Reading the Classics: Mere Christianity

I’ve been reading along with Tim Challies in his Reading the Classics Together reading program. This week’s reading was Book 2 (What Christians Believe) from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. This section has five chapters in which Lewis discusses some the common foundational beliefs of Christianity.

There’s no getting around Lewis’s skill as a writer and explainer of difficult concepts. There were places in this section, however, that had arguments that I thought were weak or unbiblical. In his post on this section, Tim Challies mentions the three bits that annoyed me the most. I’m short on time, so I’m only only going to make some brief remarks on Lewis’s idea that God gave us free will because that’s the only way we could have meaningful love.

As Lewis defines free will, it includes the possibility of going “either wrong or right.” And this sort of free will, says he, is “the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” I know this is a commonly used argument—that God had to make human beings with the possibility that they would choose evil in order for their love to be real—but I don’t think it’s a very good argument.

In heaven, will our love for God be real? Will it be a love worth having? Of course it will.

Will there be the possibility that we might go wrong in heaven, or that we might not love God? Of course not!

If we will be able to love truly and meaningfully in heaven, where there will be no possibility that we can go wrong, then we know that it wasn’t necessary for God to allow for the possibiliy of going wrong in order for us to have the sort of love that’s worth having. He had to have another reason for allowing evil in our world.

Comments

[Karen]

God gave us the gift of free will-choosing between good and evil. He will never take that gift away from us. I don't agree with Lewis's definition of free will. But we have the choice to agree or disagree with his philosophy, right?

Karen, Monrovia, CA