The eighteen-year-old C.S. Lewis was hardly what one would call an athletic young man.  He was a failure at sports and spent his school days avoiding the company of upper-class athletes.  And yet, in 1917, the bookish Lewis chose to enlist in the First World War.  I say chose because Lewis, as an Irish citizen (he grew up in Belfast), was not subjected to the draft.  Nevertheless, he served and fought in the trenches, returning to England a year later as a wounded veteran.

Though he was too old to fight in WWII, he supported the war effort in every way he could, including speaking over the BBC radio and giving live talks to the RAF.  In 1940, he even addressed a pacifist society in Oxford on the reasons why he (Lewis) was not a pacifist (his speech is anthologized in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses).

In his talk, Lewis respectfully reminds his audience that when Christ instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, he likely meant the command to refer to personal situations between people and their neighbors.  There is no indication that the command was meant to apply to all situations at all times.  Surely, Lewis argues, “turn the other cheek” does not forbid me from coming to the rescue of someone who is being chased down by a maniac with a knife!

Christ calls upon us not to harbor a spirit of self-righteous hatred and retaliation toward those who have injured us.  But that does not mean that magistrates, parents, teachers, and soldiers should suffer themselves to be struck by citizens, children, students, or enemy combatants.

Besides, Christ himself showered his greatest praise upon a Roman military officer (Luke 7:9).  Likewise, when John the Baptist was approached by soldiers in search of spiritual advice, he did not tell them to quit their jobs—he merely told them not to extort money or accuse people falsely (Luke 3:14).  Both Peter (1 Peter 2:14) and Paul (Romans 13:4) called upon the early church to obey magistrates, who do not bear the sword in vain.

In Mere Christianity (III.7), Lewis makes some of the same arguments, though this time he calls on his readers to examine their own hearts carefully.  All killing, Lewis insists, is not murder: a proper translation of the Ten Commandments would read “Thou shalt not murder,” not “Thou shalt not kill.”  Still, if we ourselves hear about the death of enemy soldiers or the execution of a criminal and rejoice in the loss of life, then we have fallen outside the high call of Christ.

“We may kill if necessary,” writes Lewis, “but we must not hate and enjoy hating.  We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.  In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.”

Yes, Lewis knew and felt that war was a dreadful thing.  No one who fought in the killing fields of WWI could doubt that.  Still, Lewis believed that if we could remove the hatred and resentment from our soul, if we could free ourselves from brooding on revenge, that war could be approached courageously with “a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.”

Lewis was no fan of war, but he was unashamed to champion the beauty of the knight, of the medieval Crusader, of the “Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause.” 

It is a sad thing that our modern world has redefined virtue in negative terms.  Rather than define a virtuous man as someone who actively practices the positive virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance, we turn things on their head and celebrate the goodness of those who don’t succumb to folly, don’t betray an excessive amount of cowardice, don’t violate anyone’s rights, and don’t drink or smoke.

Such is the case with the four classical virtues, but it is even more so with the three theological ones.  We celebrate those who stay true to the course, who press on, who don’t give up, not those who have put their faith in an unseen Creator and their hope in his promises.  Even when we do praise faith and hope, it is generally a vague, non-creedal faith in humanity or fate or the universe and a hazy, content-less hope in, well, something or other.

As for love, Lewis was fond of critiquing his age for replacing the positive love (caritas, agape) of the Bible with a negative form of unselfishness.  Although the highest pagans (Aristotle) and the great Christian ethicists (Aquinas) taught that virtue is a habit gained by practicing virtuous actions, we of a more “enlightened” age have embraced a distinctly “hands off” ethos.

Rather than actively love our neighbor, we unselfishly allow him to live whatever way he wants to, even if his life choices are self-destructive.  Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that also manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.

In Screwtape Letters (#26), junior tempter Wormwood is counseled by his more experienced uncle to teach his human patient “to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.”   Though this strategy of replacing love with unselfishness may look the same on the outside, it has a very different effect on the soul of the one surrendering the benefits.  Far from moving out of himself toward the other (which is what love calls us to do), the practitioner of the negative virtue of unselfishness uses the other person as a way of bolstering his own sense of piety and self-righteousness.

Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.

G. K. Chesterton once defined a humanitarian as someone who loves humanity but hates human beings.  The person who is on the receiving end of unselfishness knows instinctively, to paraphrase a line from Letter 26, that he is being treated as a sort of lay figure upon which the would-be humanitarian exercises his petty, self-centered altruisms.

When the virtues are enacted in a positive, healthy spirit, they draw us closer to God and our neighbor.  But when they are turned back upon themselves as a method for bolstering our ego and self esteem, they ensnare and isolate us.  The false humanitarian ends up feeling contempt for his fellow man because he cannot move outside his own desperate need to feel good about himself.  But the virtuous man who practices true love comes to truly love the people he serves.

Near the end of The Last Battle, a noble Calormene soldier named Emeth dies and comes before Aslan, the Christ of Narnia.  Although Emeth hails from a distant land that worships a false god named Tash (rather than the true Aslan), and although Emeth has served Tash all his life, when he meets Aslan, he is welcomed by the Great Lion and invited into heaven.

Of all the passages in the voluminous writings of C. S. Lewis, none has caused more controversy and confusion than this suggestion by the orthodox Christian Lewis that salvation can be attained outside of Christ.  Indeed, when I speak about Lewis, the most common question that I am asked is whether or not the episode with Emeth reveals Lewis to be a Universalist in disguise: that is, someone who believes that all who practice their religion faithfully—whether they be Christians or Jews, Muslims or Hindus—will be saved.

It does not.  Had Emeth come before Aslan and requested directions to the Tash part of heaven, and had Aslan obliged, then Lewis would be a Universalist.  But that is not what happens in the episode.  Quite to the contrary, when Emeth stands before Aslan, he realizes and accepts that Tash is false and Aslan true, and that the deep spiritual desire he has followed all his life has found its fulfillment in Aslan.  He proves this by falling to his knees in worship.

Like the Magi of the Christmas story, he recognizes that Aslan (not Tash) is the end of his journey.  In response, Aslan assures him: “‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly.  For all find what they truly seek.’”

Now, it must be admitted that though this is not universalism, it does border on a concept that the vast majority of believers would reject (rightly) as unbiblical: post-mortem (“after death”) salvation.  Orthodox Christian teaching states that all decisions for or against Christ must be made before we die.  Once we pass to the other side, all bets are off.  Though many Protestants think that the Catholic belief in purgatory allows for a second chance at salvation, it does not.  In Catholicism, those who reach purgatory are already saved; they just need to be sanctified.

So is Lewis an advocate of post-mortem salvation?  This time I must be a bit more nuanced with my answer.  Yes, Emeth is technically dead when he accepts Aslan’s offer of salvation, but that does not mean he is being given a “second chance.”

As Lewis explains in a number of his works, God lives in eternity, not in time.  Too often, people think that eternity means time going on forever, when what it really means is that time itself does not exist.  The closest we come to a perception of eternity, Lewis writes, is our experience of the present moment.  For the present is the point where time touches eternity.

The moment Emeth dies is an eternal moment—and that eternal moment contains all the other moments of his life.  He accepts Aslan (Christ) in that eternal moment, because all of the other moments have been building up to that acceptance.  And once he does, all the other moments become reoriented around that moment of decision.  That is why, in The Great Divorce, Lewis says heaven and hell work backwards.  For those who accept Christ in that eternal moment, it will seem, not that they have just entered heaven, but that they have always been there.

Mere Christianity is Lewis’s best known and most complete work of apologetics.  In it he begins with a general argument for theism (the existence of God) and then expands that argument into a specific defense of the Christian gospel.  From there, he goes on to explain and support the central moral and theological principles of Christianity.

Although Lewis believed firmly in the authority of scripture, he knew that many of his modern readers did not share his belief.  Accordingly, Lewis carefully builds his apologetical arguments on common ground: on facts and observations about our world and ourselves that all people, regardless of their religious beliefs, can see, understand, and acknowledge.

That is why he begins Mere Christianity with an unexpected statement that seems, on the surface, to have little to do with a defense of the Christian faith.  Did you ever notice, Lewis writes, that when two people disagree about something, they argue about it rather than fight?  Though most of us likely did not notice this phenomenon before, the moment we read Lewis’s statement, the truth of it becomes apparent. Of course we argue instead of fight!

And that’s when Lewis hooks us.  Whether we realize it or not, two people cannot argue about something unless they agree (often unconsciously) to a fixed standard that transcends them both.  When we argue, we take that standard for granted and then make a case (sometimes rationally, sometimes irrationally) that our side of the argument better approximates that standard.

In a case where two former business partners are suing each other for fraud, neither party says: “yes, I swindled my partner, and I was right to do so.”  If he did, he would not be sent to jail; he would be sent to an asylum.  Now, one party might partially confess to fraud, but then he would follow the confession by offering mitigating circumstances to show that the “fraud” was actually justified.  In other words, he still holds to the accepted standard that fraud is wrong.

On the basis of our shared experience of such ethical debates, Lewis posits that a universal, cross-cultural moral code exists and is binding.  In The Abolition of Man, he gives that law code a name: the Tao.  Many Christians are confused by this: why should Lewis borrow a word from Taoism (a branch of Buddhism) to bolster his case for the Christian faith?  The answer is simple: to show that all people (east and west) recognize the Tao, even though they continually break it.

Many relativists will balk against Lewis’s assertion of the Tao, claiming that morality veers wildly from culture to culture and is a man-made (rather than a divinely-given) thing that alters from age to age.  But those same so-called relativists will quickly change their tune if someone robs them.  “It was wrong of you to do that,” they will say, and if the person who robbed them says, “in my culture it is OK for me to steal,” the relativist will not accept the excuse.

The fact is everyone knows the Tao exists, for whatever our own personal ideology, we expect other people to treat us in accordance with the Tao.  Indeed, if there were no Tao, then no court could have tried the Nazis or Saddam Hussein or the perpetrators of apartheid.  The Tao does exist, but if it exists, then it makes necessary a director of the Tao who transcends all times and cultures.  It requires, in short, a super-natural Creator who inscribed the Tao into our conscience.

Young people are taught many damaging things in our great secular universities.  From Marxism to Freudianism, moral relativism to postmodern deconstruction, their heads are filled with insidious, anti-humanistic theories that, when carried out to their logical conclusion, cause chaos, confusion, and despair on both the social and personal level.

And yet, I would argue that the most damaging thing they are taught slips under the radar of most attentive parents.  In thousands of sociology and psychology classrooms across our nation, students are taught that there is no such thing as masculinity and femininity.  That our sexual natures are not innate and God-given.  That the only reason boys and girls are different is that we give boys trucks to play with and girls dolls to play with.

Though any free-thinking, open-minded parent who has raised a boy and a girl knows that this is patent nonsense—that boys and girls manifest their inborn, hard-wired masculinity and femininity from a very early age—this absurd and poisonous theory of the sexes is taught as gospel truth throughout the western world.  Indeed, as a way of adv
ancing their false view of the sexes, feminists insisted on doing away altogether with the word “sexes.”

Rather than speak, as people have spoken for centuries, about the male and female sex, they have forced academia and the media to speak of the male and female gender.  They don’t like the word “sex” because it connotes an essential link between the masculine/feminine body and the masculine/feminine soul—and that is a reality they are desperate to obscure.  Gender carries with it no such connotation.  Gender is not something we were created with but a social construct that is reinforced by cultural mores and behavioral expectations.

As a Christian who not only believed the clear and simple teachings of the Bible (namely, that God created us male and female) but who possessed an intimate understanding of human nature, C. S. Lewis never succumbed to the feminist attack on masculinity and femininity.  He knew and celebrated the essential differences between the sexes: a celebration that is beautifully expressed in Prince Caspian.  Narnia, held captive by the “post-Christian” Telmarines, cannot be rescued and renewed until Peter and Edmund exercise their masculine gifts to defeat the Telmarine army while Susan and Lucy exercise their feminine gifts to wake up the trees from their deep slumber.

However, Lewis’s crowning statement of the distinct but complementary natures of masculinity and femininity comes in Perelandra.  Near the end of the novel, Lewis allows us to gaze on the angelic guardians of Perelandra (Venus) and Malacandra (Mars).  In keeping with the ancient association of Venus with the female principle and Mars with the male, Lewis discovers in them a masculinity and femininity that reaches deeper than society or biology or language can fathom.

Although the two angels are not physically male and female, they embody the essence of masculinity and femininity.  Thus, whereas Malacandra has “the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance,” Perelandra’s eyes open “inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs.”  For, Lewis both forms of seeing are necessary; together, they bring wholeness.

John Paul II’s papal encyclical, “On the Relationship between Faith and Reason” (Fides et Ratio) is an important work that should be read by all thinking Catholics and Protestants who care about the life of the mind.  And yet, though I am a great proponent of the encyclical, I feel a great sadness that it had to be written in the first place!

In the centuries before the Enlightenment seized control of our wisest and best educated scholars, no one would have been surprised to see the words “faith” and “reason” placed side by side.  After all, the Catholic Church invented the university, and the Christian worldview shaped some of the finest minds in history: Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Luther, and Pascal, to name but a few.  Likewise, the scientific achievements of such men as Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Kepler, and Newton were all underwritten by their faith in a super-natural Creator.

Had C. S. Lewis grown up in the medieval or renaissance periods, his training in logic and rhetoric would have been carried out in direct conversation with the doctrines of Christianity.  As a citizen of the modern world, he was trained instead by an atheistic tutor named Kirkpatrick who used reason to inoculate Lewis’s mind against religious “superstitions.”

But life has its little ironies.  When Lewis became a Christian, he did not forget Kirkpatrick’s teachings.  Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, Lewis marshaled the full weight of logic and reason to defend the faith from its modern detractors.  With great boldness, Lewis restored a great truth that had been forgotten: namely, that reason is on the side of the angels.

In Miracles, for example, Lewis argues that naturalism (the belief that nature is all that there is and that nothing super-natural exists) is self-refuting.  If we are merely products of evolutionary forces guided (or “un-guided”) by time and chance, then we have no reason to trust our senses or our powers of logic to arrive at the truth.  In fact, if naturalism is true, then truth itself becomes impossible—for truth stands outside nature, but the naturalist says nothing stands outside nature.

The modern naturalist too often overlooks the fact that the laws of naturalism rest on abstract principles that lie outside the supposedly closed system of nature.  To formulate such principles we must step outside the flow of nature to achieve a perspective that is, quite literally, super-natural.  But if naturalism is true, then we cannot do that.  If the naturalists are right and nature is a vast, impersonal, unguided mechanism, then how can we have any knowledge of that mechanism?  Surely an objective judge who is not pre-committed to a naturalistic worldview would conclude that our knowledge and understanding of nature cannot be a part of nature.

So Lewis explains it in Miracles, but it is in his Screwtape Letters that he drives the message home with a bracing wit that is not soon forgotten.  Again and again, senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew to do whatever he can to prevent his patient from engaging his reason.

The job of the devil is not to make us think but to fuddle our minds—to keep us endlessly fixed on the daily stream of life.  God, in contrast, would fix our attention on things we cannot see, on laws and theorems and principles that transcend the stream.  It was God, Screwtape concedes, who created reason and logic; against it, the devils can only offer propaganda, jargon, and spin.

In the western world, the most famous quest is that for the Holy Grail.  But every nation, every culture, every religion has its great quest story.  Something deep within our psyche compels us to go on pilgrimage, to leave our home and take to the road.  The inner call that sends us forth promises to provide us with adventure and mystery but with something else as well—something less tangible.  At the end of the quest lies the promise of meaning, purpose, fulfillment.

The Greeks used the beautiful word “telos” to refer to that purposeful end that we spend our lives in search of, but in English we have a similar word that rivals the Greek in its beauty and power.  At various stages in our lives, we who speak the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton seek after a consummation (from two Latin roots that mean “all together”).

Like “telos,” consummation connotes the achievement of a final goal or end, whether in business, in art, or in life itself: the “consummation devoutly to be wished” that Hamlet seeks in his “To be or not to be speech” is death.  But it is also used to refer to that physical and spiritual moment when a new husband and wife join themselves sexually and become one flesh.  To find consummation is to achieve a happiness that is really a kind of completion.  In the moment of consummation, we know who we are, why we are here, and how we fit in to the greater plan.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis reprises a character he created in Prince Caspian: Reepicheep, king of the talking mice.  Whereas Reepicheep plays the role of a simple, if chivalrous knight in Prince Caspian, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he develops into something grander and more wonderful.  If he is a little like Lancelot (the bravest of the knights) in the former tale, then he is a great deal like Gawain (the finder of the Grail) in the latter.  Still fearless and a bit reckless, Gawain-Reepicheep turns his talents and energy toward a magnificent, never-before-attempted quest: to set his foot upon the shore of Aslan’s Country.

Since Aslan’s Country is heaven, Reepicheep’s quest can only end with that consummation that we call death.  But that does not dissuade the courageous mouse from taking up the challenge.  He will sail east, to the place where the sun rises, and he will not stop until he has found the true home of the Risen Lion King of Narnia.

What will he do, what will he risk, what will he sacrifice to achieve that goal?  Reepicheep himself gives the answer: “‘My own plans are made.  While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader.  When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle.  When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws.  And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be head of the talking mice in Narnia.’”

When my kids were younger, they spent many hours watching the Disney channel.  At first, I was pleased to see how many characters in the shows they watched spoke with passion about following their dream.  That is, until I realized that all their talk about following their dream had little to do with consummation: it was mostly about being a pop star.  Thankfully, children who read Reepicheep’s story will learn of a greater dream: one that calls for true courage and sacrifice; one that will reveal to us, in the end, the very purpose for which we were born.

God, Christians declare, is all-powerful and all-loving.  And yet, the pain and suffering in our world suggests that God is either too weak to eliminate it or too apathetic to care to do so.  That, in a nutshell, is the problem of pain, and it is has stood for centuries as one of the crowning arguments against the existence of the God of the Bible.  Skeptics from Hume to Richard Dawkins have offered the problem of pain as incontestable proof that our universe is not run by a benevolent personal God who works miracles and involves himself in human history.

As an apologist, Lewis knew that he could not hope to challenge the skeptics of his own day if he did not make some attempt to address this problem in his writing.  Accordingly, Lewis’s first full-fledged apologetic work was not Mere Christianity or Miracles, but The Problem of Pain.

In Chapters 2 and 3 of that book, Lewis argues that pain is the upshot of God’s free-will experiment.  In asserting the existence and necessity of human free will, Lewis does not mean to imply that we are free to do anything we want or that God is not sovereign.  Rather, he reminds us that as creatures made in God’s image, we possess consciousness, rationality, and will.  God did not intend to create a race of puppets, but of moral beings who think and choose and create.

Though the vast majority of Christians would agree with Lewis on this point, few take the time to draw out the implications of God’s choosing to give us a will distinct from his own.  God cannot give us choice and take it away in the same breath; that would be a contradiction, and God, Lewis boldly asserts, does not violate the law of non-contradiction.

If God truly meant for us to be moral agents, Lewis theorizes, then he would have to create a playing field where we could act out our choices.  However, to ensure that we could not manipulate that playing field to suit our own whims (and thus impinge unfairly upon the choices of other moral agents), he would have to make the field both fixed and stable.  Unfortunately, for the field to be fixed and stable, God would have to leave open the possibility that his creatures would collide with it, causing discomfort and even pain.

Our world, Lewis suggests, may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it may be the only possible kind of world God could have created to allow us to engage in his free-will experiment.  Of course, a critic will be quick to point out that God could turn rocks into pillows every time one of us fell down, so that we would not bruise our head.  Well, Lewis admits, God does sometimes do just that when he performs a miracle, but if God were to change nature every time someone was in danger of being hurt, the game, as a game, would not be playable.

So the fixed nature of our world—necessary if we are to enact our free will—makes pain an ever-present possibility.  But that is only part of the story.  Too often Christians, especially American Christians, believe that God created us to have a good time.  But that was never his intent.  He created us to grow into something greater, even if that process of growth involves pain and suffering.  Yes, Lewis concludes, God may at times treat us harshly, but he has never treated us with contempt.  To the contrary, he pays us the “intolerable compliment” of loving us fully and irrevocably.  And that love demands that we grow into the creatures he created us to be, no matter the cost.  It is the beloved son, not the servant, whom the father disciplines.

There are very few citizens of the western world who do not know the story of the Garden of Eden.  Even those who have never picked up a Bible or seen the inside of a church are aware that a great deal of trouble was caused when two people named Adam and Eve ate an apple they were not supposed to eat.  Unfortunately, many who know the story think of it only in magical terms: a cursed fruit is plucked and eaten and a sinister enchantment brings suffering into the world.

In fact, as Lewis argues in at least three of his works (The Problem of Pain, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and Perelandra), the apple in and of itself was not that important.  The vital part of the story is that in tasting of the apple the first man and woman disobeyed the direct command of their creator.  It was their disobedience, not some dark magic locked up in the fruit, that caused us to Fall from our original state of perfection.

God, writes Lewis the English professor, intended for us to be adjectives, but we, in our rebelliousness and pride, insisted on being nouns.  We were made to modify God, not to stand on our own in lonely defiance; to give him glory and honor, not to steal it for ourselves.

Before the Fall, our entire being was oriented toward obedience to God.  As long as our soul obeyed God, our body obeyed our soul.  Indeed, Lewis theorizes that pre-fallen Adam could (like certain modern gurus in Tibet) control his autonomic functions by sheer willpower.  Better yet, as long as we remained in a state of innocence, our obedience to God came naturally, almost effortlessly.  True, it did call for an act of will, but our yielding to God was as easy and pleasant as the yielding that lovers make to each other on their honeymoon.

Sadly, after the Fall, our obedience to God became a hard and bitter thing.  No longer easy and pleasant, the choice to surrender our will to God now strikes all of us (young and old, male and female alike) as a kind of little death.  At times, we all succumb to what Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, calls “the black, Satanic wish to kill or die rather than give in.”

Yet still God calls us to obey him: not just for his good, but for ours as well.  For we cannot fulfill our purpose as creatures when we are in rebellion against our creator.  That is why the devil will do all that he can to provoke and enflame in us a spirit of disobedience.

In The Screwtape Letters (#8), a senior devil warns his nephew of the dangers of obedience.  At all costs, humans must be prodded to forsake the will of God (whom Screwtape calls the Enemy) and insist on choosing their own path and making their own decisions free from divine control.

To drive home his point, Screwtape creates a scenario which fills him with dread and horror:  “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

There can be no greater victory in the Christian life than this: to obey God when we are confused and frightened and in despair.  To obey God, not because we want to, but because God is worthy of our obedience.  To obey, and by obeying, trust and love, the God who made us in his image.

If you ever watch a movie in which a non-Christian actor plays a Christian character, you will often notice that he will convey his character’s faith by means of a friendly, if oafish-looking grin.  Though it is possible that unbelieving actors do this to parody believers, I would suggest that the real reason is rooted in a characteristically American misunderstanding of the nature of that glorious new life that Christ promises his followers.

There exists in our country a widespread belief that Christians are—or at least should be—“nice” people who spend most of their day smiling.  Though it is, in most cases, a good thing to smile, to be thankful, and to takes things lightly, niceness is hardly the central virtue of the Christian faith.  Christ’s goal is to transform us into saints, not improve our personality.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that the reason God tells us not to judge is that we do not know the raw material that other people are struggling with.  The world expects all Christians to act equally happy and outgoing, but the fact is that it may be a greater victory for Christian A (who has been strapped with a weight of inner demons and psychological complexes) to smile than for Christian B (who has been blessed from birth with a loving family, a healthy body, and sound finances) to donate $5000 to charity.

As a patriotic American of conservative convictions, I am no fan of the young men who avoided the draft in the 1970’s by running off to Vietnam, but I consciously avoid casting judgment upon them.  The reason for this is simple.  Since I was born too late to have been eligible for the draft, I have no way of knowing how I would have reacted in their place.  To take a more difficult case, I cannot in good conscience judge the Germans who remained silent during the holocaust.  Of course I would like to believe that if I had been in their place, I would have risked imprisonment to shelter fugitive Jews in my attic. But how do I know if I would have had the courage to do so.

The point of this exercise is not to turn morality into something that is relative to the times: sin and cowardice are the same in any age or culture.  The point is that none of us can ever really know the struggles that go on within the hearts and minds of our fellow human beings.

And that takes us back to niceness.  The reason it is wrong for the world (and the church) to make a smiling face and a friendly demeanor the defining mark of the Christian is that the Body of Christ is made up of people whose personality types are as diverse and unique as the wavy lines of a fingerprint.   If every Christian in America were the smiling, friendly type, then that would mean that God only loves (and saves) smiling, friendly people.

In fact, God is no respecter of persons, and his church is therefore filled with people who are grumpy, cantankerous, depressed, irritable, and painfully shy.  Two of the greatest heroes of Narnia are the crotchety, suspicious Trumpkin and the perpetually gloomy, infuriatingly pessimistic Puddleglum.  Yet from their seemingly intractable raw material, Aslan molds two of the bravest and most loyal warriors in the realm.

The power of Christ lies not in his ability to make us nice, but in his capacity for transforming our hurt, our pain, and even our sin into tools and weapons for bringing his kingdoms to earth.