Mere Christianity may well be Lewis' apologetic tour de force (while the Chronicles of Narnia are his theological tour de force), even though it is not a comprehensive defense of the faith. One could argue that the weakest part of the book's first five chapters is the author's sole reliance on the moral argument as his foundation for God's existence. There are other arguments that are far more ruinous to the atheistic position, such as the Transcendent argument, devastatingly employed by Bahnsen against Stein in 1985. But Lewis was not delving into ultra-nerdy apologetic stuff like epistemology and presuppositionalism. He was talking on the radio, during a time of war, to the general public. Clearly, he wanted to move along with some urgency to the basics of Christianity, and surely it would be unfair to fault him for not turning it into an all-encompassing summa apologetica.

To be sure, there is very little to quibble over in Mere Christianity and much to endorse. I am an ardent admirer of the man, and a voracious devourer of his books. I point this out because my goal in this piece is not to do a hack-job on the man or the book, but to simply highlight an area where Lewis, claiming to represent "mere" (or "essential") Christianity, in fact inserts something else; something that is out of step even with his own Church's formularies.

Anyway, the book chugs along entertainingly and profitably, if not uneventfully. Lewis handles things like Communion and Baptism rather deftly; refusing to get too caught up in one position or another. Scattered throughout are moments of brilliance which do not bear mentioning here as you can find the various quotes on coffee mugs and keychains these days. So, I figured that when I arrived at the second to last chapter, "Nice People or New Men", I'd finish the book without incident. Boy, was I wrong.

In this chapter, Lewis is building a case that God is not so much interested in making people "nice" as much as He is in making new people. True enough. The author uses two theoretical individuals to make his points; "Dick" and "Miss Bates." He writes:

You cannot expect God to look at Dick's placid temper and friendly disposition exactly as we do. They result from natural causes which God Himself creates. Being merely temperamental, they will all disappear if Dick's digestion alters. The niceness, in fact, is God's gift to Dick, not Dick's gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural causes, working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin, to produce in Miss Bates the narrow mind and jangled nerves which account for most of her nastiness. He intends,in His own good time, to set that part of her right. But that is not, for God, the critical part of the business. It presents no difficulties. It is not what He is anxious about. What He is watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it by a mere act of power. He is waiting and watching for it both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle that can choose. It can point to its true North; but it need not. Will the needle swing round, and settle, and point to God? He can help it to do so. He cannot force it. He cannot, so to speak,put out His own hand and pull it into the right position, for then it would not be free will any more. Will it point North? That is the question on which all hangs. Will Miss Bates and Dick offer their natures to God? The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that moment,nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance. God can see to that part of the problem.

I've left as much of the surrounding text around the quotation to give the reader context. What Lewis is doing here, ironically, is smuggling in a highly partisan doctrinal system called Arminianism (a descendent of the heresy called semi-Pelagianism, condemned at the Council of Orange in 529) into a book that purports to simply identify the basic, or "mere" essentials of Christianity.

Lewis pretty clearly asserts what Arminianism affirms: the practical sovereignty of the free will of man, and man's moral ability - in his unregenerate state - to choose God. God is painted not as Sovereign, in whose hand the "king's heart is...as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will" (Proverbs 21:1). Instead, we see God primarily as impotent observer, using what influences are at his disposal to try and cajole Man's Supreme Will into choosing Him. In this scenario, Christ died to make salvation possible, but not actual. Application and appropriation of Christ's sacrifice are left up to us, and God really, really, really hopes we choose the right way. Some who adhere to this line of thinking have gone further in saying that God does actually apply the work of Christ to us, but say that the reason He does so is because He saw from eternity past that we would choose Him of our own free will. This is clever, though utterly unsupported by Scripture.

Lewis further implies that any force exercised by God to ensure people make a certain choice is absolutely not an option, as it would make humans into automatons. The author is not really guilty of being illogical (though I believe he is creating a false dichotomy), but rather of departing from Scripture. Incidentally, he is also far off the formularies of his own church (Church of England). Moreover, underlying all of this is the lack of any definition of what "free will" is.

One thing "free will" is not is "human responsibility", although the two are often used as euphemisms for each other. Human responsibility is our debt owed to the perfect, holy God of the universe. It lies completely independent of our moral ability; instead, it is a pillar of the moral order of God's universe. Humans are responsible before God. What we usually think of, when we say "free will" in the Christian context, is the moral ability to choose the Right or the Wrong. Fair enough. So what does Scripture say? Well, there isn't room for all the texts - suffice to say, the accent of Scripture is not on the free will of man, but on the sovereignty of God:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6 ESV)

This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: "About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son." And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad--in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls--she was told, "The older will serve the younger." As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.
You will say to me then, "Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory--even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles (Romans 9:8-24 ESV)

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:9-10 ESV)

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. (John 6:44 ESV)

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience--among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved--and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:1-9 ESV)

Now, let's look at what the 39 Articles of Religion say in their distillation of the biblical revelation. Article 10 says:

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith; and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

And Article 17 reads (truncated):

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour.

Additionally, the Westminster Confession of Faith handles "free will" thusly, which I find not to oppose Article 10, but rather flesh it out:

I. God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined good, or evil.
II. Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom, and power to will and to do that which was good and well pleasing to God; but yet, mutably, so that he might fall from it.
III. Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.
IV. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, He frees him from his natural bondage under sin; and, by His grace alone, enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good; yet so, as that by reason of his remaining corruption, he does not perfectly, or only, will that which is good, but does also will that which is evil.
V. The will of man is made perfectly and immutably free to do good alone in the state of glory only.

It is difficult to square the "watching, waiting, hoping" God of Mere Christianity's Book 4, Chapter 10, with the God of Scripture and the affirmations of the various Reformed confessions. And yet, my goal is not to hash out Arminianism/Semi-Pelagianism but to simply show how out-of-step Lewis is with Scripture, and even with his own church's formularies. Though moot today, It seems like it would have been a more prudent decision for Lewis to acknowledge that Scripture creates an admittedly mysterious "third way" which is neither man-centric nor automata: individuals who are chosen by God and effectually drawn by God, out of their spiritual death, into new life in Christ - and yet, they are not automatons. If anything, they are more like automatons when they are spiritually dead; unable to even recognize and choose the Good (Ephesians 2:1-5). Once made alive by God, they are freed from spiritual death and now able to willingly choose the Good, albeit not perfectly, while mortal. The very idea of a 'watching, waiting' God who cannot turn the needle of the heart's compass is entirely at odds with what is plainly revealed to us in the Bible.

If nothing else, Lewis could have left the entire thing alone and simply said that the Church has differed on the extent and nature of free will; it's a mystery, and all that sort of thing, and he wouldn't have been wrong. As it is, Mere Christianity is a fantastic piece of writing that brings much to the table and doubtlessly has been instrumental in many peoples' walk of faith, including my own. I certainly won't stop putting copies of it in curious non-Christian friends' hands. And yet, I'd be remiss if I didn't identify this area as deficient.

Eric Eagle is a geographer working in Darmstadt, Germany. Though he has quite enjoyed working with the physical and spatial aspects of God's earth for the past 19 years, he secretly only does so to support his true interest: amassing books.

First posted at http://odgdevotionals.blogspot.de/2015/01/the-powerlessness-of-god-in-c-s-lewis.html

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A Response to Eric Eagle's article

By Dr. Bruce Atkinson
www.virtueonline.org
January 22, 2105

Eric,

Now you see why Calvinists are not big C.S. Lewis fans. In the interest of convincing atheists and agnostics (which was Lewis' calling), Lewis was not shy about making them responsible for their choices. And neither is God shy about this if we examine His "whole counsel" as we find it in the scriptures. "Choose you this day who you will serve..." And note all the commands of God would be useless and absurd if humans did not have a modicum of choice (and thus responsibility).

In my view, it has never been a question of "either .. or" but always "both ... and." Our limited logic wants to say that we cannot both accept the total sovereignty of God and also human choice and responsibility. But I submit that the scriptures present both options as true. Both Calvinists and Arminians have a partial grasp on the truth here, they are just looking at opposite sides of the coin. In his quote, Lewis is examining the "tails", or human side. Not so much wrong as only half the story, and the least important half at that.

In the predestination/sovereignty versus human choice/responsibility debate, if I had to choose one over the other, then I would most certainly go with "heads"-- the sovereignty of God, that is, His perfect plan, His wisdom, His knowledge of each of us, His omniscience and His omnipotence to make sure that everything turns out according to His divine will. Romans 9 is quite clear about that. In terms of human will, of course, since the Fall, our capacity to choose what is right was broken-- but not totally so or the Law would be meaningless (see Romans 1:18-20 below).

Romans 1:18-20: 18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-- his eternal power and divine nature-- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

I especially like your quote below, which supports my own 'both...and' position: "...Scripture creates an admittedly mysterious 'third way': individuals who are chosen by God and effectually drawn by God, out of their spiritual death, into new life in Christ -- and yet, they are not automatons. If anything, they are more like automatons when they are spiritually dead; unable to even recognize and choose the Good (Ephesians 2:1-5). Once made alive by God, they are freed from spiritual death and now able to willingly choose the Good, albeit not perfectly, while mortal."

You also wrote: "The very idea of a 'watching, waiting' God who cannot turn the needle of the heart's compass is entirely at odds with what is revealed to us in the Bible." Yes and no. Lewis was just silly to depict God as anxious about anything. He already knows exactly what will happen. However, there are enough passages in scripture that indicate that God is patient and that He "stands at the door and knocks." Why would God do that if He intended to just break the door down anyway because He is all-powerful and can do it. No, as one theologian put it, God is a gentleman who will not force us. As Lewis has indicated elsewhere, God is the divine lover who woos us so well that the elect cannot resist His grace and love. But the non-elect obviously do resist it, both by their choice and God's omniscient plan.

Let's 'flesh' the issue out some more: In His wisdom and by His permissive will, in this age, the world (culture), the flesh (original sin), and the devil still remain and have their negative influence on us, enslaving humanity. But even slaves have some degree of willpower to choose; it is just greatly limited. And when we come to Christ, drawn by the love and grace of God, we are freed from the chains of these evil influences. Now our choices are increasingly free. We can continually choose God... if we will. Note that the temptations to sin will not go away as long as we are in these vulnerable bodies on this fallen planet.

How much of the sin and suffering in the world can be blamed directly on God (since He is sovereign)? We can get into the apologetics of theodicy here. Augustine (who has been so championed by the Reformers and even Calvinists) was actually a bit Arminian in his free will theodicy. I refer you to my article: http://www.virtueonline.org/apologetic-theodicy-why-there-so-much-suffering

Dr. Bruce Atkinson is a regular contributor to Virtueonline.