Our journey with C.S. Lewis

T h e   F a l l   O f   M a n

Problem: How did ‘human wickedness’ come about?

Answer: Genesis 3 // According to the doctrine of the Fall, we became a horror to God and to ourselves not because that’s how God made us (for He made us perfectly good and happy) but because we made ourselves so by our abuse of free will. And free will, like everything else that God makes, is a good thing. But free will by its very nature includes the possibility of evil.

Saint Augustine described the sin as a result of Pride, “whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up its own, to exist for itself. Such sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.” The sin conceived as the Fall is the act of self-will when we turned from God to self acting upon the lie that our soul is our own. But we are His. The result is a new kind of man: fallen.

We’re not being punished because of Adam’s mistakes. For even when a badly brought up boy is introduced to a decent family, though it’s ‘not his own fault’ that he is bad, his character is nonetheless rightly detestable. The the boy is unfortunate for being brought up the way he was, it’s still he himself the one who does bad things and likes doing it.

H u m a n   W i c k e d n e s s

We don’t think we’re wicked because: we think we’re kind, and we convince ourselves that vices are natural therefore we must no be guilty. But unless we truly perceive our sin and know we’re guilty, we will misunderstand and resent God’s anger. When we comprehend our badness, His wrath is towards it becomes appropriate because it’s merely a corollary from His goodness.

"We should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.”

We must first know our individual corruption and experience personal guilt before we think about corporate guilt.

We must not fall into the illusion that time cancels sin. What washes away our guilt of sin is repentance and the blood of Christ.

We must guard against the belief that a wrong action, when done by many, becomes acceptable. C.S. Lewis opens up the idea that human race might be a local pocket of evil and it’s backed up by the fact that there are people across time and space who has similar morality which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, and the fact that many of us support this standard.

Don’t be tempted to think that we, modern Westerners, can’t be as bad in comparison to and that God might be content with us.

As “Plato rightly taught, virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all other virtues.”

“God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less.”

James 1:13 Though “perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level” is impossible for men, it “cannot be used as means of evasion.”

Ultimately, shame gives us a valuable insight about our sinful nature.

D i v i n e   G o o d n e s s

Problem: Can we ascribe divine goodness to a God who allows suffering?

God’s idea of goodness differs from ours, but it’s not completely different. So even though we do not yet presently completely understand His moral standard, we are able to acknowledge that it’s better because of guilt and shame. (This  doctrine is presupposed in Scripture as Christ calls us to repent.) 

God’s goodness is not simply kindness, but love. Kindness only wants the object to be happy all the time, it doesn’t care whether the object becomes good or bad, just that it escapes pain. But Love may allow pain because “Love in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.” And when we wish that God would “give over trying to train us into something unlike our natural selves, ... we are asking not for more love but for less.”

Man is not the centre. Revelation 4:11 says “for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We exist not for our own sake or our happiness, but for the sake of God and His pleasure: we exist so God could love^ us. Until we understand that God’s main goal is not simply our happiness, the problem of pain will remain insoluble.

God’s love is not ‘selfish.’ To be selfish is to satisfy one’s own need at the expense of the object’s need. But God has no needs, nor does His demand differ from our need. What God demands from us is exactly what we need and what will truly make us happy. Still, human irreverence/disobedience cannot diminish His glory. “But God wills our good, and our good is to love and to love we must know Him.”

D i v i n e   O m n i p o t e n c e

Problem: God is all powerful and all good, but His creatures are not happy.

Omnipotence means the power to do extrinsically impossible (ie. impossible unless...) things, not intrinsically impossible (ie. self-contradictory, nonentities) things. “You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.”

Necessity of ‘Nature’. It’s (intrinsically) impossible to “create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.” Freedom and self-consciousness both demand a common field (ie. external world) where choices can exist and where it’s possible meet with each other. It’s inherent in a world where people are free to make choices to have a ‘nature’ that: (1) is fixed in that one is able to exercise free will; (2) is neutral in that it’s not under a person’s control to retain others’ freedom. Thus Our World, the only possible one, has the intrinsically necessary fixed and neutral ‘nature’ that “prevents it from being always, and in all disposition, ... pleasurable to [everyone].” And this furnishes occasion for good, as well as evil.

Divine freedom cannot mean choosing between alternatives because with perfect goodness and perfect wisdom, there will be no debate on which is ‘best’ for it would simply be known. God’s freedom “consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them.”

i n t r o d u c t o r y

Problem: How can a good God allow such evil?

Because man has known evil from the very beginning, it wouldn’t make sense for man to claim that the world is made by a good God. Thus, religion (which claims exactly that) has a different origin.

There are three (four in Christianity) elements in all developed religion that cannot be explained by facts/experiences of the natural world:

dread and awe: persistence of the awe and dread felt from the numinous.

morality: consciousness of moral law that’s either approved or disobeyed.

dread and awe + morality: the Numinous entity that evokes dread and awe is made the Guardian of morality.

the history and claims of Jesus.