This is my attempt to summarize CS Lewis' book, "Mere Christianity". The New Yorker says of this classic: "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way."
Dedicated to Alex Phang, Deno Au, Teo Cheng Lee and Yap Lai Fong whom I count to be among these "good men".
Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature
We have all heard people quarrelling. They say something like, "How would you like it if someone did the same to you?" Educated and uneducated, children as well as adults. The reply is seldom, "To hell with your standard!" but usually some attempt to justify that the offence has not gone against the standard or if it does, there is some special excuse." It looks as if both parties had in mind some kind of Rule of Fair Play or Decent Behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they had agreed.
This law was called the Moral Law or the Law of Human Nature because it seems everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. There may be one or two odd individuals who did not know it just as there are a few people who are color blind but the race as a whole thought the idea of decent behavior was obvious to everyone. And why when an obvious wrong is committed to someone, there is a general outcry from those who know of the wrong being done.
Chapter Two: Some Objections
Some say isn't the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and was developed like other instincts? But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling you ought to help whether you like it or not. Eg., hearing a man in danger crying for help. You desire to help but you also desire to stay out of danger. You will find a third impulse that tells you that you ought to help and not run away.
One might think the love of humanity is safe but if you leave out justice, but you may find yourself breaking agreements or faking evidence in trials for the sake of humanity. Criminals can be set free to harm others while never paying the price of their crimes nor learning from them behind bars.
When you compare two viewpoints over, say, whether a war should be fought, you are comparing them with some Real Morality, admitting that there is a real Right, and the views of some may be closer to the right Right than others.
The conclusion then is that although the difference between people's ideas of Decent Behavior makes you suspect there is no one standard, yet as we ponder whose idea closer to what is Right, just the opposite is proven.
Chapter Three: The Reality of the Law
There are two odd things about the human race:
Firstly, they are haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency or morality.
Secondly, they did not in fact do so, at least not all the time.
The Law of Decent Behavior is quite definitively real - a real law which none of us made but which we find pressing on us.
Chapter Four: What Lies Behind the Law?
Thinking man had always wondered about how the universe came into being. There are three common views: the materialist view, the religious view and the Life-Force view.
The Materialist View: People who take this view think that matter and space just happen to exist and have always existed. By one chance in a thousand, something hit our sun and planets are produced. By another thousandth chance, chemicals necessary for life and the right temperature occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive. Then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.
The Religious View: What is behind this universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know, with consciousness, purposes and preferences. It made the universe partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, in order to produce creatures like itself -- I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds.
The Life-Force View: People who hold this view say that life on this planet evolved from the lowest forms to Man not due to chance but due to the 'striving' or 'purposiveness' of a Life-Force. (We can ask "Does this Life-force have a mind?" If answer is yes, then, a mind bringing life into existence and bringing it to perfection is really a God. If answer is no, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind strives or has purposes? One reason why people find this view so attractive is that a Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like the troublesome God. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God you can switch on when you want, but it will not bother you.)
Chapter 5: We Have Cause to be Uneasy
We have only got as far as Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the bible or the churches. We are trying to find out what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. On our steam, we have two bits of evidence about the Somebody: the universe He has made and the Moral Law He has put into our minds. While the universe tells us He is a great artist, the Moral Law actually tells us more about Him just as a man's conversation will tell us more about the man than the house he has built. We can conclude that the Being is intensely interested in right conduct -- in fair play, unselfishness, courage and truthfulness. You can conclude He is 'good' but not indulgent as there is nothing indulgent in the Moral Law that tells us to do the right thing regardless of how painful, dangerous or difficult it is to do.
Some of us might say a good God is a god who forgives. But only a Person can forgive. We have only established that the power behind the Moral Law is more like a mind than anything else. It could be an impersonal mind, then there would be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you give the wrong answer. And it is no use too saying that if there is a God of impersonal absolute goodness, then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. The issue is one part of you agrees with His disapproval of human greed, trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your case but unless He really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior, then He cannot be good. We need a power that holds people accountable for bad behavior but if He does not make an exception for the times that we ourselves exhibit less than decent behavior, we are in a fix! A Power like this can be either a great safety or a great terror depending on how we have responded to His Moral Law.
Some people talk about God not revealing Himself to make it plain but meeting the gaze of absolute goodness is unlikely to be fun if we have not been absolutely good!
Why this roundabout way to get to the subject? This is because Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises forgiveness. It therefore has nothing to offer people who do not know they have anything to repent of and who do not feel they need forgiveness. It is after you have realized there is a Moral Law and a Power behind that law, and that you have broken the law and put yourself wrong with that Power, that Christianity begins to talk. Not a moment sooner.
Next... Book Two: What Christians Believe
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