C. S. Lewis – A Life by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Religious, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Mere Christianity (1952)

Although Lewis had published a lightly edited version of his broadcast talks during the war, he was not entirely happy with them. These appeared as three separate pamphlets: The Case for Christianity (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944). It seemed to him that they needed to be given still greater clarity of expression and focus. They were seen by readers as being independent works, rather than the stages of an interconnected argument. Furthermore, the text of one set of talks was omitted altogether. Lewis gradually came to see how he could create a single book that developed a coherent case for Christianity, linking the material he had developed for his four sets of broadcast talks. Mere Christianity—the final version of these wartime talks—is now regarded as one of Lewis’s most significant Christian writings. Although published in 1952, the work is clearly an edited version of his wartime material, making discussion of its themes appropriate at this point in our narrative.

Lewis is often—and rightly—criticised for coming up with some strange titles for his works. His 1956 masterpiece Till We Have Faces, for example, was originally titled Bareface. Yet Lewis chose a brilliant title for his synthesis of his four sets of broadcast talks. He avoided any reference to their origin, and chose to focus instead on their subject matter. The title Mere Christianity intrigued its readers. So what did Lewis mean by this title? And why did he choose it?

Lewis found the phrase in the writings of Richard Baxter (1615–1691), a Puritan writer whom Lewis had encountered in the course of his wide reading in English literature. Writing in 1944, Lewis argued that the best remedy against the theological errors encountered in recently published books “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”483

So what did Baxter mean by this curious phrase? Living through a period of tumultuous religious controversy and violence during the seventeeth century—including the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I—Baxter came to the conclusion that theological or religious labels distorted and damaged the Christian faith. In his late work Church History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils (1681), Baxter protested against the divisiveness of religious controversy. He believed in “meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture.”484 He wished to be known as a “meer Christian,” equating “meer Christianity” with “Catholick Christianity,” in the sense of a universal vision of the Christian faith, untainted by controversies and theological partisanship.

It is not clear how Lewis came to discover this phrase from Baxter; I have not encountered any other reference to this work of Baxter’s in Lewis’s writings from before the Second World War. Nevertheless, it clearly expresses Lewis’s own vision of a basic Christian orthodoxy, shorn of any denominational agendas or interest in ecclesiastical tribalism. It is what Lewis believed the Church of England to represent at its best—not a narrowly denominational “Anglicanism” (a notion for

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