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(3) The Christian Way.-The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with
desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger
well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there
is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a
thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world
can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another
world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that
the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to
satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so,
I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for,
these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the
something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I
must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not
find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside;
I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and
to help others to do the same."
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the
Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend
eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot
understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All
the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely
symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are
mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the
present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are
mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity
share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the
timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it
People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ
told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith.
Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two
senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it
means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of
Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it
used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as
a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what is there moral
or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously,
I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he
wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or
bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that
would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And
if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in
spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then- and
a good many people do not see still-was this. I was assuming that if the
human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on
regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up.
In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason.
But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good
evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained
surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not
alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their
horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start
thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up
before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics.
It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is
based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between
faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man
knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is
a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he
finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and
he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more
makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told
her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really
knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly
well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he
has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether
he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his
hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-or whether he will suddenly
cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking
anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the
weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith
comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the
evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in
the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he
is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe
it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz
on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or
wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of
making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment,
in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.
And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not
talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn
up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking
about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art
of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your
changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I
know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which
the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods
in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods
against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a
necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can
never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a
creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the
weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the
habit of Faith.
The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The
next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some
of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some
time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church
going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually
reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will
automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of
fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in
Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned
out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the
most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back
to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first step
towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that
the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian
virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first
week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen
back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will
have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till
he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people
do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who
try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the
strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You
find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying
down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not
know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in
one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life
by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse
inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man
who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full
what temptation means-the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main
thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is
that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and
that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If
there was any idea of a sort of bargain-any idea that we could perform our
side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him,
in mere justice, to perform His side-that has to be wiped out.
I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a
Christian, has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. The first
result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find
it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a
failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded! In
fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things
Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been
waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of
earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.
Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of
thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.
If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service
you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So
that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God,
I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to
its father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday
present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's
present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that
the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made
these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real
life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the
second sense.
I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to
notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it
seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do
not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that
can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But
there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have
gone a certain distance along the Christian road. These things are purely
practical, though they do not look as if they were. They are directions for
dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey and they do
not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find any
statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry.
Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you
suddenly see what it meant If one could understand it now, it would only do
one harm.
Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I
am going to try to explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be
thinking I have got there when I have not. I can only ask instructed
Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; and others
to take what I say with a grain of salt- as something offered, because it
may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right.
I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense.
I said last week that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man
has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that
he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God
what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy.
Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he
cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality- the
kind of creatures He intended us to be-creatures related to Himself in a
certain way. I do not add "and related to one another in a certain way,"
because that is included: if you are right with Him you will inevitably be
right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel
are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the
right positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as
an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party
in a sort of bargain-as long as he is thinking of claims and counterclaims
between himself and God-he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is
misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the
right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.
When I say "discovered," I mean really discovered: not simply said it
parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious
education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that
is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that
without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this:
really finding out by experience that it is true.
Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law
except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try,
whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that
if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus,
in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying
harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going
to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you
turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't." Do not, I implore you,
start asking yourselves, "Have I reached that moment?" Do not sit down and
start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man
quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen
we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not
always say to himself, "Hullo! I'm growing up." It is often only when he
looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what
people call "growing up." You can see it even in simple matters. A man who
starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely
to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen
to every one in a sudden flash-as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so
gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a
particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not
how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident
about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for
ourselves and leave it to God.
I know the words "leave it to God" can be misunderstood, but they must
stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that
he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with
him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His
crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a
sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His
"sonship" with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God": in Book IV I
shall attempt to analyse the meaning of those words a little further. If you
like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers
everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in
accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the
point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we
should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our
bad ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome
until we stop trying to overcome it- throw up the sponge. But then you could
not "stop trying" in the right way and for the right reason until you had
tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything over
to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him
means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in
saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you
have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying
to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these
things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.
Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably
wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is
already inside you.
Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian
home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on
such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in
a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only
thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith
in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out
of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come. There are two
parodies of the truth which different sets of Christians have, in the past,
been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps they may make the
truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that
matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving
money. The best thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over
ё10,000 and we will see you through." The answer to that nonsense, of
course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea
that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only
commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all
that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you
do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes
no difference in the end." The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you
call your "faith" in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of
what He says, then it is not Faith at all-not faith or trust in Him, but
only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things
together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling"-which looks as if everything depended on
us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "For it is God who
worketh in you"- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am
afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am
puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand,
and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and
what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we
begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could
say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down.
God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could
understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly
express it. In the attempt to express it different Churches say different
things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the
importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who
insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that
is as far as I go.
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though
Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and
rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into
something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of
those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with
what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light But they do
not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of
it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is
near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's
eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further
than mine.
Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in
this last book. They all say "the ordinary reader does not want Theology;
give him plain practical religion." I have rejected their advice. I do not
think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means "the science of
God," and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to
have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You
are not children: why should you be treated like children?
In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I
remember once when I had been giving a talk to the RA.F., an old,
hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But,
mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out
alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I
don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone
who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"
Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably
had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that
experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from
something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once
looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of
the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less
real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the
point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things
you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what
hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real
Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as
the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single
isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In
the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely
necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own
glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be
more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the
Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than
the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they
are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds
of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which
any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are
very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any
further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the
desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of
it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that is just
why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so
attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the
beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that
way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God
in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps
without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a
map.
In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In Ac old days,
when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get
on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone
reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen
to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will
mean that you have a lot of wrong ones-bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For
a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties
today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and
rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is
retrogression-like believing the earth is fiat.
For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity
simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we
took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and
avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much
less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical
importance at all.
It is quite true that if we took Christ's advice we should soon be
living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did
all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great
deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of
the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely
to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral
teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him. If we
cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the
most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice,
then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice
for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that
they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion.
They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that
those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever
that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that
means).
There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something
behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim
false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be
difficult-at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.
Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the
statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can "become Sons of
God." One asks "Aren't we Sons of God already? Surely the fatherhood of God
is one of the main Christian ideas?" Well, in a certain sense, no doubt we
are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into existence and loves
us and looks after us, and in that way is like a father. But when the Bible
talks of our "becoming" Sons of God, obviously it must mean something
different. And that brings us up against the very centre of Theology.
One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God "begotten, not
created"; and it adds "begotten by his Father before all worlds." Will you
please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that
when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We
are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something
that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. "Before
all worlds" Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?
We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English,
but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father
of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you
beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a
beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little
birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from
yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless
set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a
statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very
like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like
one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just
as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man
makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that
Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of
the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way,
man has (in a sense I am going to explain) the "shape" or likeness of God,
but he has not got the kind of life God has. Let us take the first point
(man's resemblance to God) first. Everything God has made has some likeness
to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness: not that the greatness of
space is the same kind of greatness as God's, but it is a sort of symbol of
it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is like God in
having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind
of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like Him because it
is alive, and He is the "living God." But life, in this biological sense, is
not the same as the life there is in God: it is only a kind of symbol or
shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of
resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and
fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the
unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get
the beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the
love that exists in God: but it is like it-rather in the way that a picture
drawn on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be "like" a landscape. When
we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest
resemblance to God which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds
who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not
only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known
level in him.
But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual
life-the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the
same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the
same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the "greatness" of
space and the "greatness" of God were the same sort of greatness. In
reality, the difference between Biological life and spiritual life is so
important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological
sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in
Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept
up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc.,
is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which
made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain
shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance
there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who
changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a
change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real
man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great
sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the
shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making.
A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue. God begets Christ but He
only makes men. But by saying that, I have illustrated only one point about
God, namely, that what God the Father begets is God, something of the same
kind as Himself. In that way it is like a human father begetting a human
son. But not quite like it. So I must try to explain a little more.
A good many people nowadays say, "I believe in a God, but not in a
personal God." They feel that the mysterious something which is behind all
other things must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite agree. But
the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what a being that
is beyond personality could be like. All the other people, though they say
that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal:
that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something
super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of
choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea
is the only one on the market.
Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several
lives, human souls will be "absorbed" into God. But when they try to explain
what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as
one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of
water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If
that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to
exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be
taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves-in fact, be very much
more themselves than they were before.
I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we
exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that
life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to
follow rather carefully.
You know that in space you can move in three ways-to left or right,
backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these
three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions.
Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a
straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square.
And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you
have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a
cube-a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six
squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight
line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many
lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures
but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more
real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you
found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new
ways-in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The
human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one
person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings-just as, in
two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and
any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find
personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who
do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak,
you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a
cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully
conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived
only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we
can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the
first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of
something super-personal-something more than a person. It is something we
could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels
one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all
the things we know already.
You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the
good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him.
The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal
life, and that may begin any time -tonight, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say
his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a
Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so
to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God
comes through Christ, the Man who was God-that Christ is standing beside
him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is
the thing to which he is praying-the goal he is trying to reach. God is also
the thing inside him which is pushing him on-the motive power. God is also
the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the
whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in
that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.
The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life-what I called Zoe or
spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining
himself.
And that is how Theology started. People already knew about God in a
vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet he was not the
sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They
met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been
formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside
them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they could not
do before. And when they worked it all out they found they had arrived at
the Christian definition of the three-personal God.
This definition is not something we have made up; Theology is, in a
sense, experimental knowledge. It is the simple religions that are the
made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science "in a sense," I mean
that it is like the other experimental sciences in some ways, but not in
all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and find the
rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them they cannot run
away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot either help or
hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take photos of wild
animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks.
The wild animals will not come to you: but they can run away from you.
Unless you keep very quiet, they will. There is beginning to be a tiny
little trace of initiative on their side.
Now a stage higher; suppose you want to get to know a human person. If
he is determined not to let you, you will not get to know him. You have to
win his confidence. In this case the initiative is equally divided-it takes
two to make a friendship.
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He
does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And,
in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others-not
because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show
Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition.
Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a
dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the
instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes
and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole
self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God
will be blurred-like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why
horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God
through a dirty lens.
God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means
not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united
together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to
one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in
one band, or organs in one body.
Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about
God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian
brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science-the
laboratory outfit That is why all these people who turn up every few years
with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the
Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no
instrument but an old parr of field glasses setting out to put all the real
astronomers right. He may be a clever chap-he may be cleverer than some of
the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years
later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still
going on.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could
make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people
who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of
course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never "skip."
All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find
is going to be no use to them. In this chapter I am going to talk about
something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others
merely an unnecessary complication. If you are one of the second sort of
readers, then I advise you not to bother about this chapter at all but to
turn on to the next.
In the last chapter I had to touch on the subject of prayer, and while
that is still fresh in your mind and my own, I should like to deal with a
difficulty that some people find about the whole idea of prayer. A man put
it to me by saying "I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot
swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings
who are all addressing Him at the same moment." And I have found that quite
a lot of people feel this.
Now, the first thing to notice is that the whole sting of it comes in
the words at the same moment. Most of us can imagine God attending to any
number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time
to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of
God having to fit too many things into one moment of time.
desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger
well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there
is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a
thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world
can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another
world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that
the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to
satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so,
I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for,
these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the
something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I
must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not
find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside;
I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and
to help others to do the same."
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the
Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend
eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot
understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All
the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely
symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are
mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the
present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are
mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity
share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the
timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it
People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ
told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith.
Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two
senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it
means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of
Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it
used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as
a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what is there moral
or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously,
I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he
wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or
bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that
would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And
if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in
spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then- and
a good many people do not see still-was this. I was assuming that if the
human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on
regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up.
In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason.
But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good
evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained
surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not
alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their
horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start
thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up
before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics.
It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is
based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between
faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man
knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is
a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he
finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and
he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more
makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told
her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really
knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly
well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he
has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether
he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his
hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-or whether he will suddenly
cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking
anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the
weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith
comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the
evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in
the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he
is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe
it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz
on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or
wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of
making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment,
in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.
And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not
talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn
up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking
about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art
of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your
changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I
know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which
the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods
in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods
against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a
necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can
never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a
creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the
weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the
habit of Faith.
The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The
next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some
of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some
time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church
going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually
reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will
automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of
fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in
Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned
out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the
most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back
to the subject of Humility. You may remember I said that the first step
towards humility was to realise that one is proud. I want to add now that
the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian
virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first
week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen
back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will
have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till
he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people
do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who
try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the
strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You
find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying
down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not
know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in
one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life
by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse
inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man
who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full
what temptation means-the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main
thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is
that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and
that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If
there was any idea of a sort of bargain-any idea that we could perform our
side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him,
in mere justice, to perform His side-that has to be wiped out.
I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a
Christian, has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. The first
result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find
it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a
failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded! In
fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things
Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been
waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of
earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.
Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of
thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.
If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service
you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So
that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God,
I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to
its father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday
present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's
present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that
the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made
these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real
life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the
second sense.
I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to
notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it
seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do
not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that
can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But
there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have
gone a certain distance along the Christian road. These things are purely
practical, though they do not look as if they were. They are directions for
dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey and they do
not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find any
statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry.
Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you
suddenly see what it meant If one could understand it now, it would only do
one harm.
Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I
am going to try to explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be
thinking I have got there when I have not. I can only ask instructed
Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; and others
to take what I say with a grain of salt- as something offered, because it
may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right.
I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense.
I said last week that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man
has tried his level best to practise the Christian virtues, and found that
he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God
what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy.
Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he
cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality- the
kind of creatures He intended us to be-creatures related to Himself in a
certain way. I do not add "and related to one another in a certain way,"
because that is included: if you are right with Him you will inevitably be
right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel
are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the
right positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as
an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party
in a sort of bargain-as long as he is thinking of claims and counterclaims
between himself and God-he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is
misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the
right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.
When I say "discovered," I mean really discovered: not simply said it
parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious
education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that
is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that
without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this:
really finding out by experience that it is true.
Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law
except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try,
whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that
if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus,
in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying
harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going
to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you
turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't." Do not, I implore you,
start asking yourselves, "Have I reached that moment?" Do not sit down and
start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man
quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen
we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not
always say to himself, "Hullo! I'm growing up." It is often only when he
looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what
people call "growing up." You can see it even in simple matters. A man who
starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely
to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen
to every one in a sudden flash-as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so
gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a
particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not
how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident
about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for
ourselves and leave it to God.
I know the words "leave it to God" can be misunderstood, but they must
stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that
he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with
him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His
crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a
sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His
"sonship" with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God": in Book IV I
shall attempt to analyse the meaning of those words a little further. If you
like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers
everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in
accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the
point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we
should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our
bad ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome
until we stop trying to overcome it- throw up the sponge. But then you could
not "stop trying" in the right way and for the right reason until you had
tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything over
to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him
means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in
saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you
have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying
to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these
things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.
Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably
wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is
already inside you.
Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian
home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on
such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in
a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only
thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith
in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out
of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come. There are two
parodies of the truth which different sets of Christians have, in the past,
been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps they may make the
truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that
matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving
money. The best thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over
ё10,000 and we will see you through." The answer to that nonsense, of
course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea
that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only
commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all
that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you
do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes
no difference in the end." The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you
call your "faith" in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of
what He says, then it is not Faith at all-not faith or trust in Him, but
only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things
together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling"-which looks as if everything depended on
us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "For it is God who
worketh in you"- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am
afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am
puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand,
and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and
what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we
begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could
say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down.
God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could
understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly
express it. In the attempt to express it different Churches say different
things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the
importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who
insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that
is as far as I go.
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though
Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and
rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into
something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of
those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with
what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light But they do
not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of
it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is
near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's
eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further
than mine.
Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in
this last book. They all say "the ordinary reader does not want Theology;
give him plain practical religion." I have rejected their advice. I do not
think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means "the science of
God," and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to
have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You
are not children: why should you be treated like children?
In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I
remember once when I had been giving a talk to the RA.F., an old,
hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But,
mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out
alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I
don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone
who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"
Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably
had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that
experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from
something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once
looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of
the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less
real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the
point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things
you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what
hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real
Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as
the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single
isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In
the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely
necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own
glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be
more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.
Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the
Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than
the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they
are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds
of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which
any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are
very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any
further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the
desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of
it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that is just
why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so
attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the
beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that
way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God
in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps
without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a
map.
In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In Ac old days,
when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get
on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone
reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen
to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will
mean that you have a lot of wrong ones-bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For
a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties
today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and
rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is
retrogression-like believing the earth is fiat.
For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity
simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we
took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and
avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much
less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical
importance at all.
It is quite true that if we took Christ's advice we should soon be
living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did
all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great
deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of
the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely
to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral
teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him. If we
cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the
most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice,
then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice
for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that
they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion.
They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that
those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever
that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that
means).
There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something
behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim
false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be
difficult-at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.
Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the
statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can "become Sons of
God." One asks "Aren't we Sons of God already? Surely the fatherhood of God
is one of the main Christian ideas?" Well, in a certain sense, no doubt we
are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into existence and loves
us and looks after us, and in that way is like a father. But when the Bible
talks of our "becoming" Sons of God, obviously it must mean something
different. And that brings us up against the very centre of Theology.
One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God "begotten, not
created"; and it adds "begotten by his Father before all worlds." Will you
please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that
when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We
are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something
that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. "Before
all worlds" Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?
We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English,
but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father
of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you
beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a
beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little
birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from
yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless
set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a
statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very
like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like
one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just
as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man
makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that
Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of
the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way,
man has (in a sense I am going to explain) the "shape" or likeness of God,
but he has not got the kind of life God has. Let us take the first point
(man's resemblance to God) first. Everything God has made has some likeness
to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness: not that the greatness of
space is the same kind of greatness as God's, but it is a sort of symbol of
it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is like God in
having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind
of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like Him because it
is alive, and He is the "living God." But life, in this biological sense, is
not the same as the life there is in God: it is only a kind of symbol or
shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of
resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and
fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the
unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get
the beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the
love that exists in God: but it is like it-rather in the way that a picture
drawn on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be "like" a landscape. When
we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest
resemblance to God which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds
who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not
only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known
level in him.
But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual
life-the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the
same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the
same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the "greatness" of
space and the "greatness" of God were the same sort of greatness. In
reality, the difference between Biological life and spiritual life is so
important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological
sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in
Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept
up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc.,
is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which
made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain
shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance
there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who
changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a
change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real
man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great
sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the
shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making.
A man begets a child, but he only makes a statue. God begets Christ but He
only makes men. But by saying that, I have illustrated only one point about
God, namely, that what God the Father begets is God, something of the same
kind as Himself. In that way it is like a human father begetting a human
son. But not quite like it. So I must try to explain a little more.
A good many people nowadays say, "I believe in a God, but not in a
personal God." They feel that the mysterious something which is behind all
other things must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite agree. But
the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what a being that
is beyond personality could be like. All the other people, though they say
that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal:
that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something
super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of
choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea
is the only one on the market.
Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several
lives, human souls will be "absorbed" into God. But when they try to explain
what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as
one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of
water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If
that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to
exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be
taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves-in fact, be very much
more themselves than they were before.
I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we
exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that
life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to
follow rather carefully.
You know that in space you can move in three ways-to left or right,
backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these
three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions.
Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a
straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square.
And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you
have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a
cube-a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six
squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight
line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many
lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures
but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more
real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you
found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new
ways-in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The
human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one
person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings-just as, in
two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and
any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find
personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who
do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak,
you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a
cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully
conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived
only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we
can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the
first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of
something super-personal-something more than a person. It is something we
could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels
one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all
the things we know already.
You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the
good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him.
The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal
life, and that may begin any time -tonight, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say
his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a
Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so
to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God
comes through Christ, the Man who was God-that Christ is standing beside
him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is
the thing to which he is praying-the goal he is trying to reach. God is also
the thing inside him which is pushing him on-the motive power. God is also
the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the
whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in
that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.
The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life-what I called Zoe or
spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining
himself.
And that is how Theology started. People already knew about God in a
vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet he was not the
sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They
met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been
formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside
them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they could not
do before. And when they worked it all out they found they had arrived at
the Christian definition of the three-personal God.
This definition is not something we have made up; Theology is, in a
sense, experimental knowledge. It is the simple religions that are the
made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science "in a sense," I mean
that it is like the other experimental sciences in some ways, but not in
all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and find the
rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them they cannot run
away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot either help or
hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take photos of wild
animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks.
The wild animals will not come to you: but they can run away from you.
Unless you keep very quiet, they will. There is beginning to be a tiny
little trace of initiative on their side.
Now a stage higher; suppose you want to get to know a human person. If
he is determined not to let you, you will not get to know him. You have to
win his confidence. In this case the initiative is equally divided-it takes
two to make a friendship.
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He
does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And,
in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others-not
because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show
Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition.
Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a
dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the
instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes
and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole
self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God
will be blurred-like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why
horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God
through a dirty lens.
God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means
not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united
together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to
one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in
one band, or organs in one body.
Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about
God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian
brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science-the
laboratory outfit That is why all these people who turn up every few years
with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the
Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no
instrument but an old parr of field glasses setting out to put all the real
astronomers right. He may be a clever chap-he may be cleverer than some of
the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years
later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still
going on.
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could
make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people
who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of
course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never "skip."
All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they find
is going to be no use to them. In this chapter I am going to talk about
something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others
merely an unnecessary complication. If you are one of the second sort of
readers, then I advise you not to bother about this chapter at all but to
turn on to the next.
In the last chapter I had to touch on the subject of prayer, and while
that is still fresh in your mind and my own, I should like to deal with a
difficulty that some people find about the whole idea of prayer. A man put
it to me by saying "I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot
swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings
who are all addressing Him at the same moment." And I have found that quite
a lot of people feel this.
Now, the first thing to notice is that the whole sting of it comes in
the words at the same moment. Most of us can imagine God attending to any
number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time
to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of
God having to fit too many things into one moment of time.