Good Infection

Mere Christianity - Book Four, Chapter Four

Photo by Scott Broome on Unsplash

I remember well in school—was it fifth or sixth grade?—when the teacher introduced me to Algebra. It looked more like a foreign language than math, save for the mathematical signs. At first and for a long time, it did not make sense. I struggled to understand how it worked, but eventually, one day, it clicked. Lewis’s explanations of the Trinity as it relates to the Father and the Son (and making versus begetting) are like algebra to me. I have a hard time making sense of them, even though I know it makes perfect sense to him and probably most of you who are much smarter than me.

The beginning of this chapter, where Lewis continues to explore the Trinity using the book illustration, has not clicked for this old pastor, even though I’ve read it a multitude of times over the years. Maybe it’s best just to take at face value what Lewis says,

…the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away from the words of the Bible. It is quite right to go away from them for a moment in order to make some special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of.

This relationship between the three persons of the Trinity is necessary, Lewis says, for God to be love rather than love God. If God were not a three-dimensional being, love could not have existed before other beings came into being because love requires an object; “Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.” And with this thought, Lewis introduces his famous analogy of the dance, something that winds its way through so many of his writings, both fiction and non-fiction. To be honest, the concept is still a bit like algebra to me, as I am still unpacking its deep truths.

The best I understand it, Lewis is saying that within the Trinity, there is a dynamic, active flow of love and reciprocity that is, in some mystical, cosmic way, alive and rhythmic, like a dance (always existing from eternity past) where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit delight in glorifying one another. Tim Keller, in his book The Reason for God, builds on Lewis’ thoughts here in chapter fourteen, where he expounds,

The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the Bible tells us. Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this—perichoresis. Notice our word “choreography” within it. It means literally to “dance or flow around.”¹

God invites us, through Christ, to join him in the eternal dance of mutual, self-giving, sacrificial love. Lewis closes the chapter with an explanation of how this is possible.

You remember what I said in Chapter I about begetting and making. We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. 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.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to know your thoughts.

1. Keller, T. (2009). The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (p. 224). Riverhead Books.