Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: On Faith

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book III, Christian Behaviour, "Faith [Part II]":

          I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to notice carefully. It is this. If 

     this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never 

     asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity 

     that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are 

     a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance 

     along the Christian road. These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they 

     were. They are directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the 

     journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you 

     find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave 

     it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant. If 

     one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.

          Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I am going to try to 

     explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be thinking I have got there when I have 

     not. I can only ask instructed Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; 

     and others to take what I say with a grain of salt--as something offered, because it may be a 

     help, not because I am certain that I am right.

          I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I said last week that 

     the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the 

     Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be 

     giving back to God what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his 

     bankruptcy. Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he 

     cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality--the kind of creatures 

     He intended us to be--creatures related to Himself in a certain way. I do not add "and related 

     to one another in a certain way," because that is included: if you are right with Him you will 

     inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted 

     rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another. And 

     as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, 

     or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain--as long as he is thinking of claims and 

     counterclaims between himself and God--he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is 

     misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relation until 

     he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.

          When I say "discovered," I mean really discovered: not simply said it parrot-fashion. Of 

     course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we 

     have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to 

     offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: 

     really finding out by experience that it is true.

          Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our 

     very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at 

     the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being 

     completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying 

     harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. 

     All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do 

     this. I can't." Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, "Have I reached that moment?" 

     Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a 

     man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite 

     often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, 

     "Hullo! I'm growing up." It is often only when he looks back that he realises what has 

     happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up." You can see it even in simple 

     matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very 

     likely to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen to every 

     one in a sudden flash--as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so gradual that no one could 

     ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the 

     change in itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident 

     about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and 

     leave it to God.

          I know the words "leave it to God" can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the 

     moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: 

     trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He 

     carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself 

     and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 

     "sonship" with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God"[...] If you like to put it that way, 

     Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the 

     whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to 

     reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should 

     have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. Again, in a 

     sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it-- 

     throw up the sponge. But then you could not "stop trying" in the right way and for the right 

     reason until you had tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything 

     over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, 

     trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you 

     would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow 

     that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these 

     things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to 

     get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way 

     because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

          Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good 

     actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it 

     does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious 

     moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. 

     Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in 

     Him good actions must inevitably come. There are two parodies of the truth which different 

     sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps 

     they may make the truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that 

     matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best 

     thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over £10,000 and we will see you through." 

     The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, 

     done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only 

     commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all that matters. 

     Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a 

     good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end." The answer to that 

     nonsense is that, if what you call your "faith" in Christ does not involve taking the slightest 

     notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all--not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual 

     acceptance of some theory about Him.

          The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one 

     amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling"--

     which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes 

     on, "For it is God who worketh in you"--which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. 

     I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am 

     not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight 

     compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working 

     together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that 

     you could say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down. God is 

     not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I 

     do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it different 

     Churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on 

     the importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most 

     strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that is as far as I go.

          I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to 

     be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of 

     all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of 

     those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call 

     goodness as a mirror is filled with light But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it 

     anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it 

     comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's 

     eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter