Hi everyone, my name is Chris Fogel and I'm a writer and a pastor. You probably know that the two installments before this had scriptures tied in since they were Bible studies, but my plan from here on out is to do a straight read from mere Christianity and get as much of it loaded as possible. We're in the beginning stages of COVID-19 and I think we could use, not so much a distraction, but a healthy way to redeem the time. I'm really excited about our first chapter, which is technically chapter 2 of book 2, but for our purposes is chapter 7, because I think this chapter may be the best one yet. As I prepped reading, I loved how God is a contrariety, as Ravi Zacharias might say. Lewis blew my mind with how poorly matched evil is against good, and he makes a pretty solid point for church attendance. But I hate spoilers, and I don't want to waste your time, so here we go. Chapter 7 is called The Invasion. Very well, then. Atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity in water. The view which simply says there is a good God in heaven and everything is alright, leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil and the redemption. Both these are boys' philosophies. It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I'm sitting at looks simple, but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of. all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain, and of course, you find that what we call seeing a table lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child's prayer looks simple, and if you are content to stop there, well and good. But if you are not, and the modern world usually is not, If you want to go on and ask what is really happening, then you must be prepared for something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain that the something more is not simple. Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult, They then complain that you're making their heads turn around, and that all is too complicated, and that if there really were a god, they are sure he would have made religion simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc. You must be on your guard against these people. for they will change their ground every minute and only waste your time. Notice, too, their idea of God making religion simple, as if religion were something God invented and not His statement to us of certain, quite unalterable facts about His own nature. Besides being complicated, Reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you would expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the Earth and the other planets all go around the Sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match, all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go further from the Sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason, that we can see, about either the sizes or the distances, and some of them have one moon, one has four, one has two, some have none, one has a ring. Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys' philosophies, these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple, and the answer is not going to be simple either. What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good, the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think that, next to Christianity, dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. but it has a catch in it. The two powers, or spirits or gods, the good one and the bad one, are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. Neither of them made the other. Neither of them has any more right than the other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs in its own view. Now, what do we mean when we call one of the good power and the other the bad power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer the one to the other, like preferring beer to cider, or else we are saying that whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, it regarding itself as good. Now, if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all, for good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any moment. If being good meant simply joining the side you happen to fancy for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right. But the moment you say that, you're putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two powers, some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and he will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real, ultimate God, and the other in a wrong relation to him. The same point can be made in a different way. If dualism is true, then the bad power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality, we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to that is cruelty. But in real life, people are cruel for one of two reasons. Either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else, for the sake of something they are going to get out of it, money or power or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can go good, excuse me, you can be good for the mere sake of goodness. You cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right. But no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong, only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself. Badness is only spoiled goodness, and there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion, but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of it being perverted, and you can see which is the perversion because you can explain the perversion from the normal. and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this bad power, who is supposed to be on equal footing with the good power, and to love badness in the same way as the good power loves goodness, is a mere bogey. In order to be bad, he must have good things to want, and then to pursue in the wrong way. He must have impulses which were originally good, in order to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad, he cannot supply himself either with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be getting both from the good power. And if so, then he is not independent. He is part of the good power's world. He was made either by the good power or by some power above them both. Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence, and will are in themselves good. Therefore, he must be getting them from the good power. Even to be bad, he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to effectively to be effectively bad, are in themselves good things. Resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why dualism, in a strict sense, will not work. But I freely admit that real Christianity, as distinct from Christianity in water, goes much nearer to dualism than people think. One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a dark power in the universe, a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the power behind death and disease and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with dualism that this universe is at war, but it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. 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. When you go to church, you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends. That is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, do you really mean at this time of day to reintroduce our old friend the devil, hoofs, horns, and all? Well, what the time of day has to do with it, I don't know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects, my answer is, yes, I do. I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better, I would say to that person, don't worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you'll like it when you do is another question. And that ends chapter seven. All right, on to chapter three of book two, which is our chapter eight, called The Shocking Alternative. Christians then believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the prince of this world, and of course, that raises problems. Is this state of affairs in accordance with God's will or not? If it is, he is a strange God, you will say, and if it is not, How can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power? But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, I'm not going to go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own. Then she goes up one night and finds the teddy bear and the ink and the French grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary, and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible. It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong. I cannot. If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad, and free will is what has made evil possible. Why then did God give them free will? Because free will, although it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata creatures that work 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 any 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's like cutting off the branch you're sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worthy, 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. When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, as somebody once asked me, why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong? The better stuff a creature is made of, the cleverer and stronger and freer it is, then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad. A dog can be both better and worse. A child, better and worse still. An ordinary man, still more so. A man of genius, still more so. A superhuman spirit, best or worst of all. How did the dark power go wrong? Here, no doubt, we ask a question to which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty. A reasonable and traditional guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong, can, however, be offered. The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first, wanting to be the center, wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan, and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man has something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. The story in the book of Genesis rather suggests that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its result, not its cause. What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could be like gods, could set up their own as if they had created themselves, be their own masters, invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history. Money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery, the long terrible story of a man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us, invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, 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. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expanded. Civilizations are built up. Excellent institutions devised. But each time, something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It simply, excuse me, it seems to start up all right and run a few yards, then it breaks down. They're trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans. And what did God do? First of all, he left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong, and all through history there have been people trying, some of them very hard, to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, he sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again, and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, he selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God he was, that there was only one of him, and that he cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process. Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews, there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says he always existed. He says he is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God. There would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since he was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the being outside the world who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was quite simply the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins. Any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you. You steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if he was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if he really was the God whose laws are broken, and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivaled by any other character in history. Yet, and this is the strange, significant thing, even his enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that he is humble and meek, and we believe him, not noticing that, if he were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of his sayings. I'm trying here to prevent anyone 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. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman, or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." And that ends chapter eight. I like that last bit. I see where Josh McDowell got that lunatic madman kind of a thing. Alright, so I'm going to be starting chapter 9 here, the final one of our time tonight, and it is called The Perfect Penitent. We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was, and is, just what he said, or else a lunatic or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did he come to do? Well, to teach, of course. But as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing, you will find They are constantly talking about something different, about his death and his coming to life again. It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies there. They think the main thing he came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed. Now, before I became a Christian, I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory, God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the great rebel, which is Satan, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now, I admit that even this theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly as it used to, but that's not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works. What all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. I will tell you what I think it is like. All sensible people know that if you are tired and hungry, a meal will do you good. But the modern theory of nourishment, all the vitamins and proteins, is a different thing. People ate their dinners and felt better long before the theory of vitamins was ever heard of. And if the theory of vitamins is someday abandoned, they will go on eating their dinners just the same. Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity. They are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important these theories are. My own church, the Church of England, does not lay down any one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit further. But I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanations that theologians have produced. I think they would probably admit that no explanation will ever be quite adequate to the reality. But as I said in the preface to this book, I am only a layman. And at this point, we are getting into deep water. I can only tell you for what it is worth how I, personally, look at the matter. In my view, the theories are not themselves the things you are asked to accept. Many of you, no doubt, have read Jeans or Eddington. What they do when they want to explain the atom or something of that sort is to give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then, they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. What the scientists believe is a mathematical formula. The pictures are there only to help you to understand the formula. They are not really true in the way the formula is. They do not give you the real thing, but only something more or less like it. They are only meant to help, and if they do not help, you can drop them. The thing itself cannot be pictured. It can only be expressed mathematically. We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from 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 can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it worked. Indeed, he certainly would not know how it worked until he has accepted it. We are told that Christ was killed for us, that his death has washed out our sins, and that by dying he disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all of this, in my view, are quite secondary. mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and if they do help us not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at. The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before. The one about our being left, excuse me, about our being let off because Christ has volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it, that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did he not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you're thinking of punishment in the police court sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or, if you take paying the penalty, not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of standing the racket or footing the bill, then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend. Now, what was the sort of hole man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement. He is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor, that is the only way out of our hole. This process of surrender, this movement full speed astern, is what Christians call repentance. Now, repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent. Only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are, the more you need it, and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person, and he would not need it. Remember, this 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 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. Very well then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes. But what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of his reasoning powers, and that is how we think. He puts a little of his love into us, and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters. That is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hands while we do it. Now, if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately, we now need God's help in order to do something, which God, in his own nature, never does at all, to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all, so that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in his own nature, has never walked. God can share only what he has, this thing. In his own nature, he has not. But supposing God became a man, suppose our human nature, which can suffer and die, was amalgamated with God's nature in one person, then that person could help us. He could surrender his will and suffer and die because he was man, and he could do it perfectly because he was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us, but God can do it only if he becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence. But we cannot share God's dying unless God dies, and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt and suffers for us, what He Himself need not suffer at all. I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, because it must have been so easy for Him. Others may, very rightly, rebuke the ingratitude and ungraciousness of this objection. What staggers me is the misunderstanding it betrays. In one sense, of course, those who make it are right. have even understated their own case. The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death, were not only easier to Jesus because he was God, but were possible only because he was God. But surely, that is a very odd reason for not accepting them. The teacher is able to form the letters for the child because the teacher is grown up and knows how to write. That, of course, makes it easier for the teacher, and only because it is easier for him can he help the child. If it rejected him because it's easy for grown-ups, and waited to learn writing from another child who could not write itself, and so had no unfair advantage, it would not get on very quickly. If I'm drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back between gasps? No, it's not fair. You have an advantage. You're keeping one foot on the bank. That advantage, call it unfair if you like, is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself. Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the atonement. But remember, this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing itself, and if it does not help you, drop it. And that ends our chapter. So, I'm glad that we could go through these three chapters tonight. If I misread the audience here, let me know in the comments. I'll completely record these over again with biblical applications, if that's what the majority of you want. I just kind of assumed that you were looking for a book on tape, or not on tape, I guess. Sorry, I'm part of the Oregon Trail generation. An audiobook. I figured you were looking for an audiobook for these, so that's what I tried to give you. All right, God bless.