The atom
Mere Christianity, Book II What Christians Believe, Chapter Four The Perfect Penitent
If Jesus was not a crazy person or a liar, then we are left with only one possibility. He was in fact who He claimed to be: God in human form. But why? When He was alive, He did do a lot of teaching, but Christians will tell you that the main reason He came was to suffer and die, and then be raised from the dead. Believing this is the foundation of Christianity. Every Christian, regardless of his or her denomination, believes that Jesus was God, and that He died and rose again, and that this single unimaginable act somehow put us right with God. That, in a nutshell, is Christianity.
Now, there are many different theories out there to explain how Jesus' death and resurrection put us right with our Creator once again, and defeated death (and the devil) for all time. But please remember that these theories are not Christianity. "The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start." So you don't have to accept any theory as to how that works in order to believe that it does work. Lewis compares it to getting nourishment through food. You are hungry, you eat. Long before we knew anything about vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates and proteins, we knew that when we felt hungry, that meant we needed to eat something. If we were to find out all the theories we believe that explain how digestion leads to nourishment were incorrect, we would still eat food. So the theories about how Christianity works are not themselves Christianity. Not all Christians agree on how important these theories are, but I think most would agree that none of the theories come close to reality.
If you think about an atom, you probably get a picture in your head of a nucleus with little round protons and neutrons with electrons circling around...but that is not reality, just a picture to help you understand the formula. "The thing itself cannot be pictured, it can only be expressed mathematically." (I have not studied the atom since high school, so this could be a bogus explanation, but you get the point.) So, we cannot fully understand how Christ's death saves us and gives us a new beginning, but if we could "that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be -- the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning." For those who see no value in something they cannot understand, think back to the idea of nourishment. You can eat without fully understanding how the food will nourish you. You can accept that Jesus' death put us right with God without fully understanding how. "Indeed, [you] certainly would not know how it works until [you had] accepted it."
All that being said, Lewis has his own theory to propose (not to be confused with the foundational belief of Christianity) which he says is worth hearing. The theory you are probably most familiar with is the one which says that our turning from God warranted punishment, and that Jesus volunteered to be punished for us, so God let us off the hook. Some would reply, "If God was planning to let us off, then why did Jesus still have to die?" Lewis prefers to see it more like we have a debt that needs to be paid. "On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of the person who has not. Or if you take 'paying the penalty', not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of 'standing the racket' or 'footing the bill', then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend."
The last part of this chapter is SO good...if you have the book please read it, and if you don't, please know that my summation is not going to be nearly as powerful as Lewis' words (which is why I will most likely end up quoting most of them). The hole we have gotten ourselves into is that we tried to "set up on our own, to behave as if [we] belonged to [ourselves]." We rebelled against God. In order to get out of this hole, we must surrender. We have to give our lives back to Him, and realize that we are not our own and that we are in the wrong. This act of surrender is what Christians call repentance. "Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie." Lewis says that going through repentance is like going through a kind of death. We need repentance because we are sinners, but only a good person can do it the right way...in fact, it takes a perfect person to repent perfectly, but a perfect person would have no need of it. "Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like." We can't go back to Him without going through it. "But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it." We need help.
How does God help us? "We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it." Just as a teacher holds a child's hand as he forms letters. But we need Him to help us in something He had never done -- "to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this at all...God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not." But what if God became a man? What if our human nature was put together with His Godly nature in a single person? "He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop our of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all." Wow...looking at Jesus this way is very helpful to me.
Lewis ends the chapter by reiterating the fact that this is just his own way of looking at the how of Christianity. "Do not mistake it for the thing itself: and if it does not help you, drop it."
Now that we know how we are able to share in Christ's death, next time we will see how we can share in His victory over it.
Thank you so very much for reading!!!
If Jesus was not a crazy person or a liar, then we are left with only one possibility. He was in fact who He claimed to be: God in human form. But why? When He was alive, He did do a lot of teaching, but Christians will tell you that the main reason He came was to suffer and die, and then be raised from the dead. Believing this is the foundation of Christianity. Every Christian, regardless of his or her denomination, believes that Jesus was God, and that He died and rose again, and that this single unimaginable act somehow put us right with God. That, in a nutshell, is Christianity.
Now, there are many different theories out there to explain how Jesus' death and resurrection put us right with our Creator once again, and defeated death (and the devil) for all time. But please remember that these theories are not Christianity. "The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start." So you don't have to accept any theory as to how that works in order to believe that it does work. Lewis compares it to getting nourishment through food. You are hungry, you eat. Long before we knew anything about vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates and proteins, we knew that when we felt hungry, that meant we needed to eat something. If we were to find out all the theories we believe that explain how digestion leads to nourishment were incorrect, we would still eat food. So the theories about how Christianity works are not themselves Christianity. Not all Christians agree on how important these theories are, but I think most would agree that none of the theories come close to reality.
If you think about an atom, you probably get a picture in your head of a nucleus with little round protons and neutrons with electrons circling around...but that is not reality, just a picture to help you understand the formula. "The thing itself cannot be pictured, it can only be expressed mathematically." (I have not studied the atom since high school, so this could be a bogus explanation, but you get the point.) So, we cannot fully understand how Christ's death saves us and gives us a new beginning, but if we could "that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be -- the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning." For those who see no value in something they cannot understand, think back to the idea of nourishment. You can eat without fully understanding how the food will nourish you. You can accept that Jesus' death put us right with God without fully understanding how. "Indeed, [you] certainly would not know how it works until [you had] accepted it."
All that being said, Lewis has his own theory to propose (not to be confused with the foundational belief of Christianity) which he says is worth hearing. The theory you are probably most familiar with is the one which says that our turning from God warranted punishment, and that Jesus volunteered to be punished for us, so God let us off the hook. Some would reply, "If God was planning to let us off, then why did Jesus still have to die?" Lewis prefers to see it more like we have a debt that needs to be paid. "On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of the person who has not. Or if you take 'paying the penalty', not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of 'standing the racket' or 'footing the bill', then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend."
The last part of this chapter is SO good...if you have the book please read it, and if you don't, please know that my summation is not going to be nearly as powerful as Lewis' words (which is why I will most likely end up quoting most of them). The hole we have gotten ourselves into is that we tried to "set up on our own, to behave as if [we] belonged to [ourselves]." We rebelled against God. In order to get out of this hole, we must surrender. We have to give our lives back to Him, and realize that we are not our own and that we are in the wrong. This act of surrender is what Christians call repentance. "Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie." Lewis says that going through repentance is like going through a kind of death. We need repentance because we are sinners, but only a good person can do it the right way...in fact, it takes a perfect person to repent perfectly, but a perfect person would have no need of it. "Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like." We can't go back to Him without going through it. "But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it." We need help.
How does God help us? "We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it." Just as a teacher holds a child's hand as he forms letters. But we need Him to help us in something He had never done -- "to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this at all...God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not." But what if God became a man? What if our human nature was put together with His Godly nature in a single person? "He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop our of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all." Wow...looking at Jesus this way is very helpful to me.
Lewis ends the chapter by reiterating the fact that this is just his own way of looking at the how of Christianity. "Do not mistake it for the thing itself: and if it does not help you, drop it."
Now that we know how we are able to share in Christ's death, next time we will see how we can share in His victory over it.
Thank you so very much for reading!!!
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