God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

We learn more and more about the pattern. We learn nothing about that which ‘feeds’ real events into the pattern. If it is not God, we must at the very least call it Destiny—the immaterial, ultimate, one-way pressure which keeps the universe on the move.

The laws are an empty frame; it is He who fills that frame—not now and then on specially ‘providential’ occasions, but at every moment.

the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him.

it is of the very nature of the history of this world to have happened only once; and if the Incarnation happened at all, it is the central chapter of that history. It is improbable in the same way in which the whole of nature is improbable, because it is only there once, and will happen only once.

We, with our modern democratic and arithmetical presuppositions would so have liked and expected all men to start equal in their search for God.

The people who are selected are, in a sense, unfairly selected for a supreme honour; but it is also a supreme burden.

What the story of the Incarnation seems to be doing is to flash a new light on a principle in nature, and to show for the first time that this principle of inequality in nature is neither good nor bad.

It is a law of the natural universe that no being can exist on its own resources. Everyone, everything, is hopelessly indebted to everyone and everything else.

And yet, suddenly seeing it in the light of the Christian story, one realizes that vicariousness is not in itself bad; that all these animals, and insects, and horrors are merely that principle of vicariousness twisted in one way.

when you think it out, nearly everything good in nature also comes from vicariousness. After all, the child, both before and after birth, lives on its mother, just as the parasite lives on its host, the one being a horror, the other being the source of almost every natural goodness in the world. It all depends upon what you do with this principle.

All other religions in the world, as far as I know them, are either nature religions, or anti-nature religions.

The nature religions simply affirm my natural desires. The anti-natural religions simply contradict them.

Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death; it tells me something quite new about it.

I think it is your duty to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.

Each of us has his individual emphasis: each holds, in addition to the Faith, many opinions which seem to him to be consistent with it and true and important. And so perhaps they are. But as apologists it is not our business to defend them. We are defending Christianity; not ‘my religion’.

The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true;

you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like.

The new truth which you do not know and which you need must, in the very nature of things, be hidden precisely in the doctrines you least like and least understand.

there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

we must at all costs not move with the times.

We have to answer the current scientific attitude towards Christianity, not the attitude which scientists adopted one hundred years ago.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.

it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.

Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.

Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow)6 in the particular language of our own age.

The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the tradi...

But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress.

Theology teaches us what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, while Politics teaches what means are effective.

A century ago our task was to edify those who had been brought up in the Faith: our present task is chiefly to convert and instruct infidels.

They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins.

I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home.

use of the word Church where there is no time to defend it alienates sympathy and should be avoided where possible.

Or of any other loaded word which there is no time to defend.

you must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.

If I speak only of the intellectual kind, that is not because I undervalue the other but because, not having been given the gifts necessary for carrying it out, I cannot give advice about it.

Uneducated people are not irrational people. I have found that they will endure, and can follow, quite a lot of sustained argument if you go slowly.

The very idea of ‘miracle’ presupposes knowledge of the Laws of Nature; you can’t have the idea of an exception until you have the idea of a rule.

This raises the whole problem of the ‘embarrassing supporter’. It is brutal (and dangerous) to repel him; it is often dishonest to agree with what he says. I usually try to avoid saying anything about the validity of his argument in itself and reply, ‘Yes. That may do for you and me. But I’m afraid if we take that line our friend here on my left might say etc. etc.’

Something will usually have to be said about the historicity of the Gospels.

My own line was to say that I was a professional literary critic and I thought I did know the difference between legend and historical writing: that the Gospels were certainly not legends (in one sense they’re not good enough): and that if they are not history then they are realistic prose fiction of a kind which actually never existed before the eighteenth century.

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth.

Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

(Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies.

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.

we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.

But if this argument is sound, surely it is an argument not only against praying, but against doing anything whatever?

We know that we can act and that our actions produce results. Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand.

It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method.