Mere Christianity

"Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis is an engaging introduction to Christianity for any audience. Sometimes lacking in deeper intellectual rigor, the book is a well-written, easy to read and ultimately humane book that tries to lay out the Christian worldview in a clear manner.

Written as a series of lectures during World War II, Lewis interweaves theology, philosophy, and his own personal history together to present Christianity generally to a lay audience. The book improves as it goes forward, particularly in the sections on the ethics of a Christian life and oddly enough, in his explanation of the Trinity.

Lewis' thought as a Christian apologist has become very popular in the past eighty years and he is a thinker worth engaging, even only as a manifestation of a Christian viewpoint for the public sphere. I would put the caveat that this is indeed a book of apologetic written by an unapologetically Christian author from the mid-20th century and reflects some factual, social, and intellectual biases reflecting his time and context.

That being said - I enjoyed the work and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting an understanding of the "implications" of the Christian worldview.

I have no idea how to rate this. I do think that the book is meant exactly for people like me. People who have had Christianity misrepresented to them by various clergymen, media and the like.
It starts off really well, and portrays Christianity in the slightly more human way, that isn't full of shame, and self-hatred. So that is the overarching reason I put it at 5 stars, even though I'm bound to find multiple logical obscurities and "source: dude trust me" types of statements.
At the moment of writing this, I couldn't think of any of the flaws myself. But I can say that it didn't really convince me to become someone that's all in with God. I'm still a sceptic, so I guess mission failed, Lewis.
It did made me really rethink a lot of things though. Admission to heaven not being some test based on your outwards life. But an admission based on your inner life, and how it projects that into your outer one, and realization of goals, based on your potential. It is almost impossible to explain with words, and writing 3 paragraphs on that in a review seems pointless.
Generally, to sum it up
- Avoids almost every major issue that a 2021 sceptic has with Christianity
- Doesn't get bogged down my denominations
- Real, human examples and generally does a great job of simply explaining complex concepts
- Not much repetition
- A lot of "Just my opinion bro", to avoid criticism
- A great introduction to Christianity for an average person like me, and I assume many people don't really need much reading beyond this and The Bible.

I've given C.S. 5 stars (for [b:Till We Have Faces|17343|Till We Have Faces|C.S. Lewis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1381692105s/17343.jpg|2072983]s) and 2 stars (for [b:Till We Have Faces|17343|Till We Have Faces|C.S. Lewis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1381692105s/17343.jpg|2072983]Perelandra) and 4 IIRC (for [b:Out of the Silent Planet|25350|Out of the Silent Planet (Space Trilogy, #1)|C.S. Lewis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1310984018s/25350.jpg|879622]). Now here I am again with a 2 star rating.

This is a book which (judging from the other reviews I scanned) people mostly loved or hated. Those who hated it were most often forced to read it. It attempts to give a rational account of Christianity or, at least, a logical argument in its favor, and often the ratings were split between the Christians (giving it 5) and the Lions (giving it 1 or 2). I am in neither camp and was attracted to his mission. I think that the spiritual world (if I may use that phrase) has a lot of rational things that need to be said in its favor at a time when the atheists are claiming the logical high ground, and wanted to see what C.S. had to contribute.

To start with the good, I thought he approached his subject seriously. This is stuff he's clearly thought a lot about and is convinced about and moved by. By "mere," which I took at first to be an adjective of humility, he meant he was looking for common Christian ground that would be uncontroversial. Though I didn't grow up Christian, and thus lack a point of view about what is common, I was surprised at some of his statements. I also lack the background to be able to say which of his arguments are original with him, but on both these issues, I thought he was pretty out there at times. Maybe England in 1943 (date of first publication) was a very different place than I imagine but I found what he had to say about, say, evolution, to be far from the mainstream.

I thought he had in some respects deep spiritual understanding and was trying to speak from it. Let me make clear the assumption that I believe there is such a thing as spiritual understanding and that it is, in my experience, uncommon. I think the mistake he ultimately made is not to realize his understandings did not inexorably lead to the conclusions he reached. Furthermore, it would have helped his argument if he had read more heathen (or otherwise) philosophy rather than to try and create it from scratch. In particular, arguments about moral reasoning and free will have already been done and done better. Even done better by Christians.

In the end, he was extremely culture-bound and unaware of it, often taking his limited points of view as showing him universalities. Still, I forgive him.

"Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis is an engaging introduction to Christianity for any audience. Sometimes lacking in deeper intellectual rigor, the book is a well-written, easy to read and ultimately humane book that tries to lay out the Christian worldview in a clear manner.

Written as a series of lectures during World War II, Lewis interweaves theology, philosophy, and his own personal history together to present Christianity generally to a lay audience. The book improves as it goes forward, particularly in the sections on the ethics of a Christian life and oddly enough, in his explanation of the Trinity.

Lewis' thought as a Christian apologist has become very popular in the past eighty years and he is a thinker worth engaging, even only as a manifestation of a Christian viewpoint for the public sphere. I would put the caveat that this is indeed a book of apologetic written by an unapologetically Christian author from the mid-20th century and reflects some factual, social, and intellectual biases reflecting his time and context.

That being said - I enjoyed the work and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting an understanding of the "implications" of the Christian worldview.

This isn’t “about education” any more than [a:George Orwell|3706|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175614486p2/3706.jpg]’s [b:Politics and the English Language|6324725|Politics and the English Language|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1260733026s/6324725.jpg|6510269] was about grammar. It’s really a defense of traditional morality against sloppy skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.

In our moral reasoning, Lewis thinks, we must necessarily build on the values we have inherited from the attempts of our ancestors to grapple with moral issues and get closer to a framework for understanding what is valuable. People who pretend we can carelessly cast traditional morality aside and start afresh with modern, rational, scientific notions, don’t have any idea what they’re doing. It’s not that you cannot criticize or attempt to reform traditional moral values, but that you cannot claim to stand outside of them and judge them from a more exalted place those values don’t reach (or from which values can be derived or invented afresh).

It’s ridiculous to claim you’re going to bravely and iconoclastically question all values, because if you’re challenged with a “why?” you’ll find you’ve got nothing left to answer with.

If you try to choose your own values, [a:Nietzsche|1938|Friedrich Nietzsche|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1291157969p2/1938.jpg]-style, you find that you have nothing left to base your choice of values on but whim and sense-gratification — your “choice” has evaporated into a slavish following of arbitrary inclinations.

Lewis borrows the word Tao to describe the objectively true right way of living that our worldly ethical systems grope toward describing. I wish he’d made up a new word or borrowed another one, as tao is confusing in this context, as it has a bunch of other baggage attached to it by the Taoists who, I think, have precedence.