CS Lewis

There is an activity of God displayed throughout creation, a wholesale activity let us say which men refuse to recognize. The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on a smaller scale. One of their chief purposes is that men, having seen a thing done by personal power on the small scale, may recognize, when they see the same thing done on the large scale, that the power behind it is also personal – is indeed the very same person who lived among us two thousand years ago. The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see...

The miracles of healing fall into the same pattern. This is sometimes obscured for us by the somewhat magical view we tend to take of ordinary medicine. The doctors themselves do not take this view. The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient’s body. What the doctor does is to stimulate Nature’s functions in the body, or to remove hindrances. In a sense, though we speak for convenience of healing a cut, every cut heals itself; no dressing will make skin grow over a cut on a corpse. That same mysterious energy which we call gravitational when it steers the planets and biochemical when it heals a body is the efficient cause of all recoveries, and if God exists, that energy, directly or indirectly, is His. All who are cured are cured by Him, the healer within. But once He did it visibly, a Man meeting a man. Where He does not work within us in this mode, the organism dies. Hence Christ’s one miracle of destruction is also in harmony with God’s wholesale activity. His bodily hand held out in symbolic wrath blasted a single fig tree; but no tree died that year in Palestine, or any year, or in any land, or even ever will, save because He has done something, or (more likely) ceased to do something, to it.

The facts then are these, that Jesus professed Himself in some sense ignorant, and within a moment showed that He really was so. To believe in the Incarnation, to believe that He is God, makes it hard to understand how He could be ignorant, but also makes it certain that if He said He could be ignorant, then ignorant He could really be. For a God who can be ignorant is less baffling than a God who falsely professes ignorance.

The answer of theologians is that the God-Man was omniscient as God and ignorant as man. This, no doubt, is true, though it cannot be imagined. Nor, indeed, can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined, nor the twilight of reason in His infancy. Still less is merely organic life in His mother’s womb.

But the physical sciences, no less than theology, propose for our belief much that cannot be imagined. A generation which has accepted the curvature of space need not boggle at the impossibility of imagining the consciousness of incarnate God. In that consciousness the temporal and the timeless were united. I think we can acquiesce in mystery at that point, provided we do not aggravate it by our tendency to picture the timeless life of God as simply another sort of time.

We are committing that blunder whenever we ask how Christ could be, at the same moment, ignorant and omniscient, or how He could be the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps while He slept. The italicized words conceal an attempt to establish a temporal relation between His timeless life as God and the days, months, and years of His life as man. And, of course, there is no such relation.

The incarnation is not an episode in the life of God. The Lamb is slain, and therefore presumably born, grown to maturity, and risen from all eternity. The taking up into God’s nature of humanity, with all its ignorance and limitations, is not itself a temporal event, though the humanity which is so taken up was, like our own, a thing living and dying in time.

And if limitation, and therefore ignorance, was thus taken up, we ought to expect that the ignorance should, at some time, be actually displayed. It would be difficult and, to me, repellent, to suppose that Jesus never asked a genuine question, that is, a question to which He did not know the answer. That would make of His humanity something so unlike ours as scarcely to deserve the name.

I find it easier to believe that when He said, ‘Who touched Me?’ Luke chapter 8, verse 45, He really wanted to know.

There is an activity of God displayed throughout creation, a wholesale activity let us say which men refuse to recognize. The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on a smaller scale. One of their chief purposes is that men, having seen a thing done by personal power on the small scale, may recognize, when they see the same thing done on the large scale, that the power behind it is also personal – is indeed the very same person who lived among us two thousand years ago. The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see...

Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say “It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King,” or else “It is the laws of Nature.” The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do nothing but what He sees the Father do. There is, so to speak, a family style...

When He fed the thousands He multiplied fish as well as bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius – the god of animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynecology, embryology, or the marriage bed – the “genial bed” as they called it after its god Genius. As the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of fish reveals the real Genius.

The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably). Christ said it was difficult for "the rich" to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,1 referring, no doubt, to "riches" in the ordinary sense. But I think it really covers riches in every sense—good fortune, health, popularity, and all the things one wants to have. All these things tend—just as money tends—to make you feel independent of God, because if you have^them you are happy already and contented in this life. You don't want to turn away to anything more, and so you try to rest in a shadowy happiness as if it could last forever. But God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness. Consequently He may have to take all these "riches" away from you: if He doesn't, you will go on relying on them. It sounds cruel, doesn't it? But I am beginning to find out that what people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run. I used to think it was a "cruel" doctrine to say that troubles and sorrows were "punishments." But I find in practice that when you are in trouble, the moment you regard it as a "punishment," it becomes easier to bear. If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic.

The New Testament contains embarrassing promises that what we pray for with faith we shall receive. Mark XI, 24 is the most staggering. Whatever we ask for, believing that we'll get it, we'll get. No question, it seems, of confining it to spiritual gifts; whatever we ask for. No question of a merely general faith in God, but a belief that you will get the particular thing you ask. No question of getting either it or else something that is really far better for you; you'll get precisely it. And to heap paradox on paradox, the Greek doesn't even say "believing that you will get it". It uses the aorist, [Greek: elabete], which one is tempted to translate "believing that you got it". But this final difficulty I shall ignore. I don't expect Aramaic had anything which we--brought up on Latin grammar--would recognise as tenses at all.

How is this astonishing promise to be reconciled--

(a) With the observed facts?

(b) With the prayer in Gethsemane, and (as a result of that prayer) the universally accepted view that we should ask everything with a reservation ("if it be Thy will")?

As regards (a), no evasion is possible. Every war, every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted. At this very moment thousands of people in this one island are facing as a fait accompli, the very thing against which they have prayed night and day, pouring out their whole soul in prayer, and, as they thought, with faith. They have sought and not found. They have knocked and it has not been opened. "That which they greatly feared has come upon them."

But (b) though much less often mentioned, is surely an equal difficulty. How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith--an untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (I, 6)--that you will get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance for a possible refusal? If you envisage a refusal as possible, how can you have simultaneously a perfect confidence that what you ask will not be refused? If you have that confidence, how can you take refusal into account at all?

It is easy to see why so much more is written about worship and contemplation than about "crudely" or "naïvely" petitionary prayer. They may be--I think they are--nobler forms of prayer. But they are also a good deal easier to write about.

As regards the first difficulty, I'm not asking why our petitions are so often refused. Anyone can see in general that this must be so. In our ignorance we ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even intrinsically possible. Or again, to grant one man's prayer involves refusing another's. There is much here which it is hard for our will to accept but nothing that is hard for our intellect to understand. The real problem is different; not why refusal is so frequent, but why the opposite result is so lavishly promised.

Shall we then proceed on Vidler's principles and scrap the embarrassing promises as "venerable archaisms" which have to be "outgrown"? Surely, even if there were no other objection, that method is too easy. If we are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no progress. The very writers of the "Tekkies", not to mention the scientists, know better. The troublesome fact, the apparent absurdity which can't be fitted into any synthesis we have yet made, is precisely the one we must not ignore. Ten to one, it's in that covert the fox is lurking. There is always hope if we keep an unsolved problem fairly in view; there's none if we pretend it's not there.

Before going any further, I want to make two purely practical points: 1. These lavish promises are the worst possible place at which to begin Christian instruction in dealing with a child or a Pagan. You remember what happened when the Widow started Huck Finn off with the idea he could get what he wanted by praying for it. He tried the experiment and then, not unnaturally, never gave Christianity a second thought; we had better not talk about the view of prayer embodied in Mark XI, 24 as "naïf" or "elementary". If that passage contains a truth, it is a truth for very advanced pupils indeed. I don't think it is "addressed to our condition" (yours and mine) at all. It is a coping-stone, not a foundation. For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.

2. We must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up a subjective state which, if we succeeded, we should describe as "faith", with the idea that this will somehow ensure the granting of our prayer. We have probably all done this as children. But the state of mind which desperate desire working on a strong imagination can manufacture is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat of psychological gymnastics.

It seems to me we must conclude that such promises about prayer with faith refer to a degree or kind of faith which most believers never experience. A far inferior degree is, I hope, acceptable to God. Even the kind that says, "Help thou my unbelief", may make way for a miracle. Again, the absence of such faith as ensures the granting of the prayer is not even necessarily a sin; for Our Lord had no such assurance when He prayed in Gethsemane.

How or why does such faith occur sometimes, but not always, even in the perfect petitioner? We, or I, can only guess. My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God's fellow-worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work. It is the prophet's, the apostle's, the missionary's, the healer's prayer that is made with this confidence and finds the confidence justified by the event. The difference, we are told, between a servant and a friend is that a servant is not in his master's secrets. For him, "orders is orders". He has only his own surmises as to the plans he helps to execute. But the fellow-worker, the companion or (dare we say?) the colleague of God is so united with Him at certain moments that something of the divine foreknowledge enters his mind. Hence his faith is the "evidence"--that is, the evidentness, the obviousness--of things not seen.

As the friend is above the servant, the servant is above the suitor, the man praying on his own behalf. It is no sin to be a suitor. Our Lord descends into the humiliation of being a suitor, of praying on His own behalf, in Gethsemane. But when He does so the certitude about His Father's will is apparently withdrawn.

After that it would be no true faith--it would be idle presumption--for us, who are habitually suitors and do not often rise to the level of servants, to imagine that we shall have any assurance which is not an illusion--or correct only by accident--about the event of our prayers. Our struggle is, isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that, whether He can grant them or not, God will listen to our prayers, will take them into account. Even to go on believing that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.

You are told to love your neighbors as yourself. How do you love yourself? When I look into my own mind, I find that I do not love myself by thinking myself a dear old chap or having affectionate feelings. I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself and quite apart from my character. I might detest something which I have done. Nevertheless, I do not cease to love myself. In other words, that definite distinction that Christians make between hating sin and loving the sinner is one that you have been making in your own case since you were born. You dislike what you have done, but you don't cease to love yourself. You may even think that you ought to be hanged. You may even think that you ought to go to the police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. It seems to me, therefore, that when the worst comes to the worst, if you cannot restrain a man by any method except by trying to kill him, then a Christian must do that. That is my answer. But I may be wrong. It is very difficult to answer, of course.

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as theyself.' Because in Christian morals 'thy neighbor' includes 'thy enemy', and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies...

We might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

Now that I come to think of it, I have no exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbour' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do...

Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment - even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged...

I imagine somebody will say, 'Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something insude us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one own's back, must be simply killed... Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves - to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves.

But there is worse to come. Say what you like, we shall be told. The apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the second coming in their own lifetime, and, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion.

He said, in so many words, ‘This generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else. It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. Yet how teasing, also, that within fourteen words of it should come the statement, ‘But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side.

That they stood thus in the mouth of Jesus Himself, and were not merely placed thus by the reporter, we surely need not doubt. Unless the reporter were perfectly honest, he would never have recorded the confession of ignorance at all. He could have had no motive for doing so except a desire to tell the whole truth. And unless later copyists were equally honest, they would never have preserved the apparently mistaken prediction about this generation after the passage of time had shown the apparent mistake.

This passage, Mark chapter 13, verses 30-32, and the cry, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ Mark chapter 15, verse 34, together make up the strongest proof that the New Testament is historically reliable. The evangelists have the first great characteristic of honest witnesses. They mention facts which are, at first sight, damaging to their main contention.

The facts then are these, that Jesus professed Himself in some sense ignorant, and within a moment showed that He really was so. To believe in the Incarnation, to believe that He is God, makes it hard to understand how He could be ignorant, but also makes it certain that if He said He could be ignorant, then ignorant He could really be. For a God who can be ignorant is less baffling than a God who falsely professes ignorance.

The answer of theologians is that the God-Man was omniscient as God and ignorant as man. This, no doubt, is true, though it cannot be imagined. Nor, indeed, can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined, nor the twilight of reason in His infancy. Still less is merely organic life in His mother’s womb.

But the physical sciences, no less than theology, propose for our belief much that cannot be imagined. A generation which has accepted the curvature of space need not boggle at the impossibility of imagining the consciousness of incarnate God. In that consciousness the temporal and the timeless were united. I think we can acquiesce in mystery at that point, provided we do not aggravate it by our tendency to picture the timeless life of God as simply another sort of time.

We are committing that blunder whenever we ask how Christ could be, at the same moment, ignorant and omniscient, or how He could be the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps while He slept. The italicized words conceal an attempt to establish a temporal relation between His timeless life as God and the days, months, and years of His life as man. And, of course, there is no such relation.

The incarnation is not an episode in the life of God. The Lamb is slain, and therefore presumably born, grown to maturity, and risen from all eternity. The taking up into God’s nature of humanity, with all its ignorance and limitations, is not itself a temporal event, though the humanity which is so taken up was, like our own, a thing living and dying in time.

And if limitation, and therefore ignorance, was thus taken up, we ought to expect that the ignorance should, at some time, be actually displayed. It would be difficult and, to me, repellent, to suppose that Jesus never asked a genuine question, that is, a question to which He did not know the answer. That would make of His humanity something so unlike ours as scarcely to deserve the name.

I find it easier to believe that when He said, ‘Who touched Me?’ Luke chapter 8, verse 45, He really wanted to know.