Forgiveness is an important theological and moral issue, albeit one that is nowhere near as important as many Christians say. Since forgiveness of human sins is a vital part of Christian theology, it is in one sense fitting that C.S. Lewis dedicates one of his short chapters in Mere Christianity to it. He also continues to make logical errors that can be easily avoided even when one does not embrace or reason out specific truths about philosophical matters. For example, he could have merely avoided the error of believing that feeling content or pleased with oneself makes one a morally sound person, as he does, but he does not stop there. Lewis actually equates thinking such things with experiencing some of his worst times:
"Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worse moments) but that is not why I love myself." (116)
If a person is genuinely rational, just, and consistent, he or she is a good person according to Christian morality and is thus entitled to feel good about or think well of their own self. Whether they are "nice" or not is a red herring in most cases, but, the irrelevance of "nice" behavior aside, Lewis once again mischaracterizes Christian ethics, this time by calling the times he thinks well of himself his worse moments. Lewis chooses the tyrannies and subjectivity of conscience over Christian theonomy and sides with sexual legalism in the name of Christian morality, so he is hardly an intelligent, upright person, but this is not because intelligence and moral uprightness (according to Biblical standards) are unattainable ideals that must be sought but never reached, as he says or implies elsewhere; it is because he allowed himself to remain enslaved to fallacies and live in accordance with those errors.
At the very least, he does admit that loving one's enemies has nothing to do with feeling intense affection for them as individuals or denying their wrongs, but he then mistakes hatred for a universal sin:
"So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this my entire life--namely myself." (117)
It is entirely possible and Biblically permissible to hate vile actions while not hating those who commit them. However, hatred is not automatically sinful because not all types of hatred are the same. Hate does not make someone malicious, selfish, abusive, or otherwise guilty of immoral attitudes. These are all distinct attitudes that may or may not influence a person to perform certain sinful actions. In the case of hatred, it may also influence people to war against injustice and stupidity. When God himself hates (Psalm 5:5 and Leviticus 20:23 are just two verses that affirm this), Christians lose all basis for calling hatred evil unless it is unjust hatred.
Lewis compounds his errors shortly after by asserting the commonplace myth that the Bible teaches human souls are immortal by default:
"I imagine somebody will say, 'Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or hellish creature." (119-120)
What Lewis gets wrong here is that the Bible does not teach that all humans live forever apart from restoration to God. When Jesus offered eternal life to whoever would commit themselves to him, he was not offering to give people something they already possessed by virtue of being human. Instead, he was offering the chance to both become reconciled with the only inherent moral authority in the universe and enjoy unending existence in a state where all nonsinful pleasures can be (at least hypothetically) pursued without moral blemishes marring anything. Jesus cannot violate logic because nothing can, and it is logically impossible for someone to be given something they already have. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), not eternal conscious torment.
While Romans 6:23 does not define death, other verses of the Bible make it explicitly clear that the soul that sins will die (Ezekiel 18:4), that the unsaved will be burned to ashes like those living in Sodom and Gomorrah (2 Peter 2:6), and that God will kill both the bodies and souls of the wicked (Matthew 10:28). There are seeming exceptions to this, such as Satan (Revelation 20:10), but he is not human to begin with. Lewis ignores all of this Biblical information in order to agree with the consensus of irrationalistic Christians who yearn for tradition rather than read the Bible without making assumptions and reason out what would and would not follow from a given text. This is not uncharacteristic of him, so he is merely being consistent by embracing the evangelical notion that all people have eternal life one way or another.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html
No comments:
Post a Comment