Hi everyone. Welcome to another session on Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. My name is Chris Fogel. I'm a pastor and an author, and I've been reading to you from Mere Christianity. We're going to be finishing out book three which is going to be chapter 12 of book 3. For our purposes, it's chapter 22, and we're going to go through chapter 24. And this final chapter in book 3 is entitled Faith, which is the exact same title as the chapter before it. Whereas Lewis's first use of faith meant belief in accepting the doctrines of Christianity, the second one that we'll read today is is in a higher sense, where the Christian has recognized they have failed and are in despair and must place their faith in God for salvation. So we'll go ahead and start reading in chapter 22, which is sort of the second type of faith. I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road. These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they were. They are directions for dealing with particular crossroads and obstacles on the journey, and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it means. If one could understand it now, it would only do one harm. Of course, all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I am going to try to explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be thinking I have got there when I have not. I can only ask instructed Christians to watch very carefully and tell me when I go wrong, and others to take what I say with a grain of salt, as something offered, because it may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right. I am trying to talk about faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I said just now that the question of faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practice the Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could, he would only be giving back to God what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy. Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality, the kind of creatures he intended us to be. creatures related to himself in a certain way. I do not add, and related to one another in a certain way, because that's included. If you are right with him, you will inevitably be right with all your fellow creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner, who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain, as long as he is thinking of claims and counterclaims between himself and God, he is not yet in the right relation to him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is, and he cannot get into the right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy. When I say discovered, I mean really discovered, not simply said it parrot fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own, and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this, really finding out by experience that it is true. Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest and then failing. Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time, we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense, it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, You must do this. I can't. Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, have I reached that moment? Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen, we quite often do not know at the moment what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, hello, I'm growing up. It is often only when he looks back that he realizes what has happened and recognizes it as what people call growing up. You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen to everyone in a sudden flash as it did to St. Paul or Bunyan It may be so gradual that no one ever points out a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God. I know the words, leave it to God, can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ. trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which he carried out from his birth to his crucifixion, that Christ will make the man more like himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, he will share his sonship with us, will make us, like himself, sons of God, In Book 4, I shall attempt to analyze the meaning of those words a little further. If you like to put it that way, 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 is nothing. What we shall Excuse me, what we should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it. Throw up the sponge. But then you could not stop trying in the right way and for the right reason. until you had tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take His advice. Thus, if you really have handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. but trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because he has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably waiting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside you. Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions or faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade and a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point, and out of that faith in Him, good actions must inevitably come. There are two parodies of the truth which different sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians of believing. Perhaps they may make the truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, Good actions are all that matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best thing to give money to is the church. So hand us over 10,000 pounds and we will see you through." The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, faith is all that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time, and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end. End quote. The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your faith in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not faith at all. Not faith or trust in Him, but only an intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him. The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions. But the second half goes on, for it is God who worketh in you, which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand and to separate into watertight compartments what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, he did this bit and I did that. But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside. Even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it different, churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good actions tell you you need faith. And even those who insist most strongly on faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate, that is as far as I can go. I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that Though Christianity seems, at the first, to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness, as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that. Lots of people's eyes can see further than mine. that ends chapter 12 book 3. We're going to start in on book 4, which is called Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity. And you'll see that these chapters really do seem to have a lot to do with theology, but C.S. Lewis is just so masterful in explaining theology in very, very easy to understand ways and terms, and I love that he's taking on the Trinity here. So, without further ado, this is chapter one of book four, our last book, and our chapter 23. And the chapter is titled, Making and Begetting. Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say, the ordinary reader does not want theology, give him plain practical religion. I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means the science of God, and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You are not children. Why should you be treated like children? In a way, I quite understand why some people are put off by theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the RAF, if you remember from a previous chapter, that's the Royal Air Force. So he's giving a talk to the Royal Air Force. An old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, I've no use for all that stuff, but mind you, I'm a religious man, too. I know there's a God. I've felt him, out alone in the desert, at night, the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who's met the real thing, they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal. Now, in a sense, I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert, and when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real. Turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way, it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach. Only while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to go to America. Now, theology is like the map, merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines. If you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God. They are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God. Experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion all about feeling God in nature and so on is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work, like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way. and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to see, nor will you be very safe if you go to see without a map. In other words, theology is practical, especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads. Everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. it will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones, bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones that real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression, like believing the earth is flat. For when you get down to it, it is not the popular idea of Christianity simply this, that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and avoid another war. Now, mind you, that is quite true, but it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity, and it has no practical importance at all. It is quite true that if we took Christ's advice, we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced ones? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last 4,000 years. A bit more makes no difference. But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God, whatever that means. They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become sons of God, whatever that means. They say that His death saved us from our sins, whatever that means. There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim false, but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult, at least as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason. Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can become sons of God. One asks, aren't we sons of God already? Surely the fatherhood of God is one of the main Christian ideas. Well, in a certain sense, no doubt, we are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into existence, and loves us, and looks after us, and in that way is like a father. But when the Bible talks of becoming sons of God, obviously, it must mean something different. And that brings us up against the very center of theology. One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God, begotten, not created, and it adds begotten by His Father before all worlds. Will you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that when Jesus was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin. We're not now thinking about the virgin birth. We are thinking about something that happened before nature was created at all, before time began. Before all worlds, Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean? We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of. To create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies. A beaver begets little beavers. And a bird begets eggs, which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set, or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set, say a statue. If he is a clever enough carver, he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man. It only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive. Now, that is the first thing to get clear. When God begets is God, just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God, just as what man makes is not man. 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 things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God. A statue has the shape of a man, but is not alive. In the same way, man has, in a sense I'm going to explain, the shape or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has. Let us take the first point, man's resemblance to God first. Everything God has made has some likeness to himself. Space is like him in its hugeness. Not that the greatness of space is the same kind of greatness as God's, but it is a sort of symbol of it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is like God in having energy, though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like him because it is alive, but he is the living God. But life, in this biological sense, is not the same as the life there is in God. It is only a kind of symbol or shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals, we get the beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the love that exists in God, but it is like it, rather in the way that a picture drawn on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be like a landscape. When we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the complete resemblance to God, which we know of. There may be creatures in other worlds who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them. Man not only lives, but loves and reasons. Biological life reaches its highest known level in him. But what man in his natural condition has not got is spiritual life. the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both. But if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the greatness of space and the greatness of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between biological life and spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The biological sort, which comes to us through nature and which, like everything else in nature, is always tending to run down and decay, is that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from nature in the form of air, water, food, etc. is BIOS. The spiritual life which is in God from all eternity and which made the whole natural universe is ZOE. BIOS has to be sure. 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 rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life. And that ends our first chapter of book four. And I'm just double checking if I pronounced Zoe right. And from what I can tell, I did. I usually double check that before I read. So, sorry about that, but sounds like Zoe is right. It's Z-O-E, and it's Greek. All right, so we're going to move into chapter two, or our chapter 24. And this chapter is called The Three-Personal God. The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making. A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue. God begets Christ, but he only makes men. But by saying that, I have illustrated only one point about God, namely that what God the Father begets is God, something of the same kind as himself. In that way, it is like a human father begetting a human son, but not quite like it. So I must try to explain a little more. A good many people nowadays say, I believe in a God, but not in a personal God. They feel that the mysterious something, which is behind all other things, must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite agree. But the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other people Though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal, that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something super personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea is the only one on the market. Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be absorbed into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea, but of course, that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians, who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves. In fact, be very much more themselves than they were before. I warned you that theology is practical. The whole purpose for what we exist, excuse me, the whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways. to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three dimensions. Now, notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure, say a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now, a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say a cube, a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares. Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures, but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels. You still have them, but combined in new ways, in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level, one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings, just as in two dimensions, say on a flat sheet of paper, one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the divine level, you still find personalities. But up there, you find them combined in new ways, which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who has three persons while remaining one being. just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course, we cannot fully conceive a being like that, just as if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space, we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it, And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super personal, something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, if we cannot imagine a three-personal being, what is the good of talking about him? Well, there isn't any good talking about him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin anytime. Tonight, if you like. What I mean is this. An ordinary, simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God. God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the man who was God. that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening? God is the thing to which he is praying, the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on, the motive power. God is also the road or the bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. so that the whole threefold life of the three personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life, what I called zoe or spiritual life. He is being pulled into God by God, which still while still remaining himself. And that is how theology started. People already knew about God in a vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God, and yet he was not the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside them as well, directing them, making them able to do things they could not do before. And when they worked it all out, they found they had arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal God. The definition is not something we have made up. Theology is, in a sense, an experimental science. It is simple religions that are the made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science, in a sense, I mean that it is like the other experimental sciences in some ways, but not in all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and find the rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them, they cannot run away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot either help or hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take photos of wild animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks. The wild animals will not come to you, but they can run away from you. Unless you keep very quiet, they will. There is something to be a tiny little trace of initiative on their side. Now, a stage higher. Suppose you want to get to know a human person. If he is determined not to let you, you will not get to know him. You have to win his confidence. In this case, the initiative is equally divided. It takes two to make a friendship. When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on his side. If he does not show himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find him. And, in fact, he shows much more of himself to some people than to others, not because he has favorites, but because it is impossible for him to show himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. just as sunlight, though it has no favorites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one. You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself, things like microscopes and telescopes, the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred, like the moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions. They have been looking at God through a dirty lens. God can show himself as he really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing him to be, excuse me, showing him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like, like players in one band or organs in one body. Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community waiting for him together, Christian Brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science, the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian religion are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap, he may be cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years later, everyone has forgotten about him. But the real science is still going on. If Christianity was something we were making up, of course, we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with fact. Of course, anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about. And that ends chapter 24. So that is our time for today. I hope you enjoyed Mere Christianity as we started in on the final book, book four. So God bless and have a good day.