In the previous chapter Lewis considered the idea of pretending to be like Christ in order that you may ultimately become like Christ.  But this is not simply some sort of optional exercise or special assignment for the top class, instead it is the whole of the Christian life.  This is all that Christianity has to offer.  There is nothing else.

In this chapter Lewis considers how Christianity differs from our ordinary ideas about morality.  Typically we start with our ordinary selves, with all their needs, ambitions, desires, etc. and then admit that something outside of us (morality, decent behavior, the good of society, or whatever else you would care to call it) has claims on that self which interfere with its natural desires.  We must satisfy those claims, and then we are free to indulge our natural desires with whatever is left over.  Kind of like somebody paying his taxes; he pays them but hopes there will be enough left to live on afterward.  And when we come to Christianity, it is natural for us to think of it as one more obligation outside of ourselves which must be satisfied before we are free to indulge our natural desires.

Alex Box Stadium is one of the most storied venues in all of college baseball.  It is the home of LSU baseball, and has been for over 70 years.

But after the final home game of this season, which was last night, Alex Box will be no more.  A new baseball stadium is under construction just a couple of blocks down the street, and will be completed in time for next year’s baseball season.

Here are a few pictures from the NCAA Regional which was played there last week, just to give you an idea of what a baseball game at Alex Box is like.

 

 

We are now in the middle of “Beyond Personality”, the final section of Mere Christianity in which Lewis discusses what a God who is “beyond personality” looks like and how we as human beings can enter into that life of God which is beyond personality.  In previous chapters Lewis explained that this life is transmitted by getting near that which has it, through a sort of “good infection” if you will.  But that life is completely and totally opposed to the natural, biological life which we currently possess and everything which is in the nature of that life.

So how do we get around that?

Lewis starts off this chapter with an example from Beauty and the Beast, in which the girl kisses a beast as if he were a real prince and he turns into a real prince, and another example of a man with an ugly face who wore a mask to conceal it, and over time his face grew to fit the mask.  These two illustrations start us off in moving toward the main point of this chapter, which is that the Christian life is all about this kind of pretense.  We are nothing like Christ, but we pretend that we are, and in time we find ourselves to have become like Christ.

In the previous chapter Lewis described the nature of the Trinity and how the special life that exists in God can be transferred to us, by a sort of “good infection” if you will.

But there is a hitch.  The natural life which we as humans possess (Bios) and the special life which God possesses (Zoe) are different from each other.  Not only are they different, they are completely and totally opposed to each other.  The natural life inside of us is something self-centered, which wants to look out for itself at every turn and which values its own survival and preservation above all else.  And it is especially afraid of anything which is bigger or stronger than it.  So it sees the God kind of life as a threat; it knows that all of its pettiness and self-centeredness will ultimately be strangled out of it.

It seems that everyone on the face of the earth has read William P. Young’s book The Shack and formulated an opinion about it.  Most people love it, but there are a few–a vocal few–who detest it, who have gone through the book with a fine-tooth comb and found Young guilty of every form of heresy imaginable to man.

So why isn’t C. S. Lewis getting the same treatment?

Lewis is widely hailed as the theological poster child (one of them, at any rate) of evangelical Protestant-dom.  But there are many things in Lewis’s writings and life which are at variance with traditional evangelical belief, and every constituency within evangelical Protestant-dom will find at least one thing to take offense at.  For starters:  Lewis was an Anglican.  He believed in Purgatory and infant baptism.  He did not believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.  He drank.  (Wouldn’t the Baptists have a cow over that?  Why aren’t they?)  He doesn’t get into all the theological nits that we evangelicals love to pick, such as the atonement and the Sacraments; instead he takes a view which is much closer to the “mere Christianity” that he advocates in his work.  His view of sanctification places little emphasis on the traditional Protestant distinctives of justification by faith, substitutionary atonement, imputation of the righteousness of Christ, etc.  Instead he speaks of our being transformed, becoming like Christ, “putting on” Christ as it were, which we will see in the upcoming chapters of Mere Christianity.  This emphasis has more in common with the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox view of spiritual formation than with anything in evangelical Protestant-dom.

And yet, you don’t see anyone critiquing Lewis’s view of the Trinity which we just explored in the last couple of chapters of Mere Christianity the way that people have picked apart Young’s view of the Trinity.  You don’t see anyone critiquing Lewis’s depiction of the afterlife in The Great Divorce.  You don’t see anyone critiquing Lewis’s depiction of Aslan as the Christ figure in the Narnia stories.  So it’s OK for Lewis to depict God as a lion, but not for Young to depict God as an African-American woman, a Middle Eastern man, and an Asian woman?

Puh-leez.

I think this is nothing more than the sort of thing that kids do on the playground at recess.  It’s OK for Lewis to play ball with us, because he’s on our team.  We’ll just overlook all the differences between him and us, because he’s on our team.  But Young?  Who the hell is he?  Who the hell is he to think that he can come barging in here and play with us?  Who the hell is he to think that he can write a story depicting how the members of the Trinity relate to each other and how God meets us in our time of need, and not be completely and totally torn apart by us?

Now don’t get me wrong here.  I believe that Lewis’s work is of great value and I would heartily recommend it to anyone.  But why do we have to have this double standard where Lewis gets a pass and Young gets thrown to the wolves?

Puh-leez.

We are now in the fourth and final section of Mere Christianity, the section entitled “Beyond Personality”.  This section is all about what a God who is beyond personality looks like, and how we as humans can enter into the life of a God who is beyond personality.  Lewis starts off by laying the groundwork for his conception of the Trinity with the distinction between “making” and “begetting”, with the key ideas that what man begets is man while what God begets is God, and that man is made by God but not begotten by God.

Lewis then goes on to illustrate how three persons could make up one God by using the example of dimensions; in one dimensional space all we know is lines, in two dimensional space lines combine to form figures, and in three dimensional space figures combine to form solids.  In the same way, in the human “dimension” all we know is individual persons, while in the divine “dimension” three persons combine to form one God.  Lewis then goes on to lay out how this understanding of three persons and one God fits with all that we know of how God operates in our lives, both on an individual level and at the level of the whole Church.

In this chapter Lewis digs deeper into the distinction between man and God as it relates to begetting.  When one man (or woman) begets another, the one who begets always comes before the one who is begotten; that is, there is a stretch of time when the one who begets exists but not the one who is begotten.  But when God the Father begets God the Son, both are in existence for all of eternity.  There was never a point in time when God the Father existed but God the Son did not.

In this chapter Lewis takes a brief detour to address a common stumbling block related to the subject of prayer.  It is this question:  How can God attend to all the prayers of all the people in the world if they are all praying to Him at the same time?

This question arises because we as humans live in time; life comes at us moment by moment, in a manner that we can conceptualize as a straight line.  We have a present, a past, and a future.  The present is what is happening now, the past is what has already happened, and the future is what has not yet happened.

So it is natural for us to think that God lives in time as well.  We conceive of Him as sitting there, listening to each person who prays as if they were all standing in one long line and waiting their turn.  We can imagine God doing this if everyone waits in line and addresses Him one at a time, and if God has an endless amount of time to listen to all these prayers.  But if all these prayers are coming at Him all at once, we cannot possibly imagine how He pulls it off.

The key is that God dwells outside of time.  Which means that God does not have a present, a past, or a future, like we do.  All moments are present for Him.

This is what I absolutely positively cannot stand about Microsoft Word:

We are now in the fourth and final section of Mere Christianity, the section entitled “Beyond Personality”.  In the previous chapter Lewis laid the groundwork for his development of the idea of the Trinity by introducing the distinction between “making” and “begetting”, the idea that what man begets is man while what God begets is God, and the idea that man is made by God but not begotten by God.

Lewis starts off by noting that many people say they believe in God but not a personal God.  That is their way of saying that whatever God is, he must be something more than personal.  Christianity agrees with this.  But it is only the Christian view that gives us any idea of what a God who is more than personal actually looks like.  If you look at the ideas of God which other religions hold, you will see that for them, “beyond personal” turns out to actually mean less than personal.  For instance, the Eastern religions speak of God as this big thing, this force or essence if you will, that permeates all of the universe.  Eventually, whether at the end of this life or at the end of other lives to come, we are absorbed into the essence of God, in much the same way as a drop of water on the shore is absorbed into the ocean.  But, that means the end of the drop, even though the water molecules which made up the drop still exist somewhere out there in that great ocean.  Christianity is the only religion which can offer any idea of what it means to be absorbed into the essence of God and still remain yourself–and in fact become much more yourself than you ever were before.

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.