Tuesday Tome - Mere Christianity / Behavior

Tonight at 7:00pm I will be leading the second session of a Mere Christianity Book Club. You're welcome to join us. We'll be discussing Section 2, Chapter 5 and all of Section 3.

Last month we had a large group. I tried to cover too much ground and would have planned for more structure had I know such a large group would be attending. We're only going to cover one section of the book tonight, and I have prepared a discussion guide that should be helpful.

In case you haven't caught it in previous posts, the entire book is available for free online. The entire text is there, downloadable as a pdf, and available as audio. CLICK HERE.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the section we'll be discussing tonight.

From Book Three: Christian Behavior, Chapter 1
The Three Parts of Morality

Some people prefer to talk about moral ‘ideals’ rather than moral rules and about moral ‘idealism’ rather than moral obedience. Now it is, of course, quite true that moral perfection is an ‘ideal’ in the sense that we cannot achieve it. In that sense every kind of perfection is, for us humans, an ideal; we cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or perfect tennis players or in drawing perfectly straight lines.

But there is another sense in which it is very misleading to call moral perfection an ideal. When a man says that a certain woman, or house, or ship, or garden is ‘his ideal’ he does not mean (unless he is rather a fool) that everyone else ought to have the same ideal. In such matters we are entitled to have different tastes and, therefore, different ideals. But it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a ‘man of high ideals’, because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own and that the rest of us were not called on to share it. This would be a disastrous mistake.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). Mere Christianity (pp. 69-70). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.