Faith (part 2)
Mere Christianity - Book Three, Chapter Twelve
Well, folks, hopefully, I can now get back on track with our Read Along With Me posts. The creative well has been dry lately. Hope you have a happy new year!
In book three, chapter eleven, Lewis spoke of faith in the first sense, which is, in his words, “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Now, in chapter twelve, he talks of faith in the second sense. He begins,
I want to start by saying something that I would like every one 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 meant. If one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.
This is incredibly insightful and true: “…there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road.” The Christian life is a journey, if it is anything, a journey without destination this side of glory. It’s also not a race or competition. Some are farther along the path than us, and some are farther behind. If you are ahead of me and speak of things you’ve experienced or seen, I might not understand them right then, but I most likely will later, things like those spoken of by AW Tozer, who wrote, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” When I first read that, it troubled me. I didn’t want it to be true. Now, after traveling farther along the journey and experiencing great brokenness and pain—and the closest sense of God’s presence in my life—I get it.
Lewis wisely realized that faith in the second sense may not register with someone who hasn’t come to grasp it yet. But I think almost everyone does eventually. It’s somewhat of a milestone in the Christian’s life. You’ll see why. Lewis goes on.
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 practise 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… [we] cannot get into the right relation [with God] until [we have] discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.
If I understand Lewis right, this kind of faith is realizing, through trying and failing, that we will never measure up to God’s holiness and perfection. A point comes when we surrender and cry out, confessing, “You must do this. I can’t.” So, faith in the second understanding is leaving it all up to God. Lewis writes,
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 a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing.
Lewis refers to a glorious truth, one that is often overlooked or lost. The bad news of the Gospel is that we are incapable of producing enough good works, overcoming enough temptations, or living righteously enough to satisfy the demands of a holy God. We must be holy as he is holy, but we can’t. The good news is that Jesus can and was. As the second Adam, he overcame temptation in the wilderness, whereas the first Adam failed in the Garden. As the Messiah and the descendant of Abraham through whom all families of the earth would be blessed, Jesus kept every tenet of the Law down to every jot and tittle, whereas the Israelites failed at keeping God’s commands over and over. Part of sharing his sonship with us is sharing his holiness, his perfection, and his obedience.
So, a watershed moment for those traveling the Christian road is when they abandon all efforts of performing their way into a right relationship with God and instead rest by faith in Jesus’ works, his living the life they should have lived and dying the death they should have died.
Note that Lewis does not reject the role of behavior in living the Christian life, just its being the basis for being a Christian. For him, there is no tension between faith and works.
I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in 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 sponge1. 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 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.’ 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 intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
That’s a good word and a good place to stop. Have you ever struggled with faith in the second sense? With faith versus works? Let me know in the comments.
Throw in the sponge is a British idiom akin to our throwing in the towel. It means to give up or surrender the fight.