PWJ: S1E32 – MC B4C4 – “Good Infection”

This week we continue to discuss the Trinity and the terms used to describe each its members. We ask what it means to say that “God is love”. Finally, we dig deeper into understanding what it means to participate in the life of God.

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Episode 32: “Good Infection” (Download)

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— Show Notes —

• Sad Announcement: Matt is moving to New York. We will, however, at least be finishing Mere Christianity together, albeit over Skype.

• The Quote-of-the-week:

“In self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice, and that not only on Calvary…. From the foundation of the world he surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience…. From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever”

– C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

• Since Matt had packed for New York and I had only just moved into a new apartment, for the drink-of-the-week we were both drinking straight Bombay Sapphire Gin out of a Chinese tea set I had unpacked.

• Lewis starts the chapter by giving us a picture to imagine:

“I begin this chapter by asking you to get a certain picture clear in your minds. Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other… It is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is causing the position of B …let us imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B’s position would always have been resulting from A’s position. But all the same, A’s position would not have existed before B’s position. In other words the result does not come after the cause”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

Jack uses this to explain the idea of the Son being eternally begotten of the Father.

• Jack reminds us of the difference between making and begetting:

“The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the second; we call it begetting, not making, because what He produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only word to use”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

The language of the Trinity may lead us to falsely conclude that the Father existed prior to the Son:

“But that is not so. There is no before and after about it. And that is why I have spent some time trying to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• Lewis then asks us to reconsider his thought experiment to see how cause and effect can happen at the same time:

“I asked you just now to imagine those two books, and probably most of you did. That is, you made an act of imagination and as a result you had a mental picture. Quite obviously your act of imagining was the cause and the mental picture the result. But that does not mean that you first did the imagining and then got the picture. The moment you did it, the picture was there. Your will was keeping the picture before you all the time. Yet that act of will and the picture began at exactly the same moment and ended at the same moment”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

He then asks us to apply the same principle to the Father eternally begetting the Son:

“If there were a Being who had always existed and had always been imagining one thing, his act would always have been producing a mental picture; but the picture would be just as eternal as the act… In the same way we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father – what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• Matt explains that Lewis has been using analogies from things within time to help try and explain the Trinity, but that the Trinity has existed outside of time from all eternity.

• Matt asked me whether I thought the human mind is blown upon entering Heaven and I quoted St. Paul:

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”

– 1 Corinthians 2:9

• Lewis warns us about using analogies of heat and light:

“All these pictures of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things instead of two Persons”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

He says that we would do well to stay close to the language of Sacred Scripture, which uses the words “Father” and “Son”:

“So that after all, the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away from the words of the Bible. 

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

Lewis says that we don’t have to use exclusively Biblical language, but that we must constantly return to it:

“It is quite right to go away from them for a moment in order to make some special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• We now turn to the phrase “God is love”…

Matt explains that love requires more than one person:

“Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love…”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

I explain that this is why you can’t say that the God of the Qur’an is love. While both Christians and Muslims are monotheists, Christians are Trinitarians but Muslims are Unitarians – they believe in a very strict oneness of God (known as Tawhid).A solitary being cannot be love if he had nothing to love. In contrast, Christians believe that God is a community of persons:

“[We] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God for ever and has created everything else”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

Lewis even describes the life of the Trinity as a kind of dance, a comparison which both Matt and I liked very much:

“…if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• From here, we transitioned to talking about the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit:

“The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person… What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

Lewis helps us understand the Holy Spirit by noting how we speak about the “spirit” of a some group or society:

“They talk about its ‘spirit’ because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

I mention that Scott Hahn who, in his book First Comes Love, says that a married couple reflect the life of the Trinity. There comes a point in a marriage when the love between husband and wife grows so strong, that nine months later they have to give it a name.

• Jack readily admits that, for many, grasping the Holy Spirit is much harder than the other two members of the Trinity:

“Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two…  In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him: He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something ‘out there,’ in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

Matt and I shared stories of our own coming to grips with the Holy Spirit.

• Now that we have established the fact that the Trinity is a communion of persons who have been loving each other for all eternity, we can now begin to understand that the invitation of Christianity is to join this relationship of love:

“…each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• How do we enter into this life though?

“Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection… If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prizes which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

• I mentioned that Joe Heschmeyer, author of Shamless Popery, came and gave an excellent presentation on theosis at a parish here in San Diego. The MP3 of that talk is available here.

• Sharing in the life of God is the bottom line in Christianity:

“Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has – by what I call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Book 4)

As we saw in the previous chapter, we don’t just need “bios” (natural) life, but “zoe” (supernatural) life from God. I pointed to an image given by George MacDonald (and recounted in The Great Divorce) of God moving into your home and transforming it into a palace where He can live.

• I shared my review of the Unbelievable? podcast:

“If you’re looking for high-quality podcast about religion, this is the podcast for you. Each week, a Christian and a non-Christian meet to discuss and debate some aspect of the Faith. The host, Justin Brierley, does a stellar job at remaining impartial, moderating the discussion to allow both sides to present their case”