He assembles logical inferences and conclusions on such foundations (“The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts it is something which makes a kind of tune by directing the instincts.”).Īt times, the discourse in MC is brusquely matter-of-fact (“Christianity is a fighting religion.”), other times it is more of a folksy wisdom (“We have to take reality as it comes to us three is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.”). Secondly, they do not behave in that way.”). He gives us simple propositions ( “First, human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. He reveals God’s truth by showing how it is woven through the fabric of human experience and may be comprehended by the rational mind of any honest seeker. In Mere Christianity ( MC) Lewis the Christian teacher employs his gifts of profound clarity in language and deep simplicity in illustration to demonstrate the “sensible realities” built into the Cosmos of God’s creation. Both communicate similar and important truths about Christian understanding of reality, but each does so using very different rhetorical and artistic approaches.

Reading the two together, as I recently did for a class, made for an interesting experience. Lewis was writing The Screwtape Letters at the same time he was preparing scripts for those radio programs. Mere Christianity was a compilation of a series of radio talks Lewis gave on BBC Radio in 1942. Lewis was working simultaneously on the material that appeared in these two works–perhaps his best known writings outside of the Narnia books.

Mirror christianity