S1E40 – MC B4C10 – “Nice people or new men?”

Today we address a question which is often asked by skeptics: why are all Christians not obviously nicer than non-Christians? In response, Jack asks “Did Christ come to make nice people or new men?”

S1E40: Nice people or new men? (Download)

Show Notes

• Matt and I discussed in what ways we think Christianity has made us nicer people.

• Matt explained that he left his Quotable Lewis book back in Michigan.

• I finished Crazy Love by Francis Chan this week and chose a passage for the quote-of-the-week:

“I think sometimes we assume that, if we’re nice, people will know we are Christians and want to know more about Jesus, but it really doesn’t work that way. I know a lot of people who don’t know Christ and are really nice people. Nicer and more fun to be with in fact than a lot of Christians I know! There has to be more to our faith than friendliness, politeness and even kindness”

– Francis Chan, Crazy Love (Chapter 8)

This book had quite an impact on the direction of Matt’s life and he shared the story of how it helped shape his Christian journey and also even helped get him a job!

• The drink-of-the-week was Bacardi & Coke.

• Today we will be discussing why, if Christianity is true, that all Christians are not obviously nicer than non-Christians. Lewis says that part of this question is reasonable and part of it is unreasonable.

The reasonable is as follows:

“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions… I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary…Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better”

C.S. Lewis,  Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

Jesus tell us to judge by the fruit of the tree (Matthew 7:16). Lewis warned us that when Christians fail to live up to their calling, they make Christianity unbelievable for the outside world.

The unreasonable part of the question is thus:

“The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• You can’t divide the world into such simple categories. Lewis says that there are many more subgroups:

1. Those Christians who are in the process of falling away:

“[They] do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

2. Those who are becoming Christian

3. Those who are unknowingly becoming Christian, being attracted to Christ

4. Those of other religions who, by His Grace, God is leading them to focus on aspects of their religion most in accord with Christianity:

“[They are] being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth may have been in this position”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

I suggested that the best example of this is Emeth, a character from “The Last Battle”, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia.

I explained how the Early Church Fathers, when encountering truth in other religions and philosophies, took it, regarding it the property of Christianity since, after all, Jesus is Himself the Truth. Matt described how G.K. Chesterton argued the inevitability of finding Christian truth in other worldviews.

5. Finally, there are those who are just plain confused!

“…there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

The upshot of all this is clear:

“it is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat…”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• So, rather than comparing Christians and non-Christians en masse, Lewis says we have to think about individuals:

“If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• What we should be looking for is improvement:

“If Christianity is true then it ought to follow… That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian…”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

He uses the analogy of a toothpaste brand:

Just in the same way, if the advertisements of White-smile’s toothpaste are true it ought to follow… That anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same person would have if he did not use it”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• Lewis now asks us to consider two fictional characters: Miss Bates (a Christian) and Dick Firkin (a non-Christian):

“Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin. That, by itself, does not tell us whether Christianity works. The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

Jack explains that natural causes have an awful lot of influence on a person’s natural temperament. In the episode on psychoanalysis, we spoke quite a bit about a person’s “raw materials”. The claim of Christianity is that it will improve whatever raw materials are there:

“Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so. What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

Lewis points out that simply looking at a factory’s output won’t necessarily tell you how it is being run. One may have vastly inferior equipment, but be doing a tremendous job. The other may have state-of-the-art machines, but be poorly managed and underperforming.

• However, we must not think that Christianity is only needed by jerks!

“We have been talking, in fact, as if Dick were all right; as if Christianity was something nasty people needed and nice ones could afford to do without; and as if niceness was all that God demanded. But this would be a fatal mistake…

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

No, God wants the same thing from both of them:

“[God] is waiting and watching for…something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfil the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle that can choose. It can point to its true North; but it need not. Will the needle swing round, and settle, and point to God?

…Will Miss Bates and Dick offer their natures to God? The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that moment, nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

When we give our natures to God, it is only then that they become really ours:

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• Jack argues that it would make sense for the “bad” and “nasty” people to become Christians. It happened in Jesus’ day:

“That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract ‘such awful people.’ That is what people still object to, and always will”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

In fact, being “rich” in a good temperament can make it harder to turn to Christ:

“One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God… natural gifts carry with them a similar danger….A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them…  Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

However, those “poor” in temperament know their need:

“It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following-or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them… They are the ‘awful set’ he goes about with-and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, ‘If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.’

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• This should be an encouragement to us:

“But if you are a poor creature – poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels-saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion – nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends-do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all-not least yourself”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• When we fail, we simply have to start again:

Fall down seven times, get up eight

Japanese Proverb

• While we should do everything we can to make the world “nicer”, that is of lesser importance:

“But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

Lewis compares it to teaching a horse to jump a little higher to giving it wings.

• As a result of all of this, simply finding a substandard Christian does not prove Christianity false:

“…you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, ‘So there’s your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.’ But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• Rather than spending our time gossiping about others, Lewis reminds us that there is only one soul we can truly know and truly do something about:

“One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)

• As usual, I ended the review with a podcast review. This time the podcast was The Counsel of Trent:

Trent Horn is probably my favourite present-day apologist. Whether he’s speaking on Atheism, Pro-Life issues or the claims of Christianity, he always does so in a calm and clear manner. He’s also quite a nerd who loves comic books, which speaks highly of his moral character.

iTunes Review for the Council of Trent