C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity Lecture 1A (Chris Mitchell)

hi I'm Carrie not president of the CS Lewis Institute all of us at the Institute are thrilled that you have chosen this Mayer Christianity study guide of all the books written by CS Lewis none has been more influential over time than Mayer Christianity skeptics seekers and mature believers in Christ have been challenged and transformed by this book now this study guide series dr. Chris Mitchell noted CS Lewis scholar and director of the Wade Center in Wheaton College takes you through four lectures corresponding to the four main sections of the book I think you'll enjoy the context and analysis that dr. Mitchell brings to this most important work and whether you watch this alone with your family or in a small group setting I think you will find your understanding of faith in general and Christianity in particular greatly enhanced now our mission at the CS Lewis Institute is development sure believers in Christ who can articulate defend and live out their faith in personal and public life we call this discipleship of the heart and mind and we believe it is desperately needed today now if you'd like to learn more about the CS Lewis Institute please go to our website at WWF there you can sign up for our free newsletter and our quarterly journal knowing and doing as well as learn about our other materials and programs now please sit back and enjoy this mayor christianity study guide thank you [Music] you well this evening and tomorrow my task as I understand it is to take you through CS Lewis's book Mere Christianity and the way I want to do it is that I want to as much as possible to do it time permitting with his own words I've reduced the book to 38 pages we're not going to read all of those pages between today and tomorrow but we're going to read significant portions of those and after teaching this book for a number of years the reason I've chosen to do this is that one of the great benefits of this book or any real work of Lewis's is that he's not just trying to give you content but as you follow his thoughts he teaches you how to think through a thing it's one of the great qualities of Louis we don't teach classes on how to think any more but when you think his thoughts after him he begins to lead you through a train of thought and teaches you in fact really you know after college most of your education comes by having to be think people's thoughts after them working through a bit of writing we're going to be working through mere christianity now this book began as broadcast talks over the BBC that's the content the middle or the context is the middle of the twentieth century world war ii the first broadcast began in August of 1941 five talks that ran through September 1941 there was a break until January January of 1942 to February 1942 another five talks then a break until the fall September 20th 1942 through November 8th 1942 a third set of talks the first two sets 5 talks apiece the third one involved 12 talks and then the final one February 22nd 1944 so it came much later towards the end of the war to August 4th the first one was called right and wrong a clue to the meaning of the universe the second was what Christians believe the third Christian behavior and the fourth beyond personality now this came about because of the BBC religious broadcasting company and it was man named James Welch who wrote to Louis in 41 dear mr. Lewis I address you by name because although we have never met you cannot be a stranger after allowing me and many others to know some of your thought and convictions which have been expressed in your book the problem of pain I should like to take this opportunity of saying how grateful I am to you personally for the help this book has given me I write to ask whether you'd be willing to help us in our work of religious broadcasting the microphone is a limiting and often irritating instrument but the quality of thinking and depth of conviction which I find in your book are surely to be shared with a great many other people and for any talk we can be sure of a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million two ideas strike me one you might be willing to speak about the Christian or the lack of Christian assumptions underlying modern literature or to a series of talks on something like the Christian faith as I see it by a layman I am sure there is a need of a positive Restatement of Christian doctrine in lay language but there may be other subjects in which you would rather speak this is Louis's response and this is key to his strategy in the first series of talks dear mr. Welch thank you for your kind remarks about my book I would like to give a series of talks as you suggest but it would have to be in the vacation and modern literature would not suit me I think what I mainly want to talk about is the law of nature or objective right and wrong it seems to me that the New Testament by preaching repentance and forgiveness assumes an audience who already believes in the law of nature and know that they have disobeyed it in modern England now we're looking again at the middle of the 20th century England we cannot at present assume this and therefore most apologetic begins a stage too far on the first step is to create or recover the sense of guilt now I find that so curious because in our culture we've been trying to get rid of guilt for decades much of psychology is involved in that hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then some title like the art of being shocked or these humans would suit me let me know what you think of this and how many talks in it what dates roughly you would like your sincerely CS Lewis now this is the controlling idea that gets us into near Christianity he again expressed the same sort of idea of pre apologetic as you might say in a letter to a priest in Rome it's involved in what are called the Latin letters of CS Lewis all these this exchange for fifteen years was all in Latin that's the only language they had in common this was dated in 1953 September about remedies the question is more difficult for my part I believe we ought to work not only at spreading the gospel that certainly but also at a certain preparation for the gospel it is necessary to recall many to the law of nature before we talk about God for Christ promises forgiveness of sins but what is that - those who since they do not know the law of nature do not know that they have sinned who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of a disease moral relativity is the enemy we have to overcome before we can even tackle atheism I would almost dare to say first less let us make the younger generation good pagans and afterwards let us make them Christians in other words what he's saying is the good old pagans had a conscience had a sense in which that there was something that held them to a right and wrong and that they often violated it but in modern english-speaking world that was no longer the case so that is how he begins this first set of broadcast talks right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe and the first one he entitled the law of human nature and he begins it by sort of setting forth a quarrel and a quarrel that you could hear in in any place in the world doesn't matter what culture people quarrel I've lived in Haiti India I've lived in Scotland and people quarrel they're the same way we quarrel here and now he picks it up and if you have your books turn to the first book the first chapter the second paragraph in the middle of that paragraph we begin the man who makes them that is these statements is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him he is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about and the other man very seldom replies to hell with your standard nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard or that if he does go against the standard there is some special excuse it looks in fact very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of law or rule of fair play or decent behavior morality or whatever you like to call it about which they really agreed down a couple of paragraphs now this law or rule about right and wrong used to be called the law of nature nowadays when we talk about laws of nature we usually mean things like gravity heredity or the laws of chemistry but the older thinkers called the law of right and wrong the law of nature and what they meant was the law of human nature and that's maybe the better term just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws so the creature called man also had his law with this great difference that body that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not but a man could choose either to obey the law of human nature or to disobey it he says we may put this another way each man is at every moment subjected to several sets of laws but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey as a body he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it as an organism he is subjected to various biological laws which cannot disobey any more than an animal can that is he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things but the law which is peculiar to his human nature the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things is the one he can choose to disobey now I know some people will say that the idea of law this law of nature a decent behavior known to all men is unsound because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities it's one of the objections but he says this isn't true there have been differences between their moralities but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference if anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teachings of say the ancient Egyptians Babylonians Hindus Chinese Greeks and Romans what will really strike him will be how very light they are to each other into our own I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean now the point he's trying to get out here is fundamentally this notion that we have of right and wrong regardless of how it actually plays out into society the key fundamental issue is that all societies have a sense of right and wrong they draw lines and they produce conflict and quarrels it causes them to form governments to be able to resolve things and to work together he goes on but the most remarkable thing is this whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and wrong you will find the same man going back on this a moment later if you tried breaking one to him he will be complaining it's not fair before you can say Jack Robinson a nation may say treaties do not matter but then the next minute they spoil their case by saying that that particular truly they want to break was an unfair one they're appealing to some notion of right and wrong I remember a poignant example of this when we lived in India in 1980-81 there was a student there from the University of Wisconsin a fellow named John and we used to get into these conversations and he was a moral relativist and I used to tell him that you know you really have no business telling me you know what is right and wrong because your whole system denies that fact but my worldview requires me to make those kinds of decisions and I'm not a hypocrite when I say this is right and this is wrong but every time you make those kinds of judgments you are well he didn't like it but he had a difficult time arguing against it well we'd been there about six months and there are a number of a sitting around and we're talking about our various experiences in India and all of a sudden John pipes up and he had witnessed something that very morning I won't tell you what it is was but when he got through it and you could tell he was disgusted he turned he looked right at me and he says and I don't care what you say that's wrong and I didn't have to say anything you know that there's a point in which we can try to make this all relative but there's a point in which we just dig in our heels now it seems van Louis it concludes we are forced to believe in a real right and wrong now if we are agreed about that I go on to my next point which is this none of us really are keeping this law of nature now no what he's trying to do in his strategy if he's ever gonna talk about Christianity has to get people to a place in which they feel like they've actually violated something they're guilty of something so he's saying okay there seems to be this general sense that there's a right and wrong and we all are aware that we don't keep it he says I'm only trying to call attention to a fact the fact that we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people there may be all sorts of excuses for us the question the moment is not whether they are good excuses the point is that they are one more proof of how deeply whether we like it or not we believe in this law of nature if we do not believe in decent behavior why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not behaving decently the truth is we believe in decency so much we feel the rule of pressing in on us so that we cannot bear to face the fact that we may be breaking it and consequently we try to shift the blame or get rid of the reason for that now I remember the first time I read Albert Camus book the stranger if you've never read it it's one of the most haunting experiences I've ever had in literature one of the most disturbing it's a brilliant book because what Camus does is that he creates a believable palpable a moral character a person with really no conscience and it sustained right up to the very end and the reason it is so disturbing is that when you really face-to-face meet absolute moral relativity it's frightening we don't live that way these then he says are the two points I want to make first that human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way and cannot really get rid of it and secondly that they do not in fact behave in that way they know the law of nature they break it these two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves in the universe we live in and again he's appealing to our own experience because now he doesn't see it this way but it's another way of getting into this I know when I've been violated I have a sense in which something wrong has been inflicted upon me but I'm also aware that there are those occasions in which I inflict the same thing on others and I can just right now nail all of you to the wall driving habits I don't think I need to say anything more we're guilty of committing them and we're guilty of making excuses when we ourselves commit them now he moves on and as a result of the first broadcast he received some letters some objections and I'm not going to deal with that chapter chapter two but basically he deals with the idea that what you're talking about is just heard instinct or social convention and he goes through and says yes I believe there's hurt instinct and I believe there's social convention but that's not what I'm talking about and he makes that distinction and I'll let you look at that in the third broadcast called the reality of the law he says I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter that there were two odd things about the human race the first one is that we're haunted by the idea of some sort of behavior that we ought to practice what you might call fair play or decency or morality or the law of nature and second that we do not in fact do this we break it now you may say he goes on that what we're calling the law of right and wrong that our breaking of it means that people are not perfect he says I'm not concerned at this point about blame he says I'm trying to get to a truth or a fact and from that point of view the very idea of something being imperfect of it not being what it ought to be has certain consequences that's his entire point for example if you take a thing like a stone or a tree it is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise when you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation is not this much the same as saying that the law only means what stones always do when you let go of them you do not really think that when a stone is let go it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground you only mean that in fact it does fall in other words you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves of just a falling rock any law about what ought to happen has distinct from what does happen it just does now the laws of nature is applied to a stone or trees may only mean what nature in fact does but if you turn to the law of human nature it is a different matter that law certainly does not mean what human beings in fact do for as I said before many of them do not obey this law at all and none of them obey it completely but the law of human nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not in other words when you're dealing with human something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts you have the facts how men or people do behave and you also have something else how they ought to behave in the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts to explain everything but this the explanation requires something else now this is so peculiar he says that one is tempted to try to explain it for instance we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does you only mean that the same is when you say that the stone is the wrong shape namely that what he is doing is inconvenient to you but that is simply untrue a man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag are both equally and convenient but I blame the second man and I do not blame the first sometimes all the behavior which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all but the very opposite and he goes in and he uses an illustrator station of the war and a traitor now he moves on and again as he's moving through this this idea that this is very peculiar that we can't get rid of this idea of a sense of right and wrong and it doesn't seem to be able to be explained from within the particular zuv where we live and he says and this is where I want to stop right now men ought to be unselfish ought to be fair not that men are unselfish nor that they like being unselfish but that they ought to be it is not mere fancy for we cannot get rid of the idea and most of the things we say and think about people would be reduced to nonsense if we did and it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience for the behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we first or find inconvenient it may even be the opposite consequently as he ties this broadcast off this rule of right and wrong or law of human nature whatever you call it but somehow or other be a real thing a thing that is really they're not made up by ourselves and it begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality that is that this in this particular case there is something above beyond the ordinary facts of human behavior and yet quite definitely real a real law which none of us made but which we find pressing in on us now when he says that looks like we're going to have to admit that there was more than one kind of reality and we'll look at this here in a moment where he distinguishes between a worldview that is materialistic in a worldview that's religious right now the ruling paradigm in the english-speaking world was naturalism that denied anything outside of the material world anything supernatural what he's already beginning to point to is that you cannot account for this sense that we have as human beings I mean the birds don't have this the dogs don't have we have this you can't account for it by just the material world it must lie someplace else so as much as we in the modern world don't want to admit something outside of the material world this seems to begin to be pointing towards that so in a sense he's beginning to push back against modernity

Channel: C.S. Lewis Institute

Views: 63,595

Rating: 4.867435 out of 5

Keywords: Mere Christianity (Book), Christianity (Religion), C.S. Lewsi, C.S.Lewis Institute, Jesus Christ (Deity), C. S. Lewis (Author)

Id: KeBU5yck2ss

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2013