart God gave them.
The niceness...is God's gift to Dick, not Dick's gift to God.
It costs God nothing, as far as we know, to create nice things: but
to convert rebellious wills cost His crucifixion.
The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far
above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.
God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce
better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

11 THE NEW MEN
Christ's work...is not mere improvement but transformation.