Mere Christianity: Book 4, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Lewis offers two notes in this chapter. First, a potential objection to his argument would be, “Why did God create human beings and tell them to become divine, rather than simply making them divine?” Lewis answers the question in two ways. First, God gave humans the power of free will: he gave them the choice of becoming Sons or not. God prefers to challenge human beings, rather than creating them to be perfect already. Second, Lewis guesses that God could not have begotten an infinite number of Sons from the beginning of eternity—there could only be one. The only way to conceive of an infinite number of Sons would be to imagine them as “human forms standing about together in some kind of space.” In other words, the only way to conceive of infinite sons is to think of them existing in the universe—whereas one can conceive of a single Father and Son existing outside the material confines of the universe.

Lewis’s notions of unity among humans could be interpreted to mean that individuals don’t really matter, as if all people are interchangeable. But in Christianity, human beings are like the different “organs in a body”—they are different from one another, and each one plays a unique part, but they are still all operating as one on some level. Lewis then says that there are two ways that the Christian mindset can be corrupted. If people think of themselves as utterly different from one another, without any common bond of religion, then they become individualists. If, however, they come to think that all people are just the same, their way of thinking becomes Totalitarian. Christianity, and Christianity alone, defines human beings as different yet also united—any step toward Totalitarianism or individualism is a dangerous perversion of the faith.