In C.S Lewis’s celebrated book Mere Christianity he writes the following: “I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice.…
In “Mere Christianity”, C.S Lewis describes how hard it is to be a good Christian in his statement “now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing)” (265). In this statement, Lewis is arguing that struggling to be good and having faith in religion takes a tremendous amount of willpower. Faith in religion takes conscious effort because it can become difficult to hold onto faith over time. I can relate this to my own personal experience of struggling to maintain my faith and be a good person/Muslim. I consider myself to be a person with good “akhlaq” which is an Arabic term referring to an individual that practices virtue, morality, and manners.…
The following comments are intended to be a distillation, commentary, and reflection on the major themes of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. I hope these notes will be helpful for those charged with leading a study of the book, particularly for students or others who have had minimal theological training. Chapter comments are more extensive in the beginning because Lewis introduces themes early and tends to return to them as the book progresses. Page references are to the HarperCollins 2001 paperback edition. Chapter 1 One of Lewis’ major concerns throughout the book is the intellectual assumptions of his world. At the beginning he notes a “materialist”…
Lewis is once again saying, merely having these feelings are not the sin, the sin is what you do about them. The bible states that “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” (Ephesians, 4:26). The scripture appears to be supporting Lewis’s position that, you can have these emotions. The question then becomes if you are allowed to be angry, then where does the sin enter into the equation? The answer is when your actions based on that emotional anger come into play. The book also goes into the subject of marriage within the context of sexual morality, by stating “Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence." Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong,” (Lewis,…
Wengert, T. J. (2009). The Book of Concord and Human Sexuality, Seen Through the Institution of Marriage.Dialog: A Journal Of Theology, 48(1), 9-18. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6385.2009.00426.x…
The conflicts between the gods and men are a topic which is heavily present within Till We Have Faces, but those between family members are as well. Examples include Bardia and his wife, and Orual and Redival, but the disagreements of Orual and her father, Trom, King of Glome, are particularly strengthened by their relationship as parent and offspring. The foundations of this greater argument are what is used to exploit the greater overall message conveyed about the relationship between God and man, but paralleled within a family scenario. In Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis, the external conflicts between the King of Glome and Orual which are based in Glome itself, Psyche, and Ungit enhance Lewis’s support for Christianity and its comparison to other religions.…
Though Screwtape’s distorted views on God’s love, Lewis implies that God is “Love” that He loves people for their sake, not His, and that His love challenges people to become generous in their love. Wormwood’s “patient” is drifting dangerously deeper into Christian belief, and Screwtape advises his protege to forsake fleshly temptations and try to corrupt his spirituality. He mentions that the various interpretations of Jesus that exist in society are devilish inventions. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each “historical Jesus” is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new “historical Jesus” therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another.…
‘Flawed characters are always more memorable than any moral lessons that literature seeks to draw from them’…
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the…
Natural Law, the basis for many of the teachings of the Catholic Church, is often considered a very conservative approach to sexual ethics, particularly to pre-marital sex. This allows for many interesting points for discussion in a modern society like our own. In this essay I will outline the Natural Law approach to pre-marital sex and evaluate its reliability. I will also outline and evaluate other ethical approaches to the topic in an attempt to determine if a more reliable approach is available.…
This essay seeks to definitively answer if contents from the Holy Bible condemn Homosexuality. Within the essay is a clear definition of homosexuality and the debate between Conservative Christians and Liberal Christians about the answer. Biblical verses and passages are analyzed from a Conservative and Liberal point of view, including Genesis 1:27-28 (the passage concerning God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply”), and Genesis 19 (the passage surrounding a possibly homosexual intimacy offense attempt before God destroyed the city of Sodom). Isaiah 1, Jeremiah 23:14 and Ezekiel 16:49-50 are analyzed from a Liberal point of view in support of the Liberal claim that an accurate interpretation of Genesis 19 does not present text in clear and convincing condemnation of homosexuality. Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 and Romans 1:26-27 are analyzed to give support to the Conservative claim that homosexuality is condemned within biblical text. Overall, it is concluded that the Holy Bible while it doesn’t condemn homosexuality in as many places as Conservatives argue, does however condemn it in selected places.…
At a glance, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Aeneid are some of the greatest works of literature pertaining to violence and its effects on the societies from which they’re derived from. In fact, these three works of literature are meant to teach the audience a lesson about what sin does to people all around the world. For this reason, the epics travel so well into the 21st century. We all can feel how sin pollutes our life. The sin of sexual desire hits us all at our core and tries to break down the barriers of our faith. Sexual desire itself is not sinful, when used in marriage. However, when sexual desire causes catastrophic effects and pollutes our everyday living, it becomes dangerously sinful. Which is gratified in these three epics. Consequently, the sin of sexual desire in Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Aeneid ultimately leads to the humiliation of…
The chapter that I chose to reflect on for this paper is Chapter 8 from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: The Shocking Alternative.…
To deny that beauty is an agreeable object to the eye would be false and foolish But to make this the sole consideration of marriage, to lust after it so violently as to reject and disdain religion, virtue and sense is surely inconsistent either with a wise man or a good Christian. Although this sermon mainly condemns marriage for reasons of lust, Fielding more commonly condemns marriage for reasons of financial gain or social elevation. The way in which Fielding conveys his philosophy of marriage is different in all four works, and the virtuousness of the virtuous is variable. However, the basic message is fairly consistent.…
In the vocation of marriage the husband is to love and serve his wife, and the wife is to love and serve her husband. God instituted marriage near the beginning of time in Genesis. Nowadays we can clearly see how sin has got the best of marriage by twisting its meanings and blessings that are supposed to come out of this life-long vow. Love is the basis and backbone of every marriage and its vocation. This is especially true in marriage with God’s undeserved love for us. This is the reason Christians live their lives to the best of their God-given abilities to better their vocation in marriage.…