Tuesday Tome - Mere Christianity / Faith

Tuesday, March 12 (7:00pm) will be the third and final session of the Mere Christianity Book Club I've been leading at Valley. You're invited to join us, even if you have not made it to the two previous sessions. There is so much to discuss that each meeting really stands on its own. This next time we'll be discussing the fourth section (Book IV) of the book.

The study questions I provided at our last gathering turned out to be really helpful in our discussion. If you would like to get a copy of these questions prior to our next meeting, please send me an email message. I would be glad to send you a pdf of the study questions for the entire book.

Here is a provocative passage from the section of the book we discussed at our last meeting.

From Book Three: Christian Behavior, Chapter 11, Faith

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: 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, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then 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 churchgoing 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?

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). Mere Christianity (pp. 140-141). Harper Collins, Inc.