If you’re looking for the Cliff Notes version of Mere Christianity this week, you’re out of luck. I’m basically turning it all over to you guys. A chapter-by-chapter breakdown? Not in the cards. Besides, I don’t think it's necessary.
The five chapters we read this week really could have been one chapter, don’t you think? Jack could have called it “Theology,” just not “Theology for Dummies.” Not that everything there was way over our heads; it’s just written for an adult audience. Jack points out things that we read before in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy—and also there in GKC’s essay “Why I Am A Catholic”—albeit a little differently.
Jack’s descriptions and explanations of the differences between making and begetting, his geometric explanation of the Trinity are very well done, in my opinion. What do you think? His explanation of God being outside time, although He came into time as a man—starting as it were a good infection that has stood the test of earth time like no other religion—set my mind’s eye spinning in a good way. And since He became truly human and an example for us, He provides us the way to become children of God, rather than stay obstinate toy soldiers. Or mere sterotypical statues, as all created things really are. Keeping in mind (it’s Lent, after all) that we are dust, we very well may stay dust, or be damned if we don’t decide otherwise and get with the program. Our Lord gives us a picture in today’s Gospel reading.
A great set of chapters, uplifting even. Jack scuttles back quickly to Scriptures and counsels us to do likewise throughout. For to stray too far is to fall off a cliff. I like his disclaimer on God being out of our time stream, and I’ll paraphrase, it's not Biblical, but it's Christian. Let's hear it for the Zoe’s! Thank God for the work of the Apostolic Fathers!
My favorite passage from this week’s reading? Right here—
because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, "killed," He (Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ) chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn-poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed-killed every day in a sense-the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier-real tin, just like the rest-had come fully and splendidly alive.
Thanks be to God! Now I’m gonna hog the cheese dip and listen to you all get the comment ball rolling. Ferris Bueller was out sick last week, not this week!
Next week we read Book 4: Chapters, 6, 7, and 8.
