Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (III)

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

In Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I) and Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) I made two main points about the Christian religion as described by C.S. Lewis, the great British defender of the faith, in his ever-popular book Mere Christianity. In the first of my two previous installments, I noted that God is Perfect Goodness. In the second, I said that God is Perfect Love.

Now I would like to add a third characteristic: God as Perfect Penitence.

I said in the first two installments that the Christian God is Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is primarily as Father that God is the Power for Good who calls us to live by his will and not by our own self-seeking. God, as Father, is the taproot of Moral Law.

The Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, has the same sort of uncreated life as the Father: "begotten" not made. The Father and Son unendingly share perfect love for one another. Their union is the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. Lewis says that "a living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else." That is to say, what God has created or made — the world, us — comes from this "activity" of perfect Father-Son love.

But in Christianity, the Son is more than that statement alone would indicate. He is also Christ Jesus, "The Perfect Penitent" of chapter 4 of Lewis's Book II: What Christians Believe.

We can think of the crucial process as penitence, or as atonement, or as regeneration, or as repentance, or as salvation — indeed, as any of several other words and phrases that Christians use to indicate that we need to reorient ourselves back to God and Moral Law, and that we can never do so quite adequately, all by ourselves. From the Christian perspective, the core of the problem we face is that moral purity or spiritual perfection is out of reach for us, until we accept Christ's help.


Christ is, of course, the man Jesus of Nazareth who died ignominously on a cross in first-century Palestine and rose again from the dead. His disciples and apostles were sure then, after they witnessed the Resurrection, that he was God. Later the Gospels were written down, memorializing the dawning realization that Jesus was in fact the eternal Word of God. Still later, the religion that had begun to flourish in Jesus's name codified the divine relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, identifying the man, Jesus, the Christ, as the only begotten Son who is coeternal with the Father.

If all that is the truth, then (as Lewis point out in his chapter "The Shocking Alternative") the core belief which separates Christianity from all other religions — that an uncreated God became a man, like us in all ways but sin, and somehow by his death made up for our sinfulness — ought to galvanize us in a way that no other religious belief can.


For Christ indeed was, and is, the Perfect Penitent. We are called to penitence — the sincere desire to reform — but by itself our penitence is never enough. There is in this world, Lewis says, a Dark Power. By dint of it our every effort at excellence "all slides back into misery and ruin." That is true in the communal sphere, and in the individual. Hence, under this unseen Power's sway, our penitence is intrinsically imperfect.

Christ, free of our own sinfulness, remedied that imperfection by coming here to us bodily and dwelling among us in order to teach us about the Father, and ultimately to be put to death. It was the dying of One Who Cannot Die — because he is God — that forms the paradox which electrifies the heart of Christian belief.

Here is how Lewis so aptly puts it in his "The Perfect Penitent" chapter:

But supposing God became a man — suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person [with a "small-p"] — 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 ... 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.

These core beliefs obviously require two others. First, they require us to believe that there is, in fact, such a Dark Power in the world as that Great Rebel who is called Satan. The Devil, as he is also known, is the Power for Evil which I talked about in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (I). He is not coeternal and coequal with God, in the Christian view, but is a creature of God who has turned against his creator. As Prince of This World, he engages in ongoing rebellion, and it is part of his strategy for waging that rebellion that we would be held in in sin.

Second, we need to believe that there is another world, a heaven, an afterlife. In fact, the whole point of our accepting Christ's penetential help is to allow ourselves to become fitted for that afterlife.


This goes along with what I said in Rereading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (II) about the categorical difference between the Christian spiritual life, which Lewis calls Zoe, and our ordinary biological life, Bios. Zoe can be thought of as our soul-life. We, with Christ's help, cease to cling to Bios as we are "born again" in spirit or Zoe.

The meaning of that phrase, "with Christ's help," is key. Lewis brings out that meaning towards the end of his book, starting with his "The Obstinate Toy Soldiers" chapter in Book IV: Beyond Personality. After having characterized the Trinity and giving some idea what it means to say the Three-Personal God exists outside of time itself, Lewis has already claimed that being reborn to Zoe lets us in on the begotten-not-made life shared by Christ with his Father.


Now, Lewis goes on to say that we get this life only by letting Christ stand beside us and help us in making our otherwise inadequate efforts to "appropriate" that which his cross has established for us:

What, then, is the difference which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless "spiritual" life, has been done for us. Humanity is already "saved" in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work — the bit we could not have done for ourselves — has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us.

In other words, when we let Jesus stand beside us and help us as we pray, we will catch this "good infection," this neverending spiritual life, directly from him.


Lewis as much as admits that our praying is — and always must be — something of a pretense. In his chapter "Let's Pretend," he shows how it all works. Prayer, he says in italicized type, is "dressing up as Christ."

That is, we have the "outrageous cheek," when we pray to God, of "pretending to be what [we] are not." But this letting on that we are like Christ is the "good kind" of pretending, one "where the pretence leads up to the real thing." Whenever we say our prayers, we open ourselves to the realization of what we ought to be doing — perhaps even instead of praying — because we are for once able to become aware of what Christ would have us do, to grow to be like him. Or, as Lewis puts it:

The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality.

This, Lewis points out. is more than the ordinary voice of conscience:

If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result: if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once that you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person ... The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" his kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier [that you figuratively are] into a live man.

Accordingly we see that Christ Jesus plays several intelocking roles in Christian belief. He is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity whose mutually shared love for and with the Father turns into the Third Person, the Holy Spirit who is the spirit of all love. He is the eternal Word of God whose activity, with that of the Father, creates us and the world. He is the Perfect Penitent who, taking on our humanity, died on a cross to save us both communally and individually. He is the Ideal Person whom we, in prayer, "dress up as" and impersonate. And he is the Patient Partner who stands beside us each time we pray and guides us in our impersonation.

It is through his Perfect Penitence that our own imperfect efforts at penitence can fit us, bit by bit, for sharing his begotten-not-made spiritual life with the Father, forevermore.