PWJ: S1E41 – MC B4C11 – “The New Men”

We have finally made it! In today’s episode we draw to a close our journey through “Mere Christianity”. Lewis closes out Book IV by talking in more detail about “The New Men”…

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Episode 41: The New Men (Download)

• Today we speak about the end result of theosis, the “new men”. 

• Quote-of-the-week was one of my favourite Scripture passages:

….present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:1-2

• The drink-of-the-week is Hibiki Suntory Whisky.  I told Matt that the next time he’s back in San Diego we need to go to The Aero Club and drink some more of their Japanese Whisky.

• This past week twenty-five members of our C.S. Lewis book club see a one-man production of the conversion of C.S. Lewis called The Most Reluctant Convert, starring Max McLean.

The text for the play was drawn almost exclusively from Lewis’ works: Surprised By Joy, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity and The Weight of Glory.

Matt unfortunately missed the performance on both the East and West Coast. 

• One of my friends sent me a message saying that he got a “C.S. Lewis Discount” on a piece of art after striking up a conversation about Jack with the artist!

• I’m currently reading Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan, a novelisation of Joy Davidman’s romance with C.S. Lewis. I couldn’t recommend it more! There are quite a few differences between this book’s recounting of their meeting and romance and those of the Shadowlands movies (Movie 1 | Movie 2).

• This podcast episode is being published just a couple of days before C.S. Lewis’ death, so I kicked off the episode by reading the Collect by the Episcopal Church for C.S. Lewis:

O God of searing truth and surpassing beauty, we give you thanks for Clive Staples Lewis, whose sanctified imagination lights fires of faith in young and old alike. Surprise us also with your joy and draw us into that new and abundant life which is ours in Christ Jesus, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Episcopal Church Collect

• Lewis has been arguing in Book IV that Jesus comes not to just bring improvement, but transformation. In this chapter he couches this in terms of evolution. 

Evolution explains how man evolved from lower types of life. People devote a lot of time to speculating what the “next step” will be in evolution, the next step beyond man.

He says that they make the mistake of looking back to see how things have worked up until now. If one did the same thing at the time of the dinosaurs, one would have predicted that animals would just keep getting larger and larger with thicker and thicker armour. However, it is the small, naked homo sapiens which came to dominate the planet through their bigger brains.  As a result, he thinks the “next step” will be entirely new:

“I should expect not merely difference but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change but a new method of producing the change…. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

Christianity claims that this “next step” has already happened, with creatures of God becoming sons of God through Christianity.

• In what ways is this step new? Lewis suggests several differences:

1. It came from outside of nature through the incarnation

2.  Reproduction without sex, instead favouring “the good infection”

3. It is an optional step, we get to choose

4. The first instance is the source of life for all others

“[Jesus] is the origin and centre and life of all the new men. He came into the created universe…bringing with Him the Zoe, the new life….And He transmits it… by what I have called ‘good infection.’”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

5. The rapid speed of the change

“…compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

The world keeps predicting Christianity’s death, but they keep getting it wrong:

“Again and again [the world] has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without or corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism [Islam], the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements [French Revolution, Communism]. But every time the world has been disappointed”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

The world has been disappointed ever since the crucifixion:

“In a sense – and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them – that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us!”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

6. The stakes are so much higher with this next step 

The stakes are higher. By falling back at the earlier steps a creature lost, at the worst, its few years of life on this earth: very often it did not lose even that. By falling back at this step we lose a prize which is (in the strictest sense of the word) infinite

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

This reminded me of Pascal’s Wager which is an argument for the belief in God which essentially asks the question: “What do you have to lose?”

• Lewis also compares the “next step” to a baby being born:

“I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of course it would think the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong; for if it stays there it will die”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

• Jesus has been transforming people for two thousand years and Jack says that there are examples of this “new man” scattered about the world:

“Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognisable; but you must know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of ‘religious people’ which you have formed from your general reading. 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”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

I said that this accurately describes the (“shiny”) people in my life who have shown Christ clearly to me.

Regarding these transformed people seeming “to have a lot of time”, I referenced a book I read about a benedictine monk. At his funeral, everyone was stunned how many people he knew. They each thought that they were the centre of his life. 

• Lewis says that once you’ve recognized one, you’ll recognise others:

“When you have recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

This reminds me of the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Professor Kirk is talking to the children after their return from Narnia:

“…don’t talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves. What’s that? How will you know? Oh, you’ll know all right. Odd things they say — even their looks… Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

• Lewis now asks whether, if we die to self and put of Christ, whether we all become the same:

To become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves.’ Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go….And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be ‘in’ us all, shall we not be exactly the same?

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

To answer this Lewis gives two analogies, one regarding light and the other regarding salt:

“You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

In the same way, after tasting salt and discovering that salt is used in all cooking, one might imagine that the food would taste identical, whereas the opposite is true. 

In contrast, there is so much of Christ that even millions of Christians is not enough to express him fully:

“There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

• However, as we have often said, it is possible to resist Christ. Jack argues that this makes us less like ourselves rather than more like our selves:

“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. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils…I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

It is only Saints who are truly themselves and truly unique:

“Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

Matt lamented that society doesn’t hold up Saints as role models as much as they should. I explained that at church today the children came dressed as their favourite Saints and during the homily our priest spoke to each of them and asked for a little bit of that Saint’s story.

Matt shared a little about the movie Saint Vincent, starring Bill Murray.

• It all begins with humility:

“But there must be a real giving up of the self… The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

Jack points out that this idea runs through life. If you want to make a good impression, you should probably stop thinking about it. In the same way, rather than trying to be original, you should just be truthful and you will probably be naturally original.

Matt really liked this quotation, and I suggested it’s because it’s very close to his favourite misquote of Lewis.

• We must “die to self”, as St. Paul tells us:

“Give up 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 favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre 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”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

• Lewis then ends the book:

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”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

• Matt suggests that a way to make ourselves docile to this transformation is to make space in our lives to be quiet with God. He had just got back from a retreat which was focused on 1 Kings 19 when Elijah meets God in the stillness. I suggested that if this is the case, we must make time for it.

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

C.S. Lewis

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” 

Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

• I outlined the next few episodes. I’ll be interviewing Joe Heschmeyer, we’ll be having a Mere Christianity retrospective, we’ll then have an episode discussing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from a theological point of view. After that we’ll be starting The Great Divorce!