C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 3 | “Time and Beyond Time”
Question: Why does Lewis suggest we might want to skip this chapter?
Answer: This one may or may not be of use. He plans “to talk about something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others merely an unnecessary complication.” If you are the latter, Lewis says to go on to the next chapter.
Q: What problem does Lewis want to address?
A: He just spoke about prayer, and while the subject is still on his mind, he wanted to address a difficulty many people have. He quotes someone who said, “I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.”
Q: What should we notice in this comment?
A: The phrase, “at the same moment.” We can imagine God responding to multiple prayer requests “if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in.” The problem, then, is the idea of God trying to do too many things at once.
Q: How does this relate to us and God?
A: This is exactly how our lives work. We live “moment by moment” and in each of these moments “there is room for very little.” We then assume that the way Time works for us—a succession of moments, past, present, and future—is the way things work for God. That God is living from the past to the future, just like we do.
Q: What is “almost certainly” true of God?
A: God does not live in Time. “His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to him” at a certain time, God “need not listen to them all in that one little snippet” of time. Every moment of time “is always the Present for Him.”
Q: What analogy does Lewis offer to try and make sense of this?
A: He asks us to imagine him writing a novel where he writes, “Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!” For fictional Mary living in Lewis’ story, there is no gap of time between putting down her work and the knock at the door. But Lewis the author is not living in Mary’s time. He could spend hours thinking about Mary—really as long as he wanted—but those hours “would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all.”
Lewis doesn’t think his illustration is perfect, “but it may give just a glimpse of . . . the truth.” God, who lives outside of time, “has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only [person] in the world.”
Q: How does Lewis’ analogy break down?
A: His illustration has the author leaving the time of the story he is writing to enter his own time. The problem is that Lewis does not believe God lives in time at all. He doesn’t live moment-by-moment. If our lives are like a straight line that we travel on a page from one part to the next, God is the page that contains the whole line.
Q: What other difficulty does this solve?
A: It solves a problem he thought he had with Christianity before he became a Christian. The Christian belief was “the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human being.” And when God became a human baby—Jesus, born of Mary—how did he then keep the world going? Why as a man did he have to ask “Who touched me?” when he is “God who knows everything”?
Lewis thought of the life of Jesus the way he thought of his time in the military, as “a shorter period taken out of [his] total life,” as though there was a time “when His human life was still in the future: the coming to a period when it was present: then coming to a period when He could look back on it as something in the past.” This is not the way to think about it because “God has no history.”
Q. What is another difficulty Lewis had?
A. It’s the problem of God’s omniscience and our free will. If God knows what I am going to do, then “how can I be free to do otherwise?” The answer is that since every moment is the present to God, this does not change the choices of our free will. Again, God is not living on a time-line like we do. He doesn’t look back at a yesterday or forward to a tomorrow. “All the days are ‘Now’ for Him.”
Q. What is Lewis’ judgment about this idea?
A. He says it has helped him, but “If it does not help you, leave it alone.” He believes that though his idea is not in conflict with Christianity, “You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it.”
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