We are now starting the section entitled “Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity”, which is the final section in Mere Christianity. The first section was an apologetic which starts with that thing inside each of us which tells us that some things are right and some things are just wrong and leads us to the existence of God. The second section looks at what we can deduce about the character of God from the sense of right and wrong which He has placed inside of us and determines that of all the conceptions of God that are floating around out there in the world, the Christian conception is the best fit. From there we get into Jesus, who He was and what He came into the world to do. The third section is a look at Christian morality, with a detailed discussion of all the virtues which are expected of Christians, which leads to the conclusion that any serious attempt to live out these virtues for any sustained period of time will lead one to a place of dependance upon God and faith in Christ, who has lived a life of perfect obedience and perfect virtue right from day one.
In “Beyond Personality”, Lewis now devotes his attention to exploring some of the basic theological concepts of Christianity. The first chapter of this section, called “Making and Begetting”, consists of two sections which probably ought to be two separate chapters. The first is a justification of the relevance and role of theology in the day-to-day life of the ordinary believer, and the second is an introduction of the distinction between “making” and “begetting”, which is one of the foundational concepts in developing Lewis’s expression of the Christian doctrine of the Trininty.
Many people in Lewis’s day, and many in ours as well, had a deep and profound distrust of theology. This attitude is summed up by the R. A. F. officer who recounted to Lewis his experience of God out in the desert and his feeling that formulas and dogmas about God are petty, pedantic, and unreal compared to his own experience of God.
In our day, we have the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, which rose up in response to a religious emphasis of the 19th and early 20th centuries which was heavy on the formulation of doctrine and correct belief to say that what matters most in the Christian life is our personal experience of the Holy Spirit working and ministering in our lives.
We also have a rather sizeable chunk of evangelical Protestant-dom which believes that correct doctrine and belief are the end-all, be-all of the Christian life. Many believers who go down this route turn into extremely zealous, mean-spirited critics of anything which they believe to be contrary to correct doctrine and belief. Paul Proctor’s anti-Kyle Lake diatribe from a couple of years back is a glaring example of this. Shawn Lovejoy’s critique of video church, while nowhere near as mean-spirited as the Proctor piece, is still representative of the “We’re right and they’re wrong” sentiment which is prevalent in this wing of evangelical Protestant-dom. Slice of Laodicea, Apprising Ministries, and other blogs of a similar nature regularly serve up nice, juicy diatribes against the seeker-sensitive movement, the emerging church, contemporary worship, contemplative prayer, the Catholic Church, Hillary Clinton, The Shack, Ravi Zacharias, and other such things.
Ravi Zacharias? No, I’m not kidding about that one. Seems Zacharias stepped into it a few weeks back at the National Day of Prayer observance in Washington DC, when he prayed a short prayer which did not end with the obligatory “In Jesus’ Name”. Now, according to this segment of evangelical Protestant-dom which is so concerned about correct doctrine and belief as the end-all, be-all of the Christian life, Zacharias is nothing short of the spawn of Satan. Check out the Slice of Laodicea posts on Zacharias in the weeks following May 1; it’s really quite a funny–and sad–sight.
In response to this, many evangelicals of my generation or younger have developed a profound distrust for doctrine and theology. If an emphasis on right doctrine and correct belief makes one that rigid and mean-spirited, we want nothing to do with it. Instead, many of us believe that what matters most is what we experience of God when we are in a public worship setting and feel a song rising up from deep within us, when we are studying some bit of Scripture in our quiet time and this feeling of God’s presence washes over us, when we go on a mission trip or service project and see the face of Christ in the people we serve, or when we see the glory and grandness of God expressed in the natural world that He has created.
Not so, says Lewis. Lewis likens Christian theology to a map of the Atlantic Ocean. In one sense, the map is just a piece of colored paper and is far less real than the experience of the Atlantic Ocean that one gets from walking on the beach at Hilton Head or Jekyll Island. But at the same time, the map is a representation of the experiences of thousands of people who have seen the Atlantic Ocean for themselves, all gathered together into a unified whole. Also, if you are content with the experience of the Atlantic Ocean that one gets from walking on the beach at Hilton Head, then a map is not necessary. But if you want to cross the Atlantic Ocean and go to Europe, you need a map.
It is just like this for Christian theology. If one is content with warm fuzzy feelings which feel like they have to come from God, then theology is not necessary. But these experiences do not move us any farther on the road of discipleship, the road to Christlikeness which is the end goal for all Christian believers, any more than the experience of the Atlantic that you get from walking on the beach at Jekyll Island moves you any closer to the coast of Europe. Christian theology provides us with a map which represents the experience of thousands of believers who have gone before us and told us what they have learned in their experience of God. We do not have to reinvent the wheel as it were by attempting to feel our way along by our own experience.
The truth is that we need both. We need the actual experience of God, AND we need the road map which theology provides to help us put our experience of God into the context of what all the believers who have gone before us have experienced of God. You will never make it to Europe if you just stand on the shore at Myrtle Beach without a map. Neither will you cross the Atlantic if you spend all your life looking at the map and never actually get in a boat and go.
In the same way, it is a significant thing when a person who does not believe in Christianity makes the shift and says, “Okay, now I believe that Jesus Christ suffered and died for my sins. Now I believe in the Christian view of the Trinity” (or the inspiration of Scripture, etc). But it is an entirely different thing when you invite an unbeliever to come on a mission trip, or to participate with you in a service project, or to serve with you in an area at church where you are serving. (Note: I am NOT talking about bringing your nonbelieving friends with you to church so they can be preached at!!!) These are all powerful ways to experience God through the action of the Church, and can serve as powerful defining moments in an unbeliever’s journey toward faith. One thing which I appreciate about my church is that there are certain ministry environments where unbelievers are allowed to serve, in order to facilitate the experience of being involved in the action of the church which can jump-start one’s journey toward faith in Christ.
These experiences are not necessarily “on the map”, so to speak, but we use the map of Christian belief and experience in order to interpret these experiences. In this fashion, the map and our experiences work together to lead us onward in the journey of Christian discipleship.
And now for something completely different…
Having established the relevance and role of theology in the everyday life of the believer, Lewis goes on to start laying the groundwork for his formulation of the Christian concept of the Trinity. The first concept which Lewis lays out is the distinction between “making” and “begetting”. Which is as follows: “Making” produces something which is less than yourself. “Begetting” produces something which is of like kind as yourself. For example, a tree “makes” leaves or sticks or pollen but “begets” other trees. A bird “makes” a nest but “begets” other birds. A beaver “makes” a dam but “begets” other beavers. A dog “makes” a hole in your backyard but “begets” other dogs. A person “makes” a book, a computer, a painting, or perhaps something like himself or herself, such as a statue, but “begets” other people. And God “makes” trees, mountains, oceans, deserts, birds, beavers, dogs, and people, but “begets” God.
It follows from this that what man begets is man, while what man makes is less than man. In the same way, what God begets is God, while what God makes is less than God. This means that, though all people are children of God in the sense that God created all of us, we are not children of God in the same sense that Christ is the Son of God. We were made; Christ was begotten. Thus we are of a lesser order than Christ; we are more like “statues” of God.
Lewis points out that everything which God creates is like Him in some form or fashion: space is like Him in its hugeness, plants are like Him in that they have life, stars are like Him in the sheer amount of energy that they give off, and the higher animals are like Him to the extent that they are able to have emotions such as love or affection. But of all the things in the universe, man is the most like God (that we know of. There may be extraterrestrials out there somewhere that are more like Him than we are, but we don’t know of them).
But there is a HUGE difference between being like God and having the same kind of life that God possesses. Many Christian writers, including Lewis, differentiate between regular biological life and the kind of life which God possesses by calling them Bios and Zoe, respectively.
Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
So, to sum up, the key points thus far are as follows:
–Making produces something less than yourself, while begetting produces something of the same kind as yourself.
–What man begets is man, while what God begets is God. Man was made by God, but not begotten by God.
–Everything that is made by God is like Him in some form or fashion, but nothing made by God has the same sort of life that God has. Only that which is begotten by God has the same sort of life as God. If a man were to acquire the same sort of life as God, it would be just like a statue coming to life.
Got it?
OK, class dismissed.
