Mere Christianity -- Book 4, Chap. 2

The Three-Personal God

In the previous chapter (“Making and Begetting”) Lewis began to give definition to the doctrine of the Trinity.  In the way a man can beget a child, but only make a statue, God begets Christ but makes man. 

But this is not all there is.  While God begetting God is like a human father begetting a son, it is not exactly like that.

What does Lewis mean by God being “beyond personality”?  A person is an individual who has a mind, will, and emotions (ability to reason, choose, and feel).  But God is not merely a person, He is the only real person.  We are only a pale shadow or image of the real, true person of God.  We are copies of the real thing.  God is a perfect person (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc.).  He is super-personality or “beyond personality.”  

More Than a Person

Many people say they believe in “God,” but not a “personal” god.  They say that everything behind all there is must be more than a person. 

The Christian would agree but she is the only one who can then go on and “offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like.”

But what these others think of God as “beyond personality” really mean that God is “impersonal” – something less than personal – reduction (whereas, Lewis means “more than”).  They reduce God to something like a force or power (without mind, will, and emotions).   

According to this view, when a person dies his soul is simply absorbed into God – as when some material object is absorbed into another or when a drop of water is absorbed into the sea.  But what happens to the drop when it slips into the sea?  It is the end of the drop – it is no more.  If this is what happens to our souls when we die, then it is the same as ceasing to exist altogether. 

The only option among all religions of a personal God -- that is both personal and beyond – is Christianity.  It is also the only understanding of life that can explain how we both enter into God’s life after death and remain who we were before – in fact, something much more than before – but not less.

A Fourth Dimension? – A Trinitarian Analogy

Lewis realizes that God’s being is ultimately incomprehensible and that all analogies ultimately breakdown at some point.  But he uses his creative genius to give us a Sunday school lesson on the Trinity by using the analogy of the dimensions of space.  Basically, the Trinity exists in another dimension beyond the three dimensions with which we are familiar and that is why it seems incomprehensible for us.

He describes those three dimensions as three directions we can move:  left and write, backwards and forwards, and up and down.  One dimension would be a straight line on a page.  Two dimensions would be an object life a square.  Three dimensions would be like a cube (or six squares).

In a one-dimension world you would have only straight lines.  But in a two-dimensional world, not only would you have the former, but many more lines that make up a figure.  In a three-dimensional world, you have many figures together but that are now solid figures.

As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels:  you still have them, but combined in new ways – in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

Lewis says that we are like figures in a one- or two-dimensional world.  We cannot even begin to fathom what life is like in a three-dimensional world.  A paper doll could not conceive of what it is like to be a Raggedy-Ann doll, much less like a real baby.

On the human level you have one human being, which is an individual person.  He or she can interact with other individual persons.  But on the divine level you still have the interaction between persons but in one being.

The human level is a simple and rather empty level.  On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings – just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures.  On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine.  In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.

Now we can never fully understand a being like that.  But a two-dimensional person understands squares and so he can catch a glimpse of a third dimension when one speaks of a cube as “six squares” – a super-personal being.

The Trinity and Prayer

Now, Lewis gives yet another example of how this works so that we can grasp a little deeper the nature of the Trinity.  Think of the Christian man or woman who kneels down beside their bed for prayers.  God is the one he or she is seeking.  But why are they seeking Him?  Because He is inside them moving them to pray.  And God’s presence is beside him, helping him to pray and praying for him. 

God is the object of the woman’s prayers – the goal she is trying to reach.  God is in her moving her to pray – the motive power.  God is the path by which she is being moved into His presence. 

So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.  The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life – what I called Zoe or spiritual life:  he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself. 

Theology and Experimental Science

The three-personal God is not easy or simple – it is not simply made up.  Rather it was something we discovered – but not quite.  In the experimental sciences, you must go and look for the object you are studying – they don’t come to you (for instance, rocks).  And when you find them, they don’t usually run away from you.  The initiative of research depends solely upon your abilities. 

As you move to more complex beings (animals and humans) you begin to see the initiative for the relationship beginning to be more complementary. 

Finally, when we reach the experience with God, the initiative lies entirely on the other side and we are now like the rocks – completely passive until He reveals Himself to us.  If God does not show Himself to you, you will never know Him. 

In fact, He shows Himself more clearly to others than to some.  Not because He has favorites, according to Lewis, but because so many are so skewed that they cannot grasp God with their whole self – real men, not perfect men.

The place where God meets with us is among the band of brothers – the Christian church.  It is here that the technical equipment for this theological science is found. 

And anytime someone shows up in that community with a more simplified understanding of God than the Trinity are really wasting all our time.  It is like someone who is going to use his Wal-Mart special binoculars to outsmart the astronomers with their multi-million dollar telescopes.  He might be smart, but he doesn’t have the accurate tools to do the job. 

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier.  But it is not.  We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions.  How could we?  We are dealing with Fact.  Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.