Sixty Years of "Mere Christianity"

From the Archives (Columns)

SIXTY YEARS OF MERE CHRISTIANITY

Published in: Free Inquiry (Feb/Mar 2004)

Sixty years ago, in 1943, C.S. Lewis delivered the first in a series of lectures that would eventually be published as Mere Christianity. Lewis, author of the popular Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and the Perelandra science fiction stories, was one of the most famous Christian apologists of his time and Mere Christianity was the culmination of his efforts to, in his words, “explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”(1)

In the decades since its initial publication, Mere Christianity has been tremendously influential and has gathered a reputation as a successful conversion tool. I approached the book with (metaphorical) fear and trembling, both from the warnings of my fellow atheists and from the fact that I respected Lewis as a writer and as an intellectual—would this be the climactic end of my long period of godlessness? Would I put the book down, stunned by its sheer persuasiveness, and immediately fall to my knees in abject prayer?

As to both questions, I can safely report “no.” Indeed, the book is rather disappointing, both in its lack of philosophical rigor and Lewis’ seeming satisfaction that he had conclusively proved both God’s existence and the essentials of Christianity in just the first third of the book, with plenty of space left over to devote to the particulars of how good Christians ought to behave.

Lewis offers only a single, rather simple “proof” that God exists. He starts with the questionable assertion that if God did create the universe, he would leave no evidence of his existence within it. Next, he asserts that, throughout human history, an essential core of shared morality has existed, regardless of time or culture. Finally, since everyone has this inherent knowledge of right and wrong, we must ask how this knowledge came to be; according to Lewis, the only rational answer is that God placed this knowledge within us. In a sense, Lewis has reversed the classic formulation of writers such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and theologians such as Buber and Niebuhr, that belief in the existence of God is necessary for the existence of morality. Under Lewis’ view, the existence of morality is a given and thus proves God’s existence. As Lewis puts it: "If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes[.]"(2)

The crux of Lewis’ argument, and its major weakness, is his assertion that humanity has always shared a certain core morality: “though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can recognize the same law running through them all[.]”(3)

Taken at face value, this assertion seems to simply fly in the face of all available evidence. Volumes of anthropological research demonstrate the different moral codes human societies have had, and the differences between them cannot be considered minor—unless permissible forms of sexuality,(4) punishment,(5) and even homicide(6) are “minor” issues.

Put another way, up until the past few centuries, most of human history was marked by slavery, racism, and the oppression of women. If God “placed” a sense of morality in every human being from the very beginning of time, he apparently didn’t do a very good job of it because there is little evidence that practitioners of these policies suffered great pangs of conscience over their actions. Indeed, even if there has been a common “core” of moral conduct throughout human history, it stands to reason that this core exists because it is necessary for society itself to exist—one need not invoke “God” to explain its existence.

After this dubious “proof” of God’s existence, Lewis turns to his argument as to why Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God. His argument is short, but seems persuasive, at least at first:"[P]eople often say about [Jesus]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. "(7)

In a general sense, the first problem with this argument is that it simply proves too much. According to the logic that every one is either a lunatic, a liar, or the real thing, unless we can discover proof of insanity or intentional deception, Mohammed is really the chosen prophet of Allah, Siddhartha knew the way to Nirvana, and L. Ron Hubbard discovered the true nature of the human mind. Thousands of people are convinced they’ve been abducted by aliens, encountered ghosts, or met Bigfoot. We don’t need to think that all these people are pathological liars or certifiably insane; people can hold fantastic beliefs about themselves due to confusion, temporary hallucination, religious faith and fervor, or just plain wishful thinking. Not all of them are frauds, mental patients, or the real thing, and there’s no reason to think the historical Jesus is any different.

The second problem with Lewis’ argument is the ease in which he decides Jesus is Lord God instead of a liar or a lunatic, when reliable evidence to make the choice is simply not available. In fact, very little is known about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and it’s doubtful whether he ever claimed to be divine at all. According to religious scholar Karen Armstrong: "After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century. The development of Christian belief in the Incarnation was a gradual, complex process. Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God."(8)

When every detail about a person, from how he lived to what he said, is a true mystery, it seems illogical to try to decide what kind of person he really was—especially about a matter so important as to whether or not he was the Son of God.

Sixty years after its first formulation, and forty years after its author’s death, Mere Christianity doesn’t hold up very well to critical examination, unlike some of his other work such as The Screwtape Letters. Although the fact that Lewis was writing for a general audience merits some forgiveness, his simple refusal to respond to the powerful atheist views of other public intellectuals, such as Bertrand Russel, leads a modern reader to feel he either held his readership’s intelligence in low regard or that he was afraid that responding to serious atheist arguments would lead his audience even further away from Christianity. Regardless, from all accounts, Lewis was a kind man, sincere in his faith but never narrow-minded. His other work merits attention, however, even if Mere Christianity does not.

1. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, MacMillan Pub. Co., Inc. (1977) [1960], at 6.
2. Lewis, supra note 1, at 33.
3. Lewis, supra note 1, at 24.
4. See, e.g., Stephen O. Murray, Homosexualities, Univ. Chi. Press (2000) (discussing widely differing views on the morality of homosexuality throughout modern and ancient societies).
5. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books (1995), trans. Alan Sheridan (discussing widely differing views on the morality of flogging, torture, and capital punishment throughout modern and ancient societies).
6. See, e.g., James Rachel, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, Inc. (1993) at 23-24 (discussing how certain societies approve of infanticide).
7. Lewis, supra note 1, at 56. This argument is popular among modern apologists as well. See, e.g., Josh McDowell, A Ready Defense, Here’s Life Publishers (1990) at 245 (“Who you decide Jesus Christ is must not be an idle intellectual exercise. You cannot put Him on the shelf as a great moral teacher. That is not a valid option. He is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord and God.”).
8. Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine Books (1994) at 81. See also, Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, HarperCollins (1997) at 143 (“in calling him Christ and in testifying to his redemptive role we are making statements of faith that are not historically provable, though they are related to historical evidence. The Gospels were written at least a generation after his death, and they reflect the experience and theological interpretations of the early Christian community.”); Richard H. Nethe, “The Demystification of Belief Systems,” The Humanist, Jul/Aug 2001 at 38 (“So far, the Jesus who emerges from these studies takes on many forms. It turns out that the scholars cannot agree as to how he lived, whether he was married, if he had brothers and sisters, the exact date of his birth or death, and where he lived between the years 20 and 30 of the Common Era.”).