Mere Christianity Book 2 Lecture
Rival Conceptions of God
 Atheists
 Must think the human race has
always been wrong about the
question that mattered to them
most.
 Christians
 There are lots of wrong answers
but some are much nearer being
right than others
Divisions of Humanity
 Majority (91% in USA)
 Believe in some kind of God
 Christianity lines up with
the majority
 Minority
 Do not believe in God
Division in Those Who Believe in God
 Pantheist (Transcendental, Cosmic Humanist)
 God is beyond good and evil.
 He is an impersonal life force.
 The universe is almost or is God
 Monotheist
 There is one God who is good and right.
 God invented and made the universe
Cancer
 Pantheist
 See it from the divine point of
view, you would realize that this
also is God
 Christian
 Don’t talk damned nonsense
 Christianity is a fighting religion.
 Great many things have gone
wrong in the world and God will
put them right again.
God is Cruel and Unjust Argument
 How did I get the idea of cruel and unjust?
 Did I get the idea from myself? If so then God is not cruel
and unjust because I just made up what cruel and unjust
means
 If there is something such as real justice, it could not have
evolved. It must come from an outside being
Dualism
 Two separate and independent
powers
 One Good
 One Bad
 When we say that Good is right
then they are no longer equal
because we are saying there is an
independent power that prefers
Good
 Goodness is being in a right
relationship to God
“You can be good for the sake of mere goodness but you cannot be
bad for the sake of mere badness.” It is always something good
that you desire.
Satan
 Christians think the Dark
Power was created by
God. It was good and
went wrong.
Civil War
 This is a civil war,
a rebellion
Enemy Territory
 Christians are in enemy occupied territory
The Shocking Alternative
 Free Will is what has made evil
possible
 Wanting to be God is the sin
that Satan taught us.
Happiness
 We cannot have happiness
outside of God.
 Attempts to have happiness
outside of God bring:
 War, poverty, ambition,
prostitution, diseases, slavery
etc.. Come from this.
3 Things God Did
 Left us a conscience, the sense of right
and wrong
 Gave us “Good Dreams” those stories
scattered throughout religion of a
redemptive God
Eternity in Their Hearts
 Chose Israel to communicate to about
who He really is.
The Real Shock
 Reading From the Book
 A man suddenly shows up
among the Jews
 To be God
 To forgive sins
 That he Always existed
 That he will one day judge the
world.
The Claim to Forgive Sins
 Unless He is God, this claim is preposterous, comic and of a
mad man.
You cannot say..
 Jesus was a good moral
teacher but not God.
 He is either the Son of God,
a madman, or something
worse.
The Perfect Penitent
 He was not a lunatic or a
fiend
 He was God and is God.
God has landed on this
enemy occupied world in
human form.
The Christian Formula
 Christ was killed for us. His death has washed out our sins, by
dying He disabled death itself.
 He rose again and conquered death.
Repentance
 The process of surrender is
what Christians call repentence
 Unlearning self will and self
conceit
 Killing yourself and undergoing
a sort of death
The Catch
 It takes a good person to repent and we are
not good people
 We need Christ who has willingly
surrendered His life to help us surrender
ours.
The Practical Conclusion
 We share the suffering and humiliation of Christ and we will
share His conquest of Death when we die.
 In Christ a new kind of man appeared, a new kind of life that
we can share.
How does that life spread to us?
 According to Lewis it is some combination of belief, baptism,
and communion.
 All Christians believe in all three things yet I do not believe a
person needs to be baptized or take communion to be saved.
Belief and Repentance is all that is necessary.
 Lewis seems to indicate that Christians can lose their
salvation.
The Christian
 Christian is not a man who
never goes wrong but a man
who is enabled to repent and
pick himself up and begin over
again after each stumble
because the Christ life is inside
him repairing him, enabling
him to repeat the kind of
voluntary death which Christ
Himself carried out.
How are We Different from Others Trying
to Do Good?
 We are in a different position from other people trying
to do good. Any good we do comes from the Christ Life
inside of us.
What about the heathen who have never
heard?
 This is not an excuse for you to not come to Him who have heard
Why didn’t Christ just come in force?
 Because when He does it
will be too late for the
rest of us. He wants to
give us a chance to come
to him voluntarily
before he comes in
judgment.
Design a conversation where you are
able to make some of Lewis’s points to
a non-Christian.