MereChristianity: 3. The Shocking Alternative

The Shocking Alternative

 

     Christians,  then, believe that an evil power  has made himself for the

present the Prince of this World.  And, of course, that  raises problems. Is

this state of affairs in  accordance with God's will or not? If it is, He is

a  strange God, you  will say: and if  it  is not, how can  anything  happen

contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?

    

But  anyone who  has  been  in authority  knows how a thing  can  be in

accordance with  your will in  one  way and not  in another. It may be quite

sensible for a mother  to say to the children, "I'm not going to go and make

you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep  it tidy on

your own." Then she goes up one  night  and finds the Teddy bear and the ink

and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She

would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the  other hand, it is her will

which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing  arises in any

regiment, or trade union, or  school. You make a  thing  voluntary  and then

half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has

made it possible.

   

  It  is probably the same in the  universe. God created things which had

free  will. That means creatures  which can  go either  wrong or right. Some

people  think  they  can  imagine  a  creature which  was  free but  had  no

possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a  thing is free to  be  good it is

also  free to  be bad. And free will  is  what  has made evil possible. Why,

then, did God give them free will?  Because  free  will though it makes evil

possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or

joy worth  having.  A  world  of  automata-of  creatures  that  worked  like

machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for

His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to

Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight  compared with which

the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk

and water. And for that they must be free.

    

Of  course God knew  what would happen if  they used their  freedom the

wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined

to disagree with Him. But there is  a difficulty about disagreeing with God.

He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be

right and He  wrong any more  than  a  stream can  rise higher than its  own

source. When you are  arguing  against Him you  are arguing against the very

power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch

you are sitting on. If God thinks  this state of war in the universe a price

worth  paying  for  free  will-that  is, for making  a  live world in  which

creatures  can do real  good  or  harm  and something of real importance can

happen,  instead  of  a  toy  world  which  only moves  when  He  pulls  the

strings-then we may take it it is worth paying.

    

When we have understood about free will,  we shall see  how silly it is

to ask, as somebody  once asked  me:  "Why  did  God make a creature of such

rotten stuff that it went wrong?" The better stuff a creature is made of-the

cleverer and stronger and freer it is-then  the better it will be if it goes

right, but also the worse it will be if it goes  wrong. A cow cannot be very

good or very  bad; a dog can be both better  and worse;  a  child better and

worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so;

a superhuman spirit best-or worst-of all.

  

   How  did the Dark  Power go wrong? Here, no doubt, we ask a question to

which human  beings cannot give an answer with  any  certainty. A reasonable

(and traditional) guess, based on  our own experiences of  going wrong, can,

however, be  offered.  The  moment  you have a  self  at  all,  there  is  a

possibility of putting Yourself first-wanting to be the centre-wanting to be

God,  in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the

human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with  sex,

but  that is a mistake. (The story in the Book  of Genesis  rather  suggests

that  some corruption in our  sexual nature  followed  the fall and  was its

result,  not  its  cause.)  What  Satan put  into  the  heads of  our remote

ancestors was the idea that they could  "be like gods"-could set up on their

own as if they had created  themselves-be their own masters-invent some sort

of happiness  for themselves outside  God, apart  from God.  And out of that

hopeless  attempt has  come nearly  all  that we  call  human history-money,

poverty, ambition, war,  prostitution,  classes, empires,  slavery-the  long

terrible story  of man trying to find something  other  than  God which will

make him happy.

    

The reason why  it can never succeed  is this. God made us: invented us

as a man  invents an engine.  A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would

not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run

on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the

food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it

is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering

about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself,

because it is not there. There is no such thing.

    

That is the key to  history.  Terrific energy is expended-civilisations

are  built up-excellent  institutions devised; but each time  something goes

wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top

and it all slides back  into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It

seems to start up  all right and runs a  Jew yards, and then it breaks down.

They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to

us humans.

    

And what  did God do? First  of all He left us conscience, the sense of

right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some

of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever  quite succeeded. Secondly,

He sent  the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those  queer stories

scattered all through the heathen religions  about a god who  dies and comes

to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly,

He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into

their  heads the sort of God He was -that there was only one of Him and that

He  cared about  right  conduct. Those  people  were the  Jews, and the  Old

Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

    

Then comes  the real shock. Among these Jews there  suddenly turns up a

man  who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins.  He

says He has always existed. He says He is  coming to judge the world at  the

end of  time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians,

anyone  might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be

nothing  very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean

that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the  Being outside the world

Who had made it and was  infinitely  different from anything else.  And when

you have  grasped that,  you will  see that what  this man  said was,  quite

simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

   

  One  part  of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have

heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim

to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God,  this is really so

preposterous as to  be  comic.  We can all  understand  how  a  man forgives

offences  against himself. You  tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal

my  money  and  I forgive  you.  But  what should we make of a  man, himself

unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on

other  men's  toes and  stealing  other  men's money? Asinine fatuity is the

kindest description  we  should give  of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus

did.  He  told people  that  their sins  were forgiven,  and never waited to

consult  all the other people  whom their sins had  undoubtedly injured.  He

unhesitatingly behaved as if He was  the party chiefly concerned, the person

chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the

God  whose laws are broken and whose  love is wounded in  every sin. In  the

mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only

regard as  a  silliness and  conceit unrivalled  by  any  other character in

history.

    

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when

they read  the Gospels, do not usually  get the impression  of silliness and

conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He  is "humble

and meek" and we  believe Him; not noticing that, if  He were merely  a man,

humility  and meekness are the very last characteristics we could  attribute

to some of His sayings.

    

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that

people often say about Him: "I'm ready to  accept  Jesus  as a  great  moral

teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be  God." That is  the one thing we

must not say. A man who was merely a  man and said the sort of things  Jesus

said would not be a  great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic-on a

level  with the man  who says he is a poached egg-or  else  he would  be the

Devil of Hell. You must make your  choice.  Either this man was, and is, the

Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him  up for  a

fool, you can spit at  Him and kill Him as  a demon; or you  can fall at His

feet and  call Him Lord  and God. But let us not come  with  any patronising

nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to

us. He did not intend to.