We are in the middle of the last chapter of Mere Christianity, which is entitled “The New Men”. In this chapter, Lewis likens the process of going from being creatures made by God to being sons of God to the next step in the process of evolution. But there are some key differences between this step and any previous step in evolution. Namely, it is induced by something outside of nature (Jesus) coming into nature. Also, it does not involve sexual reproduction, it is strictly voluntary, it is not transmitted by heredity, it is happening at a much faster rate than any previous evolutionary change, and the stakes are much higher.
But if this next step is to become like Christ, then doesn’t that mean that all men who have taken this step are exactly alike? Not at all, says Lewis. Lewis uses light and salt as illustrations, presumably because Jesus used light and salt as illustrations to describe the Kingdom of God. If you have people who spent their entire lives inside a cave and described to them what light is like and how it shines on all things, they would probably imagine that it makes all things look alike. But we know that light really shows us what things truly look like and how they are different from each other. In the same way, if you give a taste of salt to someone who has never tasted it and then explain that we use it on all our foods, he would probably imagine that the salt causes everything to taste alike. But we know that salt really brings out the different flavors of all the different foods. (This is only true to a certain point. Add too much salt to any food and it will kill the other flavors, but you can never add too much Christ to a person.)
Thus it is only by surrendering to Christ and becoming like Him that we truly become ourselves. There is an awful lot that we like to think of as being truly us, that can easily be explained away by means of circumstances outside us. Lewis gives this example:
Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
At the beginning of this section Lewis said that there were personalities in God. Now Lewis finishes by saying that there is no personality anywhere outside of God–because so much of what we consider to be our own personality can be explained away by natural causes. You will not have a real self until you give yourself up to Him. But you must not do so for the purpose of gaining a real self; this must be a blind and complete surrender. Other areas of life work the same way; you will not make a good impression with other people if you are always worried about making a good impression. Writers and artists who worry about trying to be original will not be original.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
And that brings us to the end of Mere Christianity. Some concluding thoughts about the book as a whole:
First of all, you need to read this book. Beg, borrow, or steal a copy if you do not have one, and then read it. If you have read it already, read it again. Hopefully what I have written here in these posts will be helpful to you in getting more out of Lewis’s writing as you read it. But it is not a substitute for you actually reading the book; nor was it intended to be.
This is probably not the most intuitive way in which to organize a synopsis of the Christian faith, to start with right and wrong and then move to God, Jesus Christ, Christian behavior, and close it out with the Trinity and other difficult theological stuff. But countless people have found Lewis’s work to be a very effective presentation of Christian apologetics and the Christian faith. If you think you can do better, then by all means go for it, but I think you will be very hard pressed to top Lewis’s work.
Lewis says a lot of things that will probably shock you or offend you if you approach it from a traditional evangelical standpoint. There is enough in Mere Christianity to offend every constituency within evangelical Protestant-dom, if that is what you are looking for. But Lewis does not care to jump into the team sport culture that pervades much of evangelical Protestant-dom; he is too concerned with “mere Christianity” to get involved with any of our theological bickering. Allow me to close with a paragraph from the final chapter which speaks to the divisions within the church, and specifically to the team-sport atmosphere in evangelical Protestant-dom:
Never forget that we are all still “the early Christians.” The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that so often before! Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without or corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense–and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them–that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, thy suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.
