Mere Christianity -- Book 3, Chap. 11

Faith – Part 1

We have now arrived at the third and final theological virtue, which Lewis appropriately treats in the final two chapters of his section on “Christian Behavior,” reminding us that the Christian Life begins and ends – it is essentially a life of – faith.

Faith Used in Two Ways

Lewis points out that “faith” is used by Christians in one of two ways (in two senses or on two levels):

1.Simple Belief – accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.

2.Complete Trust – seeing that we are bankrupt and trusting wholly upon Christ (see chap. 12 -- Faith -- Part 2).

Simple Belief

Lewis begins by discussing the first concept of faith in this chapter and the second sense in the following chapter. 

Something about this first use has puzzled Lewis, namely that Christians take this first sense to be a Christian virtue:

I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue – what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements?  Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad.  If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very cleaver.  And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Though Lewis still believes this to be true, he has now realized that he used to hold a faulty assumption about the human mind, namely, that “if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up.”  Lewis assumed that the human mind was “completely ruled by reason.”

But there is a real struggle between what we believe to be true and how our emotions or imagination can lead us astray – note the example of anesthetics.  “The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”  And our senses and emotions have the ability to destroy our faith in what we really know to be true.

The same is true when it comes to believing Christianity to be true.  We can believe the truth of the Christian faith based upon solid evidence and then very soon certain situations arise that cause us to doubt what we know to be true. 

There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief.  Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair:  some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.  And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. 

Now Lewis is not talking about real reasons that may arise for not believing the truth of Christianity.  Those have to be honestly confronted.  But he is talking about mere “mood swings” when something affects our emotions and causes us to doubt whether or not Christianity can be true in regards to these present circumstances.

Now, the faith that Lewis is here describing is simply this: 

The art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

Different moods or feelings will come and go throughout life.  And there are certainly times when you don’t feel like a Christian or you don’t feel Christianity can really be true after all.  But that is exactly where the kind of faith Lewis is describing is a necessary virtue.

Unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.

That’s why we must train the habit of faith.  How do we do this?

The first step is to realize the fact that your moods and feelings change.  The second step is if you have accepted Christianity to be true, then be sure to study some of its main doctrines every day.  That is where private worship and public worship are necessary parts of the Christian life.  We have to constantly remind ourselves what we believe.  Our “beliefs” will not automatically remain alive in our hearts – we must constantly feed them – put Christ before our eyes.  We must daily preach the gospel to ourselves. 

Lewis says that most people who have walked away from the Christian faith do so not because they have suddenly come across new evidence to suggest that Christianity is a fraud, but rather they have simply drifted away over time.

Complete Trust – the second, higher sense of faith (cont. in chap. 12)

Now, this is the really more difficult sense of faith to explain.  You will remember what Lewis said about “humility,” that the first step towards it is to realize that you are proud.  The next step is to give the Christian life an honest go at it.  A week is not enough.  We can easily be better for a week or two.  But try a couple of months. 

By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, on will have discovered some truths about oneself.  No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. 

We usually get that backwards.  Good people are those who don’t struggle with temptation.  But that is completely wrong.  Only those who have struggled in the hard fight of battling temptations know how strong they really are. 

After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not be giving in.  You find out the strength of a wind by trying to talk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. 

We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it:  and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist.

So what do we learn from all this striving against temptation?  We learn the most important lesson of the Christian life:  we fail. 

We learn that there is no bargaining with God, there is no way to earn good marks to earn his approval – all such thinking is wiped out.  Real Christianity has a way of putting all such thoughts to rest.

One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits.  God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam or putting Him in your debt.

This shattering of our own goodness is soon followed by another important lesson – that everything you have – and I mean everything – is given you by God. 

If you have devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.

When we talk about doing something for God we are like:

A small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.”  Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present.  It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.

When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work.  It is after this that real life begins.  The man is awake now.