Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis

An Introduction and Study Guide

God is incredibly merciful to us. How many intersections have we gone through in this life, both literally and metaphorically, where things could have gone horribly wrong? That you are here, right now, reading this, and that I am right here, right now, writing this, means that God has sustained us both through one potential catastrophe after another. Only a little reflection should bear this out. That time you made that foolish choice which could have cost you all. That time someone came desperately close to hitting you with his car. That time your friend did that one thing, when you were both teenagers, which could have landed you in a world of hurt. You get the idea. God’s providence has brought you thus far and he has done so for a reason. He has shown you and I great mercy because he has plans for us.

C. S. Lewis was a recipient of uncommon levels of God’s mercy and providential protection. Born November 29, 1898 he was just the “right” age to serve in the armed forced of the United Kingdom when World War I began to rage. It was a truly terrible war, with its trenches and shotgun raids, machine gun nests, mustard gas, trench fever, mortar shells, the impossibility of keeping dry. Millions upon millions of soldiers dead. A whole generation of young men, lost.

Lewis served in the trenches during the so-called Great War. He volunteered. As an Irishmen (that’s right, he was born in Ireland, not England) he was not able to be drafted under the laws of the time (unlike so many others), but he felt it was his duty to go. What right had he to not risk his life when all his friends and fellow countrymen were doing so?

It was not terribly long into his service, however, when he wrote this brief letter to his father on April 16, 1918.

My dear Papy, I am slightly wounded and am now in Hospital and will let you know my definite address as soon as possible.

yours, Jack¹

Lewis’ letter (he was affectionately called Jack by those closest to him) reached his father, but his father assumed that things were much worse that his son was letting on. Lewis’ older brother, Warren (or Warnie), who was also serving in the war, was able to go and see him and he wrote his father immediately thereafter. In a letter dated April 24, 1918, he told his father,

A shell burst close to where he was standing, killing a Sergeant, and luckily for ‘It’ [Jack] he only stopped three bits: one in the cheek and two in the hands: he then crawled back and was picked up by a stretcher bearer.²

Lewis was wounded, though not life threateningly, and it was enough to end his service in the war. Lewis was not at all unconscious, of course, that he had been spared from potential greater sufferings and even death. In a letter to his father, dated June 29, 1918, he wrote,

If I had not been wounded when I was, I should have gone through a terrible time. Nearly all my friends in the Battalion are gone. Did I ever mention Johnson who was a scholar of Queens? I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there. ‘Dis aliter visum’,46 he is dead. I had had him so often in my thoughts, had so often hit on some new point in one of our arguments, and made a note of things in my reading to tell him when we met again, that I can hardly believe he is dead.³

Many of Lewis’ friends and acquaintances died in that war, Paddy Moore among them (one of his best friends at the time). It was only by God’s providence that Lewis survived the ordeal. He had been but inches away from a very different end. While this alternate end would have, of course, been tragic (just as all those millions of other deaths were), it would have been especially tragic for Lewis at that point. At the time Lewis was not at all ready to meet his Maker. Lewis, from the time he was 15 years old until the time he was almost 30, was an avowed atheist.

In a letter to one of his closest friends since childhood, Arthur Greeves, dated June 3, 1918, while Lewis was still convalescing from his wound from the mortar shell, he told Arthur, “I believe in no God, least of all in one that would punish me for the ‘lusts of the flesh’”⁴ Despite Arthur’s many attempts to try to reason with Lewis about matters of faith, Lewis was alway condescending. Arthur was his intellectual inferior and he knew it. Many of Lewis’ exchanges with Arthur, in their personal letters, would shock Lewis fans. The arrogance Lewis displayed in many of those discussions seems so foreign to the man we have come to know.

About this same time Lewis signed a deal for his first book, The Spirits in Bondage, which was a cycle of poetry. It is the only book that Lewis published as a non-Christian. Later he would comment that he felt like his imagination had died during these years of unbelief. This one work he did produce is of a character that would surprise most Lewis enthusiasts. It is, in a word, dark. The tenor of these poems point to the heart of a very different Lewis, an unredeemed Lewis, a Lewis who barely escaped the fate of so many other young men during those days.

By God’s grace and mercy, Lewis lived and he met men like J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and a number of other Christian men who were by no means intellectually inferior to Lewis. They were men who loved Christ and Lewis and they wrangled with him over matters of philosophy, history, faith, and religion. Over the years of many walks and talks he gradually realized that he was losing the argument. Christ and Christianity answered the big questions better than his atheism could. To boot, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus was staggeringly good.

In his autobiographical work, Surprised by Joy, Lewis described the realization that he had lost the fight with God.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.⁵

The Hound of Heaven had caught his man. Lewis was his and there was no going back. In the years thereafter Lewis’ imagination revived, invigorated with the new life Christian faith he began to churn out work after work, this time an allegory of Lewis’ own conversion (The Pilgrim’s Regress), this time a science-fiction fantasy trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength), now a story about a bus ride from Hell to Heaven (The Great Divorce), and, of course, a magical trip through a wardrobe to meet a lion named Aslan (The Chronicles of Narnia). All the while, Lewis’ imagination and first rate scholarly skills were also being applied to write books and essays in defense of the Christian faith, the faith he had run from himself for so long (c.f. God in the Dock, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, etc.).

When the Second World War broke out Lewis was asked to do a series of radio broadcasts to encourage the men on the front lines. These broadcasts became the base materials which would later be edited into the book we now call Mere Christianity. This book, many have acknowledged, is one of the best books ever written for explaining, to unbelievers and new believers alike, what it means to be a Christian and why everyone should be one. It is a masterpiece both because of its powerful argumentation as well as because it is written in such plain and simple language. It’s not particularly scholarly, it is blue-collar in tone, written for everyone, and yet it loses none of its punch for all of that. Lewis had a way of saying profoundly true things in remarkably simple and straightforward ways. Across his entire body of work he managed to speak to the heights of the ivory towers, to the average working man, and to the hearts of small children standing before a big lion.

Just think, we almost never had C. S. Lewis as we now know him. God is merciful. He was merciful to Lewis, in sparing his life and bringing him to faith, but he was also merciful to us in sparing C. S. Lewis. How many people will be in glory with Christ one day because God providentially made sure Lewis stood three inches over this way and not over that way? God could have used other means, of course, to work in the lives of so many. As Lewis knew, God always gets his man. But God chose to do things this way. He spared Lewis so that he might be saved and so that he might impact you and me and countless others for the good of Christ’s kingdom. May he show each of us such mercy and condescension so as to use us similarly in the lives of others.

Below you will find links to each section of the study guide for C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as they become available. If you would like to pick up a copy of the book to join in the study you may do so by clicking HERE. For a list of other Great Books study guides already available, in development, or planned for the future you can click HERE.

Book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Ch. 1 “The Law of Human Nature”

Ch. 2 “Some Objections”

Ch. 3 “The Reality Of The Law”

Ch. 4 “What Lies Behind The Law”

Ch. 5 “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy”

Book 2: What Christians Believe

Ch. 1 “The Rival Conceptions of God”

More Coming Soon…

1. Lewis, C. S.. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931 (pp. 365-366).

2. Lewis, C. S.. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931 (p. 366). (Function).

3. Lewis, C. S.. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931 (p. 388).

4. Lewis, C. S.. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931 (p. 379).

5. Lewis, C.S.. Surprised by Joy: The shape of my early life (p. 266).