Confession: I have been waiting for a couple of days for someone else to post on this here book blog, because I finished Mere Christianity and I don’t want to look like an unbelievable goober by publishing three posts in a row with no interruption. So, thank you, AJ.
So Mere Christianity is an apologist tract by C.S. Lewis that basically explains and defends the core doctrines and theology of Christianity. Even though he wasn’t writing from a Mormon standpoint, I still enjoyed it immensely and it helped me to build my testimony of the LDS church.
C.S. Lewis was a Christian rock star; just an amazing, exemplary person. His words are soaked with intelligence and understanding and readability; he makes abstract concepts about Christianity easy to grasp, but he also makes it clear that there are some things that we just don’t know. I will also know begin to refer to him as the Analogy King, because he backed up every idea he wrote about with a funny or interesting analogy. He discusses sin and virtue, marriage, the Godhead (although he refers to it as the Trinity), the sacrament, post-mortality, et cetera.
Like Lewis’s other theological books, every single line from Mere Christianity is very quotable. So let’s see some quotes!
“The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes right because the sun shines on it.”
“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”
“Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years; in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.”
So, jes, I loved Mere Christianity, I wish I would have read it sooner. Now I am going to read Walden and maybe Dubliners, hip hip hooray.
(As a final note, I’m pretty sure Holland quoted Mere Christianity during this General Conference when he said that someone once said that true love must include the idea of permanence. I hear that the General Authorities quote C.S. Lewis more than pretty much anyone, except maybe Jesus.)
