Neither Individualism Nor Totalitarianism—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis tells us, "One sensible critic wrote asking me why, if God wanted sons instead of 'toy soldiers' [the key image of his last chapter], He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process. One part of the answer to this question is fairly easy: the other part is probably beyond all human knowledge. The easy part is this. The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will. He gave them free will because a world of automatons could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness. The difficult part is this: All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one 'Son of God.' If we insist on asking, 'But could there have been many?' we find ourselves in very deep water. Have the words 'could have been' any sense at all when applied to God ... the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend?"

"Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could.... When you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are 'no business of yours,' remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself, you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian.... The devil sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites.... He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them."

 

Highlights from Chapter 6: Two Notes, Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

The Obstinate Toy Soldiers—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

To be obstinate is to be stubborn, and the tendency of humankind toward God is extreme stubbornness. C.S. Lewis phrases it this way: "The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.... The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives ... and especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small.... It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centeredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.... Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested in flesh: all he sees is that the tin is being spoiled. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you."

"What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what God did about us is this: The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself ... a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language.... The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby.... Think how you would like to become a slug or a crab. The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life ... allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life.... Because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, 'killed,' He chose an earthly career that 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 ... 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."

"We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one new man in whom it was fully present ... He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about 'good infection.' One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him, we shall catch it from Him. Of course, you can express this in all sorts of ... ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true."

Highlights from Chapter 5: The Obstinate Toy Soldiers from Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book. 

Good Infection—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other.... Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B.... Now let us imagine ... that both books have been in that position forever.... B's position would always have been resulting from A's position. But ... A's position wound not have existed before B's position. In other words the result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do ... but it is not so with all causes and results....

"God is ... three Persons while remaining one Being," writes C.S. Lewis. "As soon as I begin trying to explain how these Persons are connected I have to use words that make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son.... 'Father' suggests that He is there first—just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so [with God].... The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father [begot] the Son.... Think of the Son always ... streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind.... But ... all these ... are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things instead of two Persons. So then after all, the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away from the words of the Bible. It is quite all right to go away from them for a moment ... to make some special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to know is ... it is a relation of love."

"The words 'God is love' have no meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person.... Christians ... believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.... What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person ... the Third of the three Persons who are God. This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy [Spirit] ... of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find ... Him rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two.... In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him. He is always acting through you."
 

"And now, what does it matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us.... There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad ... are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.... They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.... The whole offer Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life that was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy [Spirit] will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call 'good infection.' Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else."

Highlights from Chapter 4: Good Infection from Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Time and Beyond Time—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis writes, "In the last chapter  I had to touch on the subject of prayer, and while that is still fresh in ... mind, 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 ... 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'.... The whole sting of it comes in the words at the same moment.... We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time at all: later the philosophers took it over, and now some of the scientists are doing the same.... If a million people are praying to [God] at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty—and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always the Present for Him."

"Suppose I am writing a novel. I write 'Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!' For Mary, who has to live in the imaginary time of my story, there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary's maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all.... I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary's time ... at all.... God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe....He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us."

"If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn .... God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line and sees it all. The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent difficulties in Christianity.... You cannot fit Christ's earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really, I suggest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in His whole divine life.... God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one.... To have a history means losing part of your reality (because it has already slipped away...)."

"If [God] knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise?... All the days are 'Now' for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them.... You  never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way—because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you."

 

Highlights from Chapter 3: Time and Beyond Time from Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

The Three-Personal God—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis writes, "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."

Dante's Paradisio: "Look, someone comes who shall augment our love!"

"Some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be 'absorbed' into God.... They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop.... 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."
 

"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.... As you advance to more ... complicated levels, you do not leave behind ... 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.... The Christian account of God involves just the same principle.... On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings.... On the divine level you still find personalities; but ... combined in new ways.... In God's dimension ... you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.... We cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we ... perceived only two dimensions ... we could [not] properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then ... getting some positive idea ... of something super-personal—something more than a person."

"The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin anytime.... 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 ... 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 [God-Man] beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. God is the [Person] to [whom] he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the [Person] inside him [who] is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.... The whole three-fold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on ... [when] an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into ... Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself."

"That is how [trinitarian] Theology started. People already knew about God in a [somewhat] 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 [that Jesus is fully God and fully man]. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little ... 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." Trinitarian theology is NOT 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 but 1 x 1 x1 = 1.

"Theology is, in a sense, an experimental science. It is simple religions that are the made-up ones.... 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.... The one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood ... is the technical equipment for this science—the laboratory outfit. That is why ... people who turn up every few years with some ... 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 pair 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."

Highlights from Chapter 2: The Three-Personal God from Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book," begins C.S. Lewis. What is supposedly the problem? "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?"

"If a man has ... looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then ... looks at a map of the Atlantic, he ... will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But ... the map ... is  based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic.... If you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary.... Theology is like the map ... 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 confused.... A vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on ... 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.... If you do not listen to Theology ... it will mean that you have a lot of wrong...muddled, out-of-date ideas.... Many of the ideas about God ... trotted out as novelties today are ... ones that real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected."

"By attaching ourselves to Christ, we can 'become Sons of God.' One asks, 'Aren't we Sons of God already?'... 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.... 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'.... When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies ... but when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest.... What God begets is God.... What God creates is not God.... That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is.

"What man, in his natural condition, has not got is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God.... The Biological sort that comes to us through Nature ... is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies ... in the form of air, water, food ... is Bios. The Spiritual life, which is in God from all eternity and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe.... A man who changed from having Bios to Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue that 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 rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life."

 

Highlights from Chapter 1: Making and Begetting from Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book. 

Faith as Trust—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Since C.S. Lewis considers faith to be the most difficult subject he has tackled thus far in Mere Christianity, he gives his readers some encouragement: "There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you 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.... There are directions for dealing with particular crossroads and obstacles on the journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find a statement in Christian writings that 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."

In the last chapter, Lewis talked about faith in the sense of a steady belief in facts. In this chapter, he says, "I am trying to talk about faith in the second sense ... after a man ... discovers his bankruptcy.... 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.... He ... trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience that He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion.... In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us.... Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing."

"Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means ... 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.... The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things [good works and faith] together into one amazing sentence [Philippians 2:12-13]. 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 did nothing."

"Christianity seems at the 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. Everyone 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 when 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."

Highlights from chapter 12: Faith, book 3: Christian Behavior in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Faith as Belief—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Faith+Reason VS. Emotion+Imagination

C.S. Lewis devotes two chapters to faith in Mere Christianity. Here's why: "The word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses.... In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.... 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?.... I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my mind is perfectly convinced by good evidence that ... properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But ... I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under.... The battle is between faith and reason on the one side and emotion and imagination on the other.... Faith is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your moods.... 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....

"One must train the habit of Faith.... Some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings 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.... You may remember I said ... the first step toward humility was to realize that one is proud.... The next step is to make some serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try 6 weeks. By that time ... one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.... 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 talk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after 5 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 ... is that we fail.... God has been waiting for the moment ... you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in [an] 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.... It is after this that real life begins." Here is Lewis's second chapter on faith: faith as trust in addition to belief.

Highlights from chapter 11: Faith, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Hope—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis writes in his chapter on hope in Mere Christianity, "A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not ... a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank."

"Most of us find it very difficult to want 'Heaven' at all—except in so far as 'Heaven' means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we don't recognize it.... The longings that arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings that no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.... There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.... Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with that fact, and one right one.

1. The Fool's Way—"He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes ... thinking ... if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday."
2. The Way of the Disillusioned "Sensible Man"—"Of course," he says, "one feels like that when one's young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the rainbow's end." Supposing one really can reach the rainbow's end? It would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed "common sense" we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.
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 that no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world.... Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.... I must ... never ... be unthankful for those earthly blessings, and ... never ... mistake them for the something else ... my true country, which I shall not find till after death.... I must make it the main object of life to press onto that other country and 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 scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is ... [an] attempt to express the inexpressible.... People who take those symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs."

 

Highlights from chapter 10: Hope, book 3: Christian Behavior in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.