Category Archives: Mere Christianity

The Christian Idea of Marriage

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Matrimony, Mere Christianity

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The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words ‘one flesh’ would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact—just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

This has got to be one of the best and most concise explanations for why sex before marriage is forbidden for Christians. But it still may be hard for people (even Christians) to understand because our society no longer views mankind as an integral (inseparable) union of body and soul.

Many people today act as if the soul does not exist at all, but then would contradict this by saying they believe there is a soul. The reason for the inconsistency seems to be the the false philosophy that is promoted by various forms of media and politicians: the whole separation of church and state mentality. The effect of this on our understanding of the human person is that we compartmentalize what we believe in the public sector and what we believe in the private sector, which is where religion has been relegated to. This false notion is then reinforced by so-called scientists who are really just material reductionists that deny anything spiritual because they cannot see it, touch it, or smell it.

Christians, on the other hand, are called to see the world and mankind as it really is. We were created by God as a hylomorphic union of body (matter) and soul (form): the one cannot exist without the other. (* see note) From this correct understanding of mankind we can see that what we do with the body does in fact have an effect the soul, because you cannot separate the two. And when you use your body in an improper way, as in sex before marriage and especially homosexual activity, then the negative consequences can be felt in your entire being.

Now some people may protest at this point and claim that they feel no negative effects from premarital sex or homosexual activity. I suspect that some of these people, if they were honest, would admit to a certain hollowness within themselves. For the others that do not admit to this, we can explain their lack of remorse on a society that for decades has been filling our minds with the mantra “Oh come on, it’s ok. Everyone is doing it.”

But Christians know that is not true. It is not ok. When the Church says that sex should be saved for marriage (just to clarify – one man and one woman) she is not trying to take away anyone’s fun. She is simply trying to help her children to be truly happy, which can only happen if they are living their lives in accordance with the Truth. And the truth in question here is that mankind is a union of body AND soul. Understanding this and helping others to understand is of great importance.

*Note: At least in this world they cannot exist separately. On the other hand, the Saints in heaven, the souls in Purgatory, and those in Hell exist in a spiritual state until Christ returns and everyone receives their bodies back. God created our souls as immortal and so they cannot cease to exist, but our bodies can and do die as a result of sin. This existence of the soul without the body should be viewed as a Divine concession that has been allowed until all things are restored when Christ returns.

Sharing Christ’s Life

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Theosis, Thought for the Day, Transformation in Christ

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Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

Niceness and the Need of Salvation

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Salvation, Thought for the Day

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‘Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to pro- duce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

 

Loving your Neighbor as Yourself

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Loving our Neighbor, Mere Christianity, Thought for the Day

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The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Married Love – ‘not merely a feeling’

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Love, Mere Christianity, Thought for the Day

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If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

The Rats in the Cellar

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Too often people think to themselves, “I am a pretty good person. I have never done anything that is really wrong.” If that describes you then think hard about what Lewis says above – during those times when you are 'taken off guard' what is your reaction? I would hazard a guess that it is not, “Oh well, they just made a mistake. All is forgiven.”

If we are honest we would have to admit that our reaction many times to such situations is, “I'll show them! They can't do that to me.” Yes, perhaps that is not the reaction that we want to have but it is nevertheless how we do react. We must do something about those reactions. But how? They only way is to become a different person. But because all people have serious flaws that should not be copied there is really only one person for us to become – Jesus Christ. And isn't that, after all, the whole reason to be a Christian – in order to become like Christ?

Lewis on Faith

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Faith, Mere Christianity

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Sorry I haven't posted. I am on vacation with my family. Therefore, I probably won't be posting much this week. But this quote from Lewis simply had to be posted. The first few sentences give an excellent definition of what Faith is.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

Loving our Neighbor as Ourselves

04 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Repentance, Salvation

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Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

I am working on something else to post today, but am not sure if I will be able to finish it. Therefore, I am posting this quick quote by Lewis because it cannot be repeated often enough. At the time he wrote this he would have been referring to the Nazis as the ‘enemy’. Today a similar enemy to which this quote could apply is secular progressives. And how are these two groups are similar: both the Nazis then and the secular progressives now think (in their own minds) that they are making the world a better place through acts that are immoral, unethical and even evil. For example, the Nazis wanted to make a better world through creating a ‘pure race’, therefore they exterminated anyone that did not fit the mold. Secular progressives want to make a perfect world through a false understanding of equality – men and women should have exactly the same opportunities. But, when an unintentional pregnancy happens the woman is ‘punished’ with a baby while the man is not. He can go on and be successful (in the eyes of the world) without any hindrance but she must ‘put her carrer on hold’ and raise a baby. Therefore, for things to be ‘fair and equal’, the ‘problem’ (i.e. the baby) is exterminated.

Nevertheless, as Lewis says, we should love our neighbor, which in this case is secular progressives. We should not retain hatred within our hearts in regards to them but instead should desire and pray for their repentance and ultimate salvation. But in addition to praying for them, we are obligated to do everything in our power to overturn everything they have established that is immoral, unethical and evil.

In Regards to God and the Government

02 Friday May 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Salvation, Thought for the Day

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This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden— that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

God & Ourselves

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 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 ideas. 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.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis