Book 2 Chapter Four: The Perfect Penitent (part two)

The second part of this chapter was so good for me I decided to write about it separately. After he writes a few things about atonement, he moves to our involvement, well, kind of. He begins to talk about repentance. See, there is this “hole” that we have made for ourselves, this “wrong track” we have journeyed down, and Lewis suggests we can “realize” this,

“This process of surrender – this movement full speed astern – is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.”

“Merely eating humble pie” would imply just being sorry, just feeling bad for what you have done. I like that Lewis has a more substantive definition of repentance. I have always learned about repentance as not only being sorry but that the self actually stops doing what it was doing. It was always explained to me as a moving in the opposite direction because the course was determined to be a bad course. Perhaps as an army retreats in the direction it came when realizing it has been ambushed. But Lewis goes even a bit further,

“Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person you could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it…remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.”

Wow! Repentance is for those who have been bad and can be done only by those who are good! That leaves us in a bad place, doesn’t it? But that last bit is what interests me most. God does not require it from us. If we can’t repent perfectly, then God cannot demand that from us and so this makes sense to me. And so repentance is not something that I do in order to make things right between me and God. Repentance is a description of what going back to God is like. That is superb!

Lewis continues with describing how a parent holds the hand of a child learning to write letters. The child cannot. The parent can. And so the child forms the letters because the parent is forming the letters. Lewis writes, “You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us.” Through Jesus, and while we are “in Him,” we are able to live the life of “the dying man.” This is the dying or the killing of self that is described in repentance. Some obviously object for various reasons and one that Lewis notes is that Jesus had an advantage. We cannot find an imitating pattern in Jesus because he had an advantage and therefore the whole thing is for not. Lewis obviously disagrees,

“But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them? The teacher is able to form the letters for the child because the teacher is grown-up and knows how to write. That, of course, makes it easier for the teacher; and only because it is easier for him can he help the child. If it rejected him because ‘it’s easy for grown-ups’ and waited to learn writing from another child who could not write itself (and so had no ‘unfair’ advantage), it would not get on very quickly. If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank (between my gasps) ‘No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank’? That advantage – call it ‘unfair’ if you like – is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”

When we repent, we do it “within” Christ himself. It is though our hand were being guided by the One who knows how to do it perfectly. We are trusting to help us He who is stronger than we are, He who is able. He is able, more than able, to do much more than I could ever dream, to make me what He wants me to be. Lewis concludes the whole chapter (including the part on atonement),

“Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing itself: and if it does not help you, drop it.”

Book 2 Chapter Four: The Perfect Penitent (part one)

I am laughing out loud right now because I am listening to a song that says, “…have you ever needed someone so bad…” Perhaps the author of these lyrics also had something to say regarding atonement….or not! I like Lewis’s perspective in this chapter. It is refreshing to know that it is not only contemporary authors who are challenging narrow and solitary ideas of atonement. Lewis hints at the Christian view of atonement as being “immoral” when he first heard it. Somehow our proclamation has to be good news…not immoral news to a world that is still trying to figure out why they even have a measurement of “immoral!”

This is what he writes,

“Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off…The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.”

Lewis does not go on to say that theories of “how it works” is wrong, just not as necessary as the thing itself. That is, it is more important to know that this dying has “put us right with God and given us a fresh start” than it is to know exactly how it has done this. Now, for sure this has not always satisfied me, because my dad gave me a character trait of wanting to know how it works (let’s take it apart and find out ). And so I have spent much time reading and thinking through the many theories and biblical images that have given us our ideas. Lewis says this is not unlike scientists who have spent much time trying to determine exactly which vitamins are located in which foods and what benefit exactly do they bring to our bodies. And just like this, we have changed our theories and have grown in our knowledge of new facts….but the end result stays the same…keep eating food because in it contains vitamins that are good for your body. The theories are good, helpful, sometimes life changing, but never better than the thing itself! I like that.

Lewis adds, “Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do not help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.” I think this ought to sink deep within our souls. We are not given the task to scientifically identify in correct detail the exact how but we are given the task (invitation?) to be fully nourished on this Christ who, through his death and resurrection, made all things right…well, almost all, but we’ll talk about that another time.

Book 2 Chapter Three: The Shocking Alternative

I love the question Lewis asks regarding God’s own morality. He writes, “How can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?” I think this is a great question. If God is all powerful and all loving and is able to interfere whenever He would like to; and if this God has a will, a way that things ought to be; then what is keeping Him from ordering this world according to His will? How is it that the world got away on Him?

Lewis does alright to answer this question, but he is not thorough on the matter…or perhaps he hinted at what I believe to be a great conversation to address this question. Lewis explains that it is similar to the will of a mother desiring her children to keep tidy. And when her children are not tidy, they live “out of” the will of the mother. So I guess the point is that if the mother comes in and cleans up, she has not yet accomplished her will…because her will was not that things are tidy, her was that her children would be tidy.

God’s will is not that people would keep the world tidy because the end goal is a clean world…God’s will is that people would keep the world clean because that makes the people in the right. God’s desire is that we come along in the process. I can follow my daughters around all day picking up after them and making sure that nothing falls on their heads as they set up dangerous games to play. In doing so I will protect my children from injury and they will forever live in a clean environment. And we certainly do this when our children are younger. But as they grow, we not only want to help them, but we want them to “agree” and join in the process. What a joy it is to see your child cleaning up their room because it dawned on them that it was dirty!

I believe Lewis is pointing to a higher view of God through this explanation. A God who believes we would be a good creation if He did everything for us to accomplish His will; but a supreme creation if we could come to the place of understanding and participating in His action and work in our world.

Book 2 Chapter Two: The Invasion

Lewis begins this chapter with a thought from the previous, “Very well then, atheism is too simple.” And then he picks it up from there,

“And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and –water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right – leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies.”

And so clearly Lewis wants to pick on those who claim to follow this so called “Christianity” yet are not dealing with all that following Christ entails. If it is as simple as believing that there is a good God that exists and everything will one day turn out fine, then it is too simple…is what I hear Lewis saying. And the complexity and difficulty and unexpectedness of Christianity is actually what makes it believable. Lewis writes,

“Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”

In all this there is an invasion…an invasion of power. It is referred to as the third power, the one we force ourselves to admit when wrestling with the first two powers of good and evil. As we track good and evil and determine our judgment, we automatically begin referring to the third power, simply because “good” or “right” must have a center, it must have a source (if not, it is not “good” or “right” except that which we happen to agree). Lewis writes,

“But the moment you say that [one power is wrong and one is right], you are pointing into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God. If fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.”

The standard we continue to measure our world with, proclaiming injustice and calling evil for what it is, is a constant echo of a greater “right” that is quite above us. This makes the struggle against absolute truths one that primarily looks for ways to get oneself away from under the rule of God. That makes sense to me, for certainly I have ran away from this rule. Yet, these pursuits continually leave me out of step, awkward, not in harmony with all that was created to be.

Book Two Chapter One: The Rival Conceptions of God

In this chapter Lewis tackles the ‘pantheistic’ view of God. It is the view that “God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it didn’t exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God.” I think we so easily get confused because our confession is that God is everywhere, omnipresent, and the pantheist agrees. But certainly we would distinguish our God from His creation, as not a result of what is, but the Creator of what is. The Pantheist can not view God as actively righting wrong no more than the Deist can (a Deist believes that God is a personal divine being separate from creation, but absent, not involved in creation). These views separate God from the care of creation. Lewis writes,

“Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world – the space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.”

I like the way Lewis has framed this idea. God insists very loudly. But I’m curious, why did Lewis say that “our putting them right again” instead of God doing it? Is God’s involvement the insisting and the work is up to us?

He goes on to talk about how a good God could have created a world that went wrong. As an atheist, he could not accept an intelligent God who made a world that went wrong. But then he asked himself where he got his concept of just and unjust. He writes, “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

Lewis’ journey here is a difficult one of finding meaning and justice in a world that has gone wrong. He concludes, “Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

Now I confess my inability to fully grasp most of this. I mean, there are many arguments back and forth for the existence of a God and against this idea as well. To argue over this is not my intent here. It is simply to track the thoughts of Lewis and to examine how a book called Mere Christianity is developed by a man who stumbles over the concept of meaning and justice in the universe. And then of course the problem: If Lewis is right about God, then why are we so taken up with just talking the meaning and the injustice, and not involved in the work of putting all the wrongs in the right?

Jesus Christ, Disciplemaker

I have been thinking a lot about the subject of Christian discipleship lately and so I have been hungry to learn what other people say about it. In my hunger, I read Jesus Christ, Disciplemaker. Here are some highlights:

Bill Hull sections the book into four parts. He calls the four parts Come and See, Come and Follow Me, Come and Be with Me, Remain in Me. This progression is simply his way of tracking the relationship Jesus had with these young men through the gospel accounts and pointing out the different “stages” of readiness to increase commitment. I found this helpful. So often everyone gets lumped into the same basket and those who need to hear “come and see” get burdened with much more than they can handle, and really does become overbearing. He writes in chapter twelve, “A vital principle of leadership development is, Do not back up your truck of truth and dump the whole load on the unprepared. Instead, learn the appropriateness of holding back your knowledge” (223).

At the beginning of chapter two, he quotes Robert Coleman who wrote, “Never go anywhere alone; always take someone with you” (39). When I read this, all I could think of was the natural way that Jesus taught people. No program, no “study guide,” no meetings and day-timers. Simply doing life together. “Dragging” someone into your activities for the day and explaining why you make the decisions that you do. Working out the reasons of life, the purposes, and learning to ask the best questions. Hull writes, :Jesus used every situation as an opportunity to teach his disciples. Class was always in session in the laboratory of life” (47).

Interesting that Hull talks about the non-formulaic way of addressing discipleship. He writes, “A Discipler must have neither a fixed idea of what a disciple looks, talks, and acts like nor a static idea of “how to make a disciple” (58) He says this in the context of God making disciples, not people making disciples. And so the emphasis is on the discipler being faithful in facilitating a following, but leaving the converting of this new disciple to God because it’s God’s job. I think I know what he means, but I think there is some benefit in talking through what this looks like. What is our goal? And I think that Hull would not argue against that. In fact, I think this is one of our weaknesses: we are not sure what we are working for…how do I know if I have succeeded? Are there any criteria? I think this is worth some attention.

Here is a quote that hurts, both myself and a number of people I know: “I have found that the closer a person is to a critical spirit, the farther away that person will be from personal evangelism. I can not name one faultfinding Christian who shares his or her faith on a regular basis. Constant criticism is destructive to one’s spiritual health” (86). I am not sure I even need to comment any further, because this just stands out self explanatory and painful for those of us who struggle with a learned criticism.

I appreciate the quote Hull used from G.K Chesterton, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried” (105).

In chapter ten, Hull outlines a few helpful guidelines (170-172): 1. Send them two by two. This is obviously to repeat the idea expressed in Coleman’s quote of keeping disciple-making a relational and communal experience. There is something powerful of being accompanied by another. And when there is chemistry between partners, the effectiveness increases that much more! 2. Give them authority. You know, few things are as frustrating as being asked to accomplish a task but not given the permission or the authority to fully carry that task to its completion. There can be many reasons for this such as the one discipling not being able to let go, to all the power struggles with insecure leaders! 3. Specify the audience. This is interesting. Usually we leave it wide open, don’t we. Be a Christian! Love God and express that love towards all people! Hull says to locate your audience and when assigning someone else, specify it for them. This gives direction, boundary, a path or course that empowers the disciple and gives them confidence. 4. Clarify the objective. And here we come full circle, clarifying the task. As Hull has stated earlier, this is hard to do, primarily because the “task” is a “relationship.” That is why we don’t know what this disciple should look like before we start because we don’t know how this relationship will develop. Yet there is a need to clarify.

Next is a quote that should haunt any leader in a local church…and certainly the church that I am a part of: “Laborers should be able to explain why making disciples forms the foundation for all other ministry. They should understand that a church should not consider making disciples just one of its ministries. Rather, a church should consider itself a discipling center. Anything a church does that is not contributing to the making of disciples should be closely scrutinized” (181). Yes, the criteria that is so badly needed in our churches. You gotta wonder why we keep up our efforts in so many areas of “ministry” that sometimes has very little to do with disciple-making. If there is only one thing that I will do well as a leader in the church, I hope it is disciple-making.

Book 2 What Christians Believe

To begin “Book 2” I just want to pick up what Lewis writes in the beginning of chapter one, and that is, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong all through.” This is a helpful sentence for those who are Christian and fear anything that is spoken or written from a different religious point of view. I chuckle when I hear suspicious conversations about something because a Lutheran said it…..where did we develop this fear? But we should also be looking for great ideas even beyond Christianity, in all the religions of the world, and even the non-religions (if there is such a thing J) like agnosticism or atheism. Clarification: we may need to agree that Lewis is using the term “religion” in a positive way vs. the negative light it is usually referred to in more recent literature (Eugene Peterson says, “Religion is the enemy of the gospel.” He goes on to say that this is why pastoral work is difficult, because religion is always present!).

As we continue to construct our non-negotiable ideas about God and the gospel of Jesus Christ, we must be strong enough to include the fabulous ideas and views that have come from other people, other religions, and other world views than our own. That is what I hear Lewis saying and I appreciate the strength he displays by not letting other views frighten him.