Reading the Classics: Mere Christianity

I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity along with Tim Challies in his Reading the Classics Together reading program. This week’s reading was the last five chapters of the book. I read them, but I don’t have much to say about them. 

This time around reading this book, I was a little disappointed with it. When I first read it, back in my college days, I found it rather thrilling. Yep, I’ve always been one of those people who can get excited by a book. I am still impressed by what an outstanding explainer of complicated things C. S. Lewis is; but in the years since I first read Mere Christianity, I’ve done a lot more thinking about many of the topics in this book and I disagree with him more than I remembered. And now I find quite a few of his arguments unpersuasive.

I do love the George MacDonald parable found in this section.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.

A few years ago, when my life was particularly difficult I used that last line in the signature on my email to remind me that God was working through all my circumstances, even the hard ones (or maybe especially the hard ones) to conform me to the image of his son.