Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
It is always a pain when the circumstances of life sap away your joy in reading. This book has been tough to get through, not solely because things have been difficult for me lately, but because the text provides scant refuge for emotion. It is one to be pondered over in rationality. That linear way of thinking doesn’t come naturally to me, but I made it to the end and things are looking up. So here we are.
Review
Rooted in reason, Mere Christianity provides a clear treatise for our faith. The renowned and beloved writer C. S. Lewis takes us back to the very beginning — our reason for being, and our reasons to believe — through easy conversation: much of the text is a transcription of talks he gave to radio listeners in the 1940s. Despite the decades that have passed and how much has changed in our world since then, Mere Christianity remains a fruitful resource for old, new, and questioning Christians alike. When asked what books other than the Bible I’d recommend to someone finding their feet in the faith, this is one I’m quick to proffer.
The inward collapse of the Western Church in recent years has caused many to suddenly question what and why they believe what they believe. Lack of clarity from the pulpit and the idolatry of nation and self has left many thirsty for the Truth. Mere Christianity is not the well, but it is a blazing signpost to that well, and serves as a worthy manifesto for not only the verity but the impossibly possible perfection of the Christian faith: all with room for argument and deconstruction with the promise to rebuild.
It can be hard-going in places, but in you its reading grows character, as the process teaches perseverance, patience and a deep self-awareness (without neglect for Lewis’ characteristic humour).
Standouts
“I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.”
“In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’”
“The Life-Force is a sort of tame god. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?”
“A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or to always feel hungry.”
“Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.”
“Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we naturally have about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”
“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.”
“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. […] 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 […] he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.”
“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.”
Rating
4/5 🌟
Pages
227.
Time it took me
A while! But possible in a week.
