C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: The Perfect Penitent

For the past week, I have written a number of posts on Ken Ham. This week I am going back to C.S. Lewis. After pointing out that Answers in Genesis is not promoting historic Christianity, I need to go back and focus on just what that “mere Christianity” really is. I left off half way through “Book 2” of Mere Christianity. Lewis had just finished talking about how a man who claimed the sort of things Jesus claimed about himself would not be considered a “great moral teacher.” Either he was a diabolical liar, a nutjob, or actually God himself. (Exactly how that one works will be looked into in a later post).

In the next chapter, entitled, The Perfect Penitent, Lewis attempts to clearly explain the significance of the atonement. What is the “atonement”? Basically, it is the fancy theological word that describes the belief that somehow Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection put us back into right relationship with God. Now, Lewis correctly points out that according to Christianity, despite Jesus’ moral teachings, his ultimate purpose of his coming wasn’t just to teach—his purpose was to suffer and die. And Christianity then teaches that somehow that suffering and death has given us a fresh start and has put us right with God—that is the heart of the Christian message. But really now—how does that work?

How Does Atonement “Work”?

As anyone who has grown up in Church can testify, the normal way the atonement has been explained within Protestantism has tended to be this way: (1) God created Man to be in communion with him, (2) Man sinned and screwed everything up, (3) God therefore is really ticked off and wants to kill Man, (4) but then God says, “Wait, instead of killing Man and sending him to Hell, I’m going to send my son Jesus down to earth, and I’ll beat and kill him, and I’ll let Man off the hook! (5) All Man has to do is believe that Jesus died on his behalf, and we’re good!

Of course, speaking as one who grew up in an Evangelical Christian home and church, that understanding scared the crap out of me. I mean, really—if God is so ticked off to do that to Jesus, what is He going to do if I screw up again? The guilt and fear of many Christian youth can be palpable. Of course, such a description of the atonement can be misleading. I found a good description of the difference between the typical Protestant view and the Orthodox view of the atonement. I’d encourage you to take a look.

Lewis also addresses this as well. He acknowledges that Christians have often tried to explain exactly how the atonement “works”—this is particularly true in the Protestant tradition—but he also emphasizes that the explanations of the atonement aren’t the atonement itself. They might help you understand it to a degree, but you should never get too caught up with trying to explain it perfectly. The fact is that the atonement points to something that is ultimately a mystery to us. In the death and resurrection of Christ, “something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world.”

We shouldn’t be surprised if we do not have adequate language to explain it perfectly. That’s okay, as Lewis points out, using the analogy of eating dinner, “A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly wouldn’t know how it works until he has accepted it.”

I think that is a very important point to make. Too often we tend to get caught up with trying to explain everything about the atonement, or some other aspect of theology. Now I am all for trying to explain things as clearly as possible; but we should never forget that we are ultimately dealing with a mystery. The best we can do is say, “Well, this is how it sort of works; this is how I understand it. But the important thing is not to be content with intellectual cognition of what Lewis calls elsewhere, “the dance” of salvation; the important thing is to get out on the dance floor. You’ll understand it a lot better when you’re dancing.

The Metaphorical Views of Atonement

The above example I gave about how I understood the atonement as a kid growing up is what C.S. Lewis calls the “police-court sense.” It is true, there are many places in the New Testament where the atonement is describe in this way. But we must remember that the ways in which the NT writers explained the significance of the atonement are by their very nature metaphorical. In addition to the “police-court” or “legal” language Paul sometimes uses, there is also the sacrificial and medical metaphors as well.

Now the reason why the “law court” metaphor is so dominant in Protestant theology is because both Luther and Calvin, both who had studied to become lawyers, naturally latched on to that particular language in Paul, and emphasized that way of understanding the death of Christ over the other ways in the New Testament. Consequently, since Protestantism has traditionally focused almost exclusively on that way, it has unfortunately failed to appreciate the other ways in which the New Testament explains Christ’s death.

But also in the NT there is the sacrificial metaphor of Christ as the lamb. Yes, every Christian knows “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” but I simply haven’t met too many who can articulate or understand what the New Testament writers are doing by calling him that. They are using the sacrificial language of the Temple—and it is not the same as when the language of the law court is used. The purpose of the OT sacrificial system was not simply to avert punishment. It was to restore community. A Jewish family would go the Temple, offer a lamb, and then the priests would kill the lamb, keep a portion for YHWH (that they would eat), and then give some back to the family so that the family could eat a meal in the Temple, in YHWH’s presence, and thus celebrate reconciliation and restoration.

In addition, the final metaphor often used in the NT is that of the medical metaphor of the hospital: the sufferings of Jesus bring about our healing—therefore Jesus is the Great Physician. The point is that if you focus solely on the legal language in the NT, your understanding of the significance of Christ’s death is going to be limited. Yes, (1) he bears our punishment (legal language), but (2) his death is also a sacrifice that restores community, and (3) his sufferings and death are the means by which we are healed (medical/physician language). A fuller understanding of Christ’s death requires reflection and emphasis on all three ways it is described in the NT: legal, sacrificial, medical.

Lewis gives another analogy to explain the atonement: if someone has fallen into a hole, it is up to someone who is on firm ground to reach down and pull him up. And the “hole” that humanity has gotten itself into is that it has tried to set itself up as the center of the universe, and to behave as if it belonged to itself. Therefore, Lewis points out that “fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”

Repentance

So we are both imperfect and rebellious. What needs to happen is what Christians call “repentance.” Now repentance is not simply saying you are sorry. Lewis says, “It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.” And the kicker is that the person who really needs to repent is a really bad person, but the really bad person probably won’t want to repent. The only person who could repent perfectly would be a good person, but then the good person wouldn’t need to repent.

So what can be done? Answer: the atonement. God becomes man, lives a sinless life so that he has the ability to repent perfectly, and therefore undergoes the death and repentance that bad humanity couldn’t do for itself. Or simply put, in Christ, God has physically identified with our bad and sinful humanity, and still being God, has put right in the middle of that bad and sinful humanity a person who could repent perfectly and undergo that kind of “repentant death” on behalf of humanity.

That is essentially what the atonement means. Even if it is not a perfect explanation, hopefully it is good enough to begin to get one’s head around the significance of Christ’s death. The significance of it will get fleshed out later in the book.