Mere Christianity - Book Two, Chapter Five

The Practical Conclusion

Since the birth of Christianity, there have been precious few of what I call spiritual savants. A savant exhibits superhuman skill or brilliance in some field (such as mathematics or music) but usually ends up somewhere on the spectrum. Remember Rain Man? A spiritual savant is a Christian who possesses uncanny spiritual abilities or characteristics, but, like their secular counterparts, it usually comes at a cost.

John the Baptist was filled with the Spirit in his mother’s womb and became a powerful prophet. But he ate bugs, dressed weirdly, and wasn’t the kind of guy you invited to parties. Paul was a luminous theologian and rhetorician but wasn't the best with subtlety or tact. Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation, but if you read what he wrote about the Jews, you’d wonder if he really knew Jesus. Charles Spurgeon was the Prince of Preachers, and his sermons are more popular today than in his day. But he suffered horrific bouts of depression so bad he’d spend days in bed, unable to function. A.W. Tozer was one of the godliest men of all time (I almost can’t read his stuff because I get so convicted I want to spend a few days in bed myself). And yet, his wife felt so unloved by him that after he died and she remarried, she said, “I have never been happier in my life. Aiden [Tozer] loved Jesus Christ, but [my new husband] loves me.”

Surely, C.S. Lewis was also a spiritual savant, even though he had good social skills and people invited him to parties. But he did have some peculiarities regarding theology, and I’m sure that’s because he approached it from a level I can’t seem to reach! Nonetheless, he makes more than a few Christians nervous. We must be careful when it comes to admiring Christian authors, teachers, preachers, and the like so as not to let ourselves set them on too high a pedestal, even when it comes to Old Jack. At the end of the day, spiritual savants are human, just like us, which means they are capable of eccentricities, blind spots, making mistakes, and even committing sins. In fact, I don’t think I’d be off in saying that the greater the spiritual gift imparted to our faith heroes, the greater the potential for flaws. Lewis is no different. Read an honest biography of his life, and you’ll agree.

The reason I share this will become clear as we observe how Lewis fleshes out what the Christ life is about.

There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper. At least, those are the three ordinary methods. I am not saying there may not be special cases where it is spread without one or more of these. I have not time to go into special cases, and I do not know enough. If you are trying in a few minutes to tell a man how to get to Edinburgh you will tell him the trains: he can, it is true, get there by boat or by a plane, but you will hardly bring that in. And I am not saying anything about which of these three things is the most essential. My Methodist friend would like me to say more about belief and less (in proportion) about the other two. But I am not going into that. Anyone who professes to teach you Christian doctrine will, in fact, tell you to use all three, and that is enough for our present purpose.

Here is the first of three theological whammies Lewis makes in this chapter that cause many pause. He seemingly adds baptism and the Lord’s Supper to belief as necessary in living as a Christian. Do I—an evangelical (I wish we could find a new word for that) and a lifelong Baptist—believe that’s what the ordinances do, that they have indispensable value beyond just symbolism? It depends on when you ask me. For many years as a pastor, I saw them as merely pointing to spiritual truths but nothing else. It wasn’t too long ago, though, that God convicted me about this. Could Lewis be right? Could they actually do more, imparting mystical, spiritual effects as well? I’m convinced they very well might.

It would take too much space to go into why I changed my mindset, but Paul’s warning to the Corinthian Christians that their abuses in celebrating the Lord’s Supper were the source of sickness and death is a factor. Paul and the early church took that and baptism much more seriously than the modern church today, so maybe there is more to them than we realize. I don’t, however, think they are required for salvation or to maintain it, and I don’t think Lewis said that either. However, if you are from a faith background that does go there, there’s nothing to see here. Hang on, though; we haven’t finished the chapter.

Lewis continues,

Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion as things that will do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ. Your natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it: but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it.

Did Lewis say what we think he said? Yes, it seems he believed Christians could lose their salvation, hence the second whammy. What a blow to this born and bred Baptist who holds the doctrine of eternal security in the highest esteem. The old me I often refer to would have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this, condemning and rejecting him because he didn’t line up with my doctrinal slant. But I have learned to move beyond that. I cannot expect Lewis to align perfectly with my every theological detail. It’s actually a good thing he doesn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be challenged.

Seeing the ordinances as having grace-giving value and our salvation as transitory is not heretical. Many in our faith family believe the same. And that’s okay. But we haven’t looked at the final controversial words in this chapter. And now for the third whammy.

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

Lewis touches on a question plaguing the church since her birth. What happens to people who never heard about Jesus such as those on some isolated island? Is that an automatic sentence to hell? Lewis leaves the door open just enough so that they might have hope. More than a few think he’s advocating universalism. Actually, Lewis leaned more towards what is called inclusivism. In universalism, everybody goes to heaven in the end. In inclusivism, those who know God through general revelation (creation) and those who know him through special revelation (the Scriptures and thus, specifically, Jesus) go to heaven. So Lewis is not saying everyone is saved and no one goes to hell, just that when the end comes, we may see people in the new heaven and earth who did not get there by “conventional” means even though they still came through Jesus. Here’s one of those challenges that made me think.

Chances are at least one of those three whammies gobsmacked you. Don’t let that discourage your confidence in Lewis. He might be wrong. He might be right. He might be crazy (Do you hear a Billy Joel song right now?). He might just be showing his eccentricities as a spiritual savant, but he is not a heretic as some say. As usual, Lewis turns things around, grabbing us by the shoulders and facing us toward what’s most important:

But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.

Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely… When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

Call Lewis what you will, but that is as clear a call to follow Christ as any I’ve ever heard.