Towards the end of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, writes honestly about the reality that Christianity requires a transformation that is very difficult business: 

Christ says 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked – the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'

...The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call 'ourselves', to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at teh same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way – centred on money or pleasure or ambition – and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs.

...That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a day or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, 'Be perfect,' He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder – in fact, it is impossible (197-198).

Matthew Mason, one of the regular contributors to the blog of the The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology, wrote in a post some time ago of the growing trend in evangelical circles to speak of 'repenting of our righteousness'. Mason points out that proponents of this perspective argue 'that the gospel is the beginning and end of of the Christian life, that all our problems come from a lack of orientation to the gospel...[and] that Christians should speak like this of our present attempts to obey God.'

The basic point they wish to make is sound – your understanding of salvation must be rooted in the gospel, along with the recognition that you can do nothing of your own to earn or merit salvation. Agreed. But the argument then extends further to include the idea that you grow as a Christian by increasing your belief in the gospel, or trusting more in the gospel, and so on. Well, to a degree, that is also true. This is emphasized so strongly, however, that any discussion of good works leads to a warning to be careful you're not trusting in your works for salvation.

So what is the place of righteousness, then? And what of the Bible's call to pursue righteousness and holiness? C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter on faith in Mere Christianity, writes,

The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us, will make us, like Himself, 'Sons of God'... In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing... And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says... If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already.

Any attempt to earn your righteousness in salvation is to be avoided, certainly. But it is hard to understand how you grow as a disciple of Christ if you are not pursuing righteousness in response to the good news of the gospel. Our homegroups at church have just begun a series on Romans 12-16. It is particularly noteworthy that after discussing the gospel message in the first eleven chapters, Paul then goes on to lay out some pretty in-depth applications of that gospel and how it should shape our lives as Christians. Those last chapters of Romans show us that you must indeed make the gospel the centre of your life as a Christian, but that you do so by actively pursuing righteousness. And it is not just here in Romans; the Bible speaks repeatedly of the call to live righteous lives. Think of the Psalms, or the book of James.

The Heidelberg Catechism says two important things about this. First, in Q&A 86, it asks why we must still do good when we have been delivered from our misery by God's grace. The response:

We do good because Christ by his Spirit is renewing us to be like himself, so that in all our living we may show that we are thankful to God for all he has done for us, and so that he may be praised through us. And we do good so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbours may be won over to Christ.

It is striking here to note that God is praised through our righteous living. Those who call us to 'repent of our righteousness' would likely find these words hard to stomach. But perhaps it is even more striking, then, that assurance of our faith is linked with the practice of righteousness. And secondly, the Catechism indicates that genuine repentence and conversion has two parts: the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new. In describing the coming-to-life of the new, the Catechism tells us that this is marked by 'wholehearted joy in God through Christ and a delight to do every kind of good as God wants us to' (Q&A 90).

Belief in the gospel motivates you to act in accordance with it. That action is not an attempt to justify yourself, but an expression of your gratitude for God's grace and your acknowledgement of his rule as Lord and King of heaven and earth. You don't repent of your righteousness, because God calls us to righteousness.

Belief in the gospel and the pursuit of righteousness are not contradictory. To be sure, the latter does not precede the former. But the latter must flow out of the former.

In a comment to this past Monday's post on mortifying modernity, Wayne Sparkman, who is the director the historical center of the Presbyterian Church in America, posted a portion of an introduction C. S. Lewis wrote for a translation of Athanasius' On the Incarnation. What Lewis says in this introduction is so important that I had to reproduce it almost in full here. Please note that this is quite a lengthy quotation, but it is well worth your time to consider the wisdom of Lewis on this point.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about 'isms' and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ('mere Christianity' as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were 'influences.' George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only con- temporaries—that 'Christianity' is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages 'mere Christianity' turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in François de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed 'Paganism' of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:

an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

The present book, [On the Incarnation], is something of an experiment. The translation is intended for the world at large, not only for theological students. If it succeeds, other translations of other great Christian books will presumably follow. In one sense, of course, it is not the first in the field. Translations of the Theologia Germanica, the Imitation, the Scale of Perfection, and the Revelations of Lady Julian of Norwich, are already on the market, and are very valuable, though some of them are not very scholarly. But it will be noticed that these are all books of devotion rather than of doctrine. Now the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted. In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing. Nor would I admit any sharp division between the two kinds of book. For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

What do you think? Does this prompt you to head over to the local library and start reading some classics?

C. S. Lewis, from his Christian Reflections:

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point...the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.

Thoughts?

Fr. Stephen Freeman offers the following thoughts in his latest post:

My experience, with regard to the Orthodox faith, has been not so much my keeping the faith - but the faith keeping me. I recall reading, in my late teen years, C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy. It is clear that when Lewis relates his conversion to the Christian faith, he no longer asked the question: 'What do I believe?' but rather asked the question: 'What is a Christian to believe?' Thus, he turned his attention to Scripture and to the Fathers of the Church. The universal quality of his Christian writing is that he simply speaks from the depths of the Christian faith rather than from the depths of his own delusions and imagination. Becoming a Christian means learning what it is to be kept by the faith rather than simply joining an organization and then setting about picking and choosing one’s personal doctrines.

There is not much to add to that. Our faith is not something internal and unique to ourselves, but it is the outpouring of the Spirit's work in us. We need to understand our faith as being rooted in God, not in us. And that is an important reminder in a man-centered culture. Whatever doctrines and ideas we come up with and choose to believe in, we must always test them against the truth of God's Word. There is no room for individual preference and picking and choosing. "The Lord’s word trumps your theology, all the time, every time" (HT: Scott). After all, faith is not of ourselves, it is the gift of God.