THURSDAY MORNING STUDY GROUP FAITH AND LIFE A GROUP FOR IN-DEPTH LEARNING AND SHARING SECTION I:...

THURSDAY MORNING STUDY GROUP

FAITH AND LIFEA GROUP FOR IN-DEPTH LEARNING AND SHARING

SECTION I: SELECTED WRITINGS OF C. S. LEWIS

FACILITATORS: JOHN SCRUGGS AND ART SAUER

SEPTEMBER 11, 2014

SEPTEMBER 11, 2014TODAY’S AGENDA

Opening Prayer:

Book 2. What Christians Believe

Chapter 1. The Rival Conceptions of God

Chapter 2. The Invasion

Chapter 3. The Shocking Alternative

Chapter 4. The Perfect Penitent

Chapter 5. The Practical Conclusion

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 1. THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF

GOD

Lewis begins with what Christians do not have to believe:

- That all religions are wrong throughout

- That other religions contain some truth

Atheists must believe that the main point of every major religion is wrong.


GODBeliefs about God

Atheists, Theists, and [Agnostics]

Pantheism

- God animates the universe, gives life and substance

- Universe almost God, if it did not exist he would not exist

- Anything in the universe is part of God

- God is beyond good and evil, everything good and bad


GOD

Monotheism

- God invented and made the universe

- God definitely good or righteous

- God loves love and hates hatred

- God wants us to behave in a certain way


GOD

What went wrong?

With the world so cruel and unjust how could it possibly have been made by a loving God?

Where does the idea of justice even come from?


GOD

Two possibilities:

1) Justice is just a privately held idea, it doesn’t really exist- Conclusion: God doesn’t exist

- Proof: The world is cruel and unjust

- If justice is not real then the lack thereof (injustice) cannot be a proof against the existence of God


GOD

2) Justice is real, men are aware of it – answers to the question of meaning

- Whole notion of justice declares that the universe has meaning

- If universe had no meaning we would not be able to discern it


GOD

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had got this idea of just and unjust. A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line…Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense.”

-C. S. Lewis

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 2. THE INVASION

Lewis wants no part of “simple philosophies.”

Atheism is too simple because if there is no God and the unverse has no meaning, we would never have found out.

“Christianity and water” is too simple – the notion that there is a God in Heaven but forget about the terrible doctrines of sin, Hell, the devil and redemption.


There exists a world which contains much that is obviously bad and meaningless, but there are creatures like ourselves who know that much is bad and meaningless.

What can explain this?


Christianity

- This is a good world that has gone wrong

- Retains the memory of what it out to have been

Dualism

- Two equal, independent powers, one good, one bad

- Universe is a battlefield for endless war between the two


We believe that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other right. Thus, there is a third thing, some law or standard to which one of the powers conforms and the other does not.

Since the two powers are judged by this standard, or the Being who made the standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, He is is the real God.


Lewis asserts that goodness, is itself while badness is spoiled goodness.

In order to be bad that power must:

- Want good things but pursue them in a bad way

- Have impulses that were originally good, but pervert them

- Must be getting both from the Good Power’s world


To be bad, the Bad Power must possess:

- Existence

- Intelligence

- Will

But these are good, so he must be stealing them from the Good Power, even to be bad he must borrow and steal from his opponent.


- This is why Christianity teaches that the devil is a fallen angel.

- Evil is a parasite, now an original thing.

- This Dark Power was originally created by God, and created to be good, but went wrong.

- Christianity is the story about how the rightful king has landed the Invasion.


“Enemy occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends; that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing to our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.”

- C. S. Lewis

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 3. THE SHOCKING ALTERNATIVE

Is this state of affairs (Prince of the World in power) in accordance with God’s will?

- If yes, one might think this is a very strange God indeed

- If no, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?


Free Will

- God created things to have free will

- Creatures which can go either wrong or right

- A thing free to be good, is also free to be bad

Thus, free will has made evil possible


So why did God give creatures free will?

- Free will, though it makes evil possible, is the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness worth having.

- Happiness God designs is being freely, voluntarily united to him. This requires free will.

- Not a toy which only moves when He pulls the strings.


The Rebellion

So how did the Dark Power go wrong?

- Any creature with a self, can put yourself first, wanting to be God

- Satan’s temptation was to “be like God”

- Experience happiness outside of God, apart from God


God’s Remedy

The shocking alternative to the other systems we have been discussing: A man talking and acting as though he was God.

- He claimed to forgive sins

- He claimed to be eternal

- He claimed to be coming again to judge the world


Lewis closes the chapter by rejecting what he describes as the really foolish thing that people often say: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.”


“This is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; 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. He did not intend to.”

-C. S. Lewis

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 4. THE PERFECT PENITENT

What is the purpose of God landing in enemy-occupied territory?

- Certainly he came to teach

- Gospels are constantly talking about His death and coming to life again


Lewis’ beliefs pre and post-Christian

Pre-Christian: God wanted to punish men, Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off.

Post-Christian: Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself


Lewis uses the chapter to discuss his views of atonement. Most importantly he suggests that if his explanation isn’t helpful to just drop it, since it is just an explanation of the thing to be believed and not the thing itself.


Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement, he is a rebel who must:

- Lay down his arms

- Surrender

- Say he is sorry

- Realize he is on the wrong road


This is the process of repentence, which involves:

- Unlearning self-conceit and self-will

- Killing part of ourself, dying to our self as Jesus put it in the Gospels

The worse you are the more you need to repent and the less you can do it. The only person who do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it.


We now need God’s help to do something which God, in His own nature never does at all – to surrender, to suffer, to submit and to die.

But suppose God became a man – suppose our nature which can suffer and die was combined in one person – then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was a man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.


- We can go through this process only if God does it in us

- God can do it only if He becomes a man (thus the Perfect Penitent)

This is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He need not suffer at all.

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 5. THE PRACTICAL

CONCLUSION

Christians believe that if we share the humility and suffering of Jesus then somehow:

- We share His conquest of death

- We find new life after we have died

- We become perfect and perfectly happy


CONCLUSION

Christianity involves transformation. What is the next step in the development of man?

- Evolution: the step beyond man

- Christ: the man indwelt by Christ


CONCLUSION

How does one appropriate this new life?

- Baptism

- Belief

- Communion


CONCLUSION

Things that are true about Christians according to Lewis:

- Christians don’t act under own strength

- Christian is not someone who never goes wrong

- Christian has the life of Christ within

BOOK 2.CHAPTER 5. THE PRACTICAL CONCLUSION

So the difference between Christians and others is:

- Unbeliever hopes that by doing good, he can please God

- Christian believes that any good he does comes from the life of Christ within him. He or she doesn’t think that God will

love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.

Christians believe that Christ is operating through them.


CONCLUSION

Isn’t is frightfully unfair that this new life should be restricted to those who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? God hasn’t told us what his arrangements for the other people are.


CONCLUSION

“But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through him.”

-C. S. Lewis

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1) Is Christianity the only “truth?” Do other religions contain elements of truth? What does this mean to your Christian faith?

2) Are good and evil two equal powers in an eternal struggle? Can God conquer evil?

3) The “Historical Jesus” movement seeks to describe Jesus as a mortal man. Could a mortal man do and act like Jesus and not be crazy? Must then, Jesus be God?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

4) The central tenet of Christianity is that Christ died for our sins. What does this mean to you?

5) Is Christ a new kind of human? If we accept Christ are we new humans? What does that mean to you?

THURSDAY MORNING STUDY GROUP FAITH AND LIFE A GROUP FOR IN-DEPTH LEARNING AND SHARING SECTION I:...

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