Mere Christianity Review

In this special book review episode of The Long Obedience, Pastor Santosh dives into one of the most formative books of his life: C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He traces the book’s fascinating origins from Lewis’s BBC radio broadcasts during WWII and unpacks its brilliant, logical progression from universal human morality to the necessity of Christ's perfect atonement. Ultimately, this episode serves as a powerful reminder of why this classic apologetic work remains a vital, paradigm-shifting guide for both everyday Christian living and encountering the "true myth" of the gospel.

Transcript

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A quiet Oxford professor once sat down to speak into a microphone during wartime Britain. And what came out of those broadcasts would end up shaping the faith of millions of people around the world. He wasn't trying to become famous. He wasn't trying to start a movement, but C.S. Lewis did both. Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Long Obedience Podcast with me, Santosh Ninan. I hope you're having a good day, a good night, or a good afternoon wherever you are in this incredible world of ours and whatever you are doing. Now, normally in this podcast, I am teaching through the book of First Peter. But once a month, I like to do a book review of some of my favorite books. And so today I'll be reviewing one of the most important books in my life. In the last review, I did the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. And in comparing it to the book I'm going to look at today, I'm not sure actually which one is more important. I often tell people I probably would not be a Christian without these two books. Without Orthodoxy, in the book I'm going to talk about today, which is Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And I'm not sure how many times I've read this book. I think it's probably over 10 times. I believe I've studied it in groups, maybe two or three times. And I actually am going to reread it again sometime this summer. You know, I have this kind of strange hobby. I like to collect different editions of C.S. Lewis books. So I have several editions of the same book by Lewis, but published at different times and in different countries. Well, actually, mainly just America, Canada, and the United Kingdom. I don't have copies in different languages yet. I don't have a first copy of any of his books. I have first American editions of The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, but I don't have the first editions, which I'd love to add to my library someday. So I first read Mere Christianity as a teenager 40 years ago, and I was struck by the lucidity and the simple logic that Lewis uses in presenting his case for Christianity. And every single time I reread the book, at one point I was actually reading it every January. I think for four or five years I read it every January. And every time I read it, I find something incredibly stunning and incredibly paradigm-shifting. And at the end of this podcast, I'll share with you the latest thing that Lewis has really taught me as I as I kind of look through the book and look through some notes I made about the book. But let's start with some background on C.S. Lewis. I actually gave a lecture on the life and work of C.S. Lewis at Cornell University some years ago, but sadly I couldn't find that file. So I'm actually starting all over from scratch. His full name is Clive Staples Lewis. Clive Staples Lewis, one of the 20th century's most influential Christian writers, literary scholar, and storyteller. He's probably best known for his children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, which have been made into movies in the last 20 years. And currently, filmmaker Greta Gerwig is working on one of the books, The Magician's Nephew, for Netflix. And that's starring uh Meryl Streep, Daniel Craig, and Carrie Mulligan, which again shows the power of Lewis's stories, that one of these uh stories that was written decades ago could be greenlit as a major project for Netflix and to get these, you know, kind of A-list stars on board. Lewis was born November 29th, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland, to Albert James Lewis, who was a lawyer, and Florence Augusta Lewis, known as Flora. He grew up loving books. He had an older brother, Warren, and they would invent imaginary worlds together, which was a sign of the creativity with the which would later shape his fiction. Tragedy strikes the Lewis household when uh the mother Flo dies of cancer when Clive is only nine years old. And so this obviously has a significant formative effect on Lewis, which would later emerge uh in his atheism when he's a young man. C.S. Lewis was a war veteran. A lot of people don't know that, but he fought in World War I. He fought in France. He was actually wounded by gunfire, and his career as a soldier was cut short. But he would be forever marked by the horrors, which he actually doesn't talk that much about, I don't believe, in his books. He doesn't really reference the things he went through, but they uh affected him nonetheless. So after the war, after he recovers from his wounds, he enrolls at University College, Oxford. He earns first class honors in classics, philosophy, and English literature. So English literature is really his field. That's what he teaches for the most of his academic career. And that's he actually, outside of his popular works, he published um studies in English lit, which are still used today. Okay, so in some of my research, I found this really fascinating tidbit, and this is gonna blow you away. When he graduated from Oxford, he needed a job. And uh one of his tutors, one of his professors, said there's this American university that can offer you a one-year fellowship. So why don't you check it out? So Lewis applies for this fellowship, but the the university does can't cover his transportation, so he can't get over there. He can't get over there. And the university was Cornell University. Cornell in Ithaca. So I lived in Cornell, I lived in Ithaca, sorry, for 10 years. And when I found this out, and I shared it in this lecture at Cornell, like people were freaking, they were like, What are you kidding me? C.S. Lewis could have lived here in Ithaca, could have worked at Cornell University, but sadly that didn't work out. But anyway, so he doesn't go to Cornell, he doesn't go to Ithaca, he doesn't go to America. And instead, he uh gets a job at Maudlin College in Oxford, and he teaches there for 30 years before shifting over to Cambridge University. So most of his professional academic life is at Oxford. So while he's at Oxford, he's this young academic, and he's an atheist, and he's a committed atheist. He describes himself as a committed atheist. But he joins this small group of fellow academics, uh fellow authors. Um it's they're called the Inklings. So there's Gerrard Tolkien, Owen Barfield, uh Dorothy Sayers are some of the some of the big names that are part of this group of the inklings. And so the inklings would meet a couple times a week. They would meet at the Eagle and Child pub, which I have actually visited when my brother actually studied at Oxford. And one time when I was visiting him, we went to the Eagle and Child and we had uh had we we sat where they they sat. There was a little plaque that showed where the inklings used to sit. So anyway, he's in this group and they get together and they would discuss literature, they would discuss theology, and um and the the works, the the books that they were writing, they would they would talk about that as well. And it was actually his friendship with J.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, that would prove to be the most consequential in his conversion to Christianity. And in 1931, in September, Tolkien and Lewis go for a walk after dinner, I believe. They they went for a one-mile circular path called Addison's Walk in Oxford. Now, this walk is uh proves to be a pivotal turning point for Lewis. So they're going on this walk and they're talking, and Tolkien starts to talk about the role of myth in human imagination and life. And Tolkien says that human myths reflect fragments of the true light. The story of Jesus is the supreme myth, but that it actually happened. He says the gospel story of Jesus Christ is not just one more good story which points to the underlying reality. Rather, it is the underlying reality to which all the other stories point. And then Lewis uh concedes this point, and he says, the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth working on us in the same way as the others. But this with this tremendous difference, it really happened. So he looks at the the story of Christ, he looks at the gospel, right? He looks at the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus. And he says, this is not just some kind of story or myth that helps us get through life. The difference here is that this is historical. This is actually true. And this becomes this is the starting point of his conversion. And his conversion actually happens in two ways. First, he he converts from atheism to theism. So now he actually believes God exists. And he famously describes himself as the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. And then later on, he would come to confess that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Lewis would go on then to write a remarkable number of books that presented the truths of Christianity in very compelling ways. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction. So he wrote apologetic works. He wrote The Children's Stories, The Chronicles of Narnia. He wrote a science fiction trilogy, uh, which also, you know, had Christian themes and Christian truths woven in through there. He wrote um, oh, I forget what Till We Have Faces, which I think is a reworking of a famous Greek myth. I think that's the last thing that he wrote, actually. In 1956, Lewis marries the writer, American writer Joy Davidman. And uh this brings him happiness and joy in a new way. Uh but tragically, she dies of cancer just four years later. And Lewis writes a book uh about his journey through grief. It's called A Grief Observed. And this is very interesting because years before he had written the book, The Problem of Pain. That might have been one of his first books, like kind of Christian books that he wrote. But he wrote Problem of Pain, which is kind of this philosophical theological reflection on suffering. But now he writes A Grief Observed, which is way more raw, way more personal. He's really wrestling with God in this book. All right. So that's it's amazing. What's funny is he actually published this book under a different name. Forget what the name was. And uh because he didn't want people to know he didn't want whatever reason, he wanted to remain anonymous. And the funny thing is, some of his friends would give him this book. They they found this book, they found like, oh, this is really good, Clive. You'd you'd really this might help you. And it was actually his book that they were giving back to him. Um Lewis would ended up dying uh November 22nd, 1963, uh just a week before his 65th birthday. So he died relatively young. Um and his influence has grown over the decades. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, sold millions of copies worldwide. And uh yeah, he's still on the bestseller list. If you look on Amazon right now, Mere Christianity is still way up there. Top 10 in various different, like Christian apologetics, Christian living, etc. Mere Christianity is still up there, which is just unbelievable if you think about it. Like a book that was uh published, I think in 52, it came out. So like how many years? That's almost a hundred, not a hundred years ago. What am I talking about? 52. That's 80, almost 80 years ago, right? 70 something. Anyway, this book, written a long time ago, is still selling, right? There's not that many old books like that that are still selling, but this one still sells. Uh okay, let's move on to the book. Okay. In 1941, a man named James Welch was the director of religious broadcasting for the BBC. And he had read The Problem of Pain by Lewis and a couple of other things. I think Lewis was some of his work was being published by the Guardian newspaper. And Welch had re-read some of these. And he'd heard that uh Lewis had been uh giving talks to troops all around England on Christianity. And so Welch himself was uh a Christian and he was very concerned about the decline of faith in the United Kingdom. So he writes a letter to C.S. Lewis that would have a profound effect on Christian apologetics and the Christian church in the West for generations to come. So I'm gonna read this letter that that this guy writes to Lewis. This is what he writes. Dear Mr. Lewis, I address you by name because although we've never met, you cannot be a stranger after allowing me and many others to know some of your thoughts and convictions, which have been expressed in your book, The Problem of Pain. I should like to take this opportunity of saying how grateful I am to you personally for the help this book has given me. I write to ask whether you'd be willing to help us in our work of religious broadcasting. The microphone is a limiting and rather irritating instrument, but the quality of thinking and depth of conviction which I find in your book ought surely to be shared with a great many other people. And for any talk, we can be sure of a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million. Two ideas strike me. One, you might be willing to speak about the Christian or lack of Christian assumptions underlying modern literature. Two, a series of talks on something like the Christian faith, as I see it by a layman. I'm sure there is need of a positive restatement of Christian doctrine in lay language, but there may be other subjects on which you'd rather speak. So this Welch throws this kind of shot in the dark out to Lewis, and Lewis responds three days later. This is his letter back to Welch. Dear Mr. Welch, thanks for your kind remarks about my book. I'd like to give a series of talks, as you suggest, but it would have to be in the vacation. Modern literature would not suit me. I think what I mainly want to talk about is the law of nature, or objective right and wrong. It seems to me that the NT, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, the NT is the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness always assumes an audience who already believe in the law of nature and know they have disobeyed it. In modern England, we cannot at present assume this. And therefore, most apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create or recover the sense of guilt. Hence, if I give a series of talks, I should mention Christianity only at the end and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then. Some title like The Art of Being Shocked or These Humans would suit me. Let me know what you think of this and how many talks and on what dates, roughly, you would like. Yours sincerely, C.S. Lewis. So, okay, so that's the start of it, just these letters back and forth. So they correspond, and it's decided that Lewis will deliver a series of messages that would be broadcast all across England. Now, these broadcast talks, when they when they are coming on live, these proved to actually be a massive cultural phenomena at the time in the United Kingdom. So pastors, professors would tune in. They were even played publicly in pubs where people would gather together and listen. So just imagine a bunch of just people in a pub, all of a sudden just being quiet as the voice of C.S. Lewis comes on, just articulating various Christian doctrines. So he does quite a few of these, what they're called broadcast talks. And he gets a bunch of, he starts getting like massive amounts of mail, right? People asking, like, we want transcripts of this talk. So he he goes ahead and he publishes these talks under three books. Uh, broadcast talks comes out in 1942, Christian Behavior, 1943, and the last book is called Beyond Personality in 1944. And there's another book called The Case for Christianity, and that that one comes out in America, and it's kind of the first book, Broadcast Talks, and a few other things. The Case for Christianity comes out. Now, 10 years later, he combines all the talks into what we now know as mere Christianity. So that's the root of the book. The book comes out of these uh radio talks that he gives in BBC. And then the book comes out, and now the book transforms Lewis into one of the first Christian celebrities of the 20th century. Um, he shows up on Time magazine. He's on the cover of Time Magazine at one point. His books are selling like crazy all over. He's getting all these invitations to speak. Uh Mere Christianity itself goes on to sell over 10 million copies internationally. And like I said, it's still selling, like it's still a bestseller, and it's been translated into dozens of languages. Okay, so now let's take a look at the book itself. So there's four sections to the book. Uh section one, right and wrong as clue to the meaning of the universe, two, what Christians believe, three, Christian behavior. And the last uh part is called Beyond Personality or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity. So let's work through these and then at the and then I'll end this thing with some personal reflections. So the first section is called Right and Wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe. And now, right off the start here, we see Lewis's brilliance. And I'm just gonna read the first from the first page here. So uh this is chapter one, the law of human nature. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny, sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant. But however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you? That's my seat. I was there first. Leave him alone. He isn't doing you any harm. Why should you shove in first? Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine. Come on, you promised. People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now, what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior doesn't happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. So this is the beginning of our the brilliance that I see here, right? Is that Lewis doesn't start with Christian doctrine. He doesn't start with Christian theology. He doesn't start with God, he doesn't start with Jesus, he begins with human experience. Uh, and Lewis would go on and call this the universal law of human nature. And this is the beginning of his argument for an objective standard of right and wrong that transcends cultural differences. And this this becomes most brilliantly portrayed in a book that Lewis called his most important. It's a book called The Abolition of Man, where he expands on this a bit more. The second thing that he points out in the beginning here is that this law exists and we've all broken it. He writes, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. And then he says that this objective morality points to something, rather, someone beyond itself. And he discusses, then he goes on and discusses the origins of the universe, right? That it's either material or supernatural. He says those are the only two options before us is that the universe came into being by itself or it had a creator. And he can't convince himself of blind materialism as being the origin of the created order. So he believes in God. And then he writes this Christianity simply does not make sense until you face the sort of facts I've been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. If it therefore has nothing, as far as I know, to say to people who don't know they have done anything to repent of and who don't feel they need any forgiveness. It's after you've realized that there is a real moral law and a power behind the law, and that you've broken that law and put yourself wrong with that power. It's after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. So this is just so brilliant. He's just saying, look, none of this stuff is going to make any sense until you have these prior truths alive within you, that there is an objective law and you have broken it, and that there is a God behind this law. The second section is what Christians believe here. Um, he goes into God, sin, evil, identity. Um, there's a chapter on atonement. Let me see here. The it's called the perfect penitent. And I want to quote extensively from this chapter. I just think it's so important. So I'm just gonna read some quotes from from chapter four, the perfect penitent. However, strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that Jesus was and is God. God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human forms. In human form. Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity. They are explanations about how it works. The thing itself is infinitely more important than any explanation that theologians have produced. 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. Indeed, if we found 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. And I love this illustration he uses. He says, 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 works. 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 did all this are, in my view, quite secondary. What sort of hole has mans 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're sorry, realizing you've been on the wrong track, getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor. That's the only way out of our hole. This process of surrender, this movement full speed astern, is what Christians call repentance. Repentance is no fun at all. It is much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we've 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, and only a good man can repent perfectly. We love and reason because God loves and reason and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. We 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. God can share what he has. But suppose 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 can't share God's dying unless God dies, and he can't die except by being a man. That's the sense in which he pays our debt and suffers for what he himself need not suffer at all. I yeah, that work on the atonement just blows me away every time. Then he goes on, and next chapter or next section is on Christian behavior. He goes through human morality, both personal and corporate. He talks about the cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, what Christian morality is and how we can live it. Find another quote here. This is a quote I've used a lot in my sermons. Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices, all your life long, you're slowly turning the central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven. That is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other. Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. Every decision we make is of utmost importance. The way we live our daily lives is of utmost importance. Lewis goes on and talks about marriage, sexuality, and forgiveness. He has a great chapter on pride, calling pride a spiritual cancer that eats up the very possibility, possibility of love, contentment, and common sense. He talks about hope, he has two chapters on faith. The final section of the book is called Beyond Personality. And here he gets into Trinity, the eternality of God, and of sanctification. Now, the I was going to share the one part that really stood out to me the last time I last time I read it. I'm just going to pull it up here. And I've thought about this a lot, and it's it's been helping me a lot in my Christian life. Lewis writes this that is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people don't usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back, in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in, and so on all day, standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings coming in out of the wind. He says the real problem of the Christian life comes the moment we wake up every morning. And I just thought that was stunning. The real problem in life, in the Christian life, comes when we wake up in the morning. And here's what he's getting at. We all have this inner dialogue going on. We have an inner critic. And because we are fallen creatures, our thinking is spoiled, and we will always move towards the negative. And so from the minute you wake up in the morning, you have a choice of whether you are going to listen to the negativity of your own life and your own mind and of this messed up world, or whether you're going to pause, whether you're going to stop, and whether you're going to invite the voice of God, the voice of the Holy Spirit to start your day off for you. Right. And this is what I have been trying to do in my own spiritual practice of silence, of contemplative prayer, of quieting my thoughts so that I can hear God's thoughts. And I just think it's stunning that in this book, this brilliant book on apologetics, that Lewis has these incredible practical things worked in. And you know what? I'm not even sure. Like, I yeah, it is an apologetic book, but this is really a book on Christian doctrine and Christian theology and Christian behavior. And so I think every Christian should read this book. Every non-Christian should, every human being should read this book. It's so good. It's so helpful. All right. And uh it has proved helpful in the lives of many, many people. Chuck Colson, who used to work for uh Richard Nixon, was converted through mere Christianity. Many, many people around the world. Actually, there should they write a book on the impact of mere Christianity. Maybe I'll write that book on the impact mere Christianity has had around the world. Anyway, that's the end of my book review. Uh this went pretty long, longer than most of my podcasts, but that's okay. It's a great book. He was a great guy. And I'll share one of the things I look forward to in heaven, to be honest with you, is hanging out with C.S. Lewis. I'm just gonna spend thousands of years hanging out with him, talking with him about all his books, how he wrote his books, um, drinking tea with him. And who knows, maybe he and I will write some books together in heaven. We'll do something together in heaven. Anyway, that's what I'm looking forward to. Hope you enjoyed the pod today and hope you have a great day. And uh remember to walk closely to the one who loves you and cares for you. Take care. Bye.