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.