Book Summary: “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis
Book summary: Notes, quotes & highlights of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.
Overview
Moral Law & God’s Existence: There is an objective moral law that governs human behavior, which points to the existence of a moral Lawgiver. Our sense of right and wrong provides evidence for the existence of a transcendent moral standard.
Christianity's Central Claims: Christianity seems valid based on its core beliefs: God’s existence, Jesus’s divinity, the nature of sin, the need for redemption, and the concept of faith. These claims aren’t based on myths, but have a rational basis.
Trilemma of Jesus: Jesus must be either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Jesus’s claims & teachings leave no room for considering him as a moral teacher. Either Jesus was lying, He was delusional, or He really was God.
God’s Nature & Human Nature: Humanity is inherently broken and sinful. Mankind is fundamentally flawed and needs fixing.
Faith & Reason: Faith is supported by reason. Faith doesn’t contradict reason—it extends beyond it. Having faith in Jesus is to trust Him.
Quotes
Morality
Morality involves three components:
1. Relations between man and man.
2. Things inside each man.
3. Relations between the man and the Power that made him.God doesn’t want obedience to a set of rules. He wants people of a particular sort.
What we ARE matters even more than what we DO.
Christianity isn’t intended to replace arts and sciences. It is a director that points them all to the right jobs and a source of energy that gives them new life if they only submit to it.
Human beings judge each other according to their EXTERNAL ACTIONS, while God judges them according to their MORAL CHOICES. (That’s why He tells us not to judge.)
Good and evil both increase with compound interest.
Sexuality
Surrendering to all our desires would lead to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is opposite of healthy. For any happiness to exist, restraint is necessary.
Perfect sexual purity can’t ever be attained by human efforts, but our failure teaches us to depend on God.
Virtue (even attempted virtue) brings light, while indulgence brings fog.
If marriage partners stop being “in love” that doesn’t mean they need to stop loving each other.
After the thrill of marriage dies out, if you proceed into the more subtle interest and happiness that follows, you’ll find a world of new thrills.
There might be something unnatural about wives ruling over their husbands, because women feel shameful when they do it.
Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy our desires, but only to arouse them to the real thing. I shouldn’t despise these earthly blessings, but I shouldn’t mistake them for the true realities that they mimic.
If the world can’t satisfy my desires then I must be made for another world.
Sin / Pride
I heard the saying, “Hate the sin but not the sinner,” yet I hated myself instead of my sin.
Love all selves—even people who have nothing lovable about them.
Pride is the biggest sin, because it leads to every other vice. It’s the complete anti-God state of mind.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. Pride is the pleasure of being above the rest.
Christianity is right when it teaches that pride is the chief cause of misery.
Pride eats up the possibility of love, contentment, and common sense.
Experiencing delight temporarily relieves us of all the silly nonsense about our own dignity that makes us restless and unhappy.
I am a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and conceits, all doomed to death.
Faith
Faith is based on reason.
A sane person accepts or rejects a statement because of the evidence that supports it. It doesn’t make sense to accept or reject a statement only because that’s what we want or don’t want.
If someone thinks the evidence is bad, but tries to force himself to believe it in spite of the evidence, that would be illogical.
“Faith” can be thought of as “holding on to things your reason once accepted in spite of your changing moods.”
Faith isn’t just intellectual acceptance of some theory about Jesus. It’s trusting in Jesus.
Often times the only way to obtain a certain quality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
God
If you devoted every moment of your entire life exclusively to God‘s service, you couldn’t give Him anything that He didn’t already own.
When we face God, we come up against something that is immeasurably superior to ourselves in every respect. Unless you know God as that—and you know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all.
The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.
10:30am and every other moment from the beginning of the world always seems like the present to God.
God has no history. To have a history means losing the part of your reality that has slipped away into the past while not yet having another part of your reality that’s still ahead in the future.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself because it isn’t there—there’s no such thing.
Humanity is already saved in principle, but individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work—the part we couldn’t have done for ourselves—has been done for us.
God gave us free will, because if we were robots we could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness.
God is the foundational, irreducible fact that all other facts depend on.
The church exists for no other reason than to draw a man into Christ.
You can shut Jesus up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.