C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 11 | “The New Men”
Question: What point did Lewis emphasize in the previous chapter?
Answer: God is after transformation, not improvement. He used the illustration of a horse becoming a winged creature.
Q: How might evolution help us understand this Christian idea?
A: Evolution is the idea “that man has evolved from lower types of life.” As a result, people ask What’s next for humans? “When is the thing beyond man going to appear?” Lewis reminds us about the “very heavily armored creatures” of the dinosaur era. The idea of evolution would have expected “heavier and heavier armor,” but instead “little, naked, unarmored animals which had better brains . . . were going to master the whole planet” not only with “more power” than dinosaurs, but “a new kind of power.”
Lewis says that in the same way “the stream of Evolution” did not continue in the same direction but took a sharp bend, “the Next Step” for humans will also be in a new direction, “not merely difference but a new kind of difference.”
Q: How does this help us understand the Christian view of things?
A: The Christian view is that “the Next Step has already appeared.” Rather than bigger brains and more control over nature, the change “goes off in a totally different direction—a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God.” 2,000 years ago we saw the first example in Jesus. The change wasn’t a natural process of evolution, “but something coming into nature from outside.”
Q: How will the Next Step be different from what has happened previously?
A: One, change won’t be introduced by sexual reproduction.
Two, change from creatures to sons will include a voluntary choice where previously “progress was . . . something that happened to them, not something that they did.”
Three, Christ is not simply an example of something new, but he is “the new man” who brought new life into the world he created and shares that life with those who relate to Him.
Four, compared to evolutionary processes, the introduction of Christianity has happened quickly and is in the early stages of development. Anti-Christian forces are always disappointed, beginning with the crucifixion where “The Man came to life again.”
Five, “The stakes are higher.” There is an infinite prize that awaits all who choose this new birth.
Q: How can you recognize people who have taken the new step?
A: “Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. . . . They will not be very like the idea of ‘religious people’ . . . They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. . . . They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from.”
Q: What one thing will not be true of these new creations?
A: That they will be all alike. We must say goodbye to ourselves and go to Christ to have His mind, but that will not produce identical creatures. In the same way that light reveals differences and salt brings out the taste of things, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully.”
Q: Why is it no good trying to be ourselves without Christ?
A: “The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires.” There’s a kind of irony even in talking about pursuing our own wishes when those wishes come from our physical bodies or the ideas of others or the suggestion of devils or propaganda. It is when we give ourselves over to the personality of Christ that we “first begin to have a real personality of [our] own.”
Q: What do we need to remember about giving up our self?
A: It must be real. You should not go to God to seek an improved personality. If you do you are not actually going to God. “The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.” Your real self comes when you look for Him, not it.
Lewis should have the last word:
“Give your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing! Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
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