This post started out with me writing about the book I just finished reading:
Mere Christianity. But as I went to my favourite source of gratuitous links for my posts,
Wikipedia, I found that the article there was in some ways rather critical of the book, which I have almost nothing but praise for. Its main point concerns Lewis being vague and creating false dilemmas. The piece of the book they choose to illustrate this (evidently a famous portion, quoted by Ronald Reagan at some point...) was one that I found to be particularly profound.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.Wikipedia's "argument" is that Lewis doesn't consider other reasonable options, such as Christ's claim of being the Son of God being attributed to him later by the writers of the Gospels. To me that argument isn't even really this argument at all. Really, that argument is asking whether or not Scripture is ispired word or a nice piece of literature. With regards to Lewis being vague, I see many of his metaphors as being simplifications, but what good is a metaphor if it is more complicated than the thing it is trying to convey?
This could quickly turn into a rant about Wikipedia and the bias of a system where anyone can write about anything they like, and work their own views into it, but I'll leave that for another day.
Really I would rather talk about the book. I think it should be required reading for anyone who is Christian, is thinking of becoming Christian or isn't Christian and would like to hear some good reasons to think about it. It solidified for me a good number of things that I either understood poorly, or had never thought about. Parts of faith can often be taken at face value as you're taught them, and this pulls those things out and gives a how and why to them.
FInally it would seem that as I slowly read the book a few chapters at a time, the part of the book I was reading would seem remarkably applicable at that exact moment. From Bible study discussions where I would immediately see the connection to what I had read to discussions with friends to random daily events, I would see connections back to the book. Coincidence can be blamed for many things, and maybe I was looking for what I had read and therefore finding it, but it would seem to me that there might be a bit more behind this. In either case, it was a great book: thought provoking, applicable and remarkably readable for what passes as a theology text. Now everyone should go out and read it. Yes, that means you.
