Mere Christianity - Book One, Chapter Five

We Have Cause to be Uneasy

Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash

Lewis wraps up Book One with Chapter Five where he begins,

I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance. You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw’. You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back.

Lewis knew some might be turned off because they thought he used the old bait and switch. He started out talking philosophy and then slyly changed to religion. The attitude of his day was that the modern world had moved beyond religion (still is, isn’t it?). It had not worked, so discussing it was passé and a waste of time, a “turning the clock back.” Lewis defended himself by pointing out that turning the clock back is appropriate if you have the time wrong, and in truth he had not promoted any religion, let alone Christianity. He had simply made the case that there was “a Somebody or Something behind Moral Law.” What do we discover about that Somebody? It’s a being that must have created the universe around us, and if that’s all the intel we have, we conclude that He or It or Whatever is “merciless and no friend to man.” Why? The universe and the world are scary places “red in tooth and claw,” as the English poet Tennyson put it (don’t be impressed; I know he wrote that, but I’m not smart enough to read his stuff).

But there is another source of information about this Somebody, and it’s inside us, inside mankind. Lewis writes,

You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is ‘good’.

This is a culmination of all Lewis has discussed up to this point, as he’s built the case for Natural Law (an ought to built into us that didn’t come from us) and how we are inclined to break that Law. The Something that encoded that into our being is actually Someone with a mind, a consciousness. Based on what we observe about those ought to’s, we know the Someone is very, very serious about good behavior. On the one hand, it’s comforting to know the Someone is good, but on the other, it’s unsettling.

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.

Lewis’s point in making these points is that Christianity can’t make sense unless we get these basic facts down, and Christianity is a religion that makes sense of these facts. Does that make sense? “All I am doing,” Lewis claims, “is to ask people to face the facts—to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts.” And this is why we have cause to be uneasy. I think maybe Lewis is saying that we must hear (and embrace) the bad news before we can hear the good.

Thankfully, Christianity also presents hope! And we will continue in that direction with Book Two: What Christians Believe. So read chapters one and two for next time.

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Well, as we close Book One, how is this read along so far? Any thoughts? Is there something you’ve learned? Is there something we need to spend more time on? Let me know by replying to the emails or commenting on the posts. And no worries at all if you’ve found it hard to follow Lewis. I’d encourage you to keep at it, but rather than trying to grasp some of the hard concepts, look for those nuggets of truth he dishes out so well. I promise you’ll come across them.