S1E5 – MC B1C3 – “The reality of the Law”

Moving on to Chapter 3 of “Mere Christianity”, Jack speaks further to “The reality of the Law”. Do we imagine a Moral Law because it is convenient to us? Or does it arise due to its good for society? In today’s episode, together with some help from C.S. Lewis, we tackle these and other questions…

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe using iTunes or Google Play. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.

S1E5: “The reality of the Law” (Download)

Show Notes

Chit-Chat

–

Toast

• David and Matt were both finishing up a six-pack of Heineken. If you’d like to give drink suggestions, tweet us @pintswithjack. Remember, Matt is a cheap date!

Discussion

01. “The Reality of the Moral Law”

• According to Jack, the fact that there’s this Moral Law and that we don’t keep it is “odd” and this has consequences. What does this tell us about the Moral Law and what does it tell us about reality itself?
• He turns to stones and trees, considering the idea of right and wrong in relation to them. Here, the law describes what these things do, and nothing more.

If you take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there is no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise. Of course you may say a stone is ‘the wrong shape’ if you want to use it for a rockery, or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as much shade as you expected. But all you mean is that the stone or the tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own. You are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that. You really know, that, given the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any different. What we, from our point of view, call a ‘bad’ tree is obeying the laws of its nature just as much as a ‘good’ one.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

• The law of human nature is completely different, according to Lewis, in that it is not descriptive, but prescriptive.

The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

• Some might say that this law is the same as trees and stones, it just means ‘what is inconvenient to us’. But Lewis points out that this criticism does not hold water…

A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

• Other times, we aren’t inconvenienced, but violated in some way.

I am not angry – except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses – with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

• A final point that Lewis makes is that bad behaviour can actually be incredibly convenient to us.

In war, each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful. But though they use him and pay him they regard him as human vermin. So you cannot say that what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that happens to be useful to us.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

• Additionally, sometimes good behaviour can be very inconvenient indeed.

02. “The Cost of Discipleship”

• David has often heard people accuse Christians of holding their religious beliefs to alleviate the problems in their lives, when nothing could be further from the truth. Being a Christian is immensely inconvenient.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate … [True grace] is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 16:25

• Matt and David referred to the book “The Cost of Discipleship” by the Dietrich Bonhoffer. In Chapter 8 of “Mere Christianity”, Lewis will discuss the question “Is Christianity hard or easy?”
• Lewis gives many examples of how decent behaviour is not always profitable.

As for decent behaviour in ourselves, I suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behaviour that pays. It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have got three pounds, doing schoolwork honestly when it would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her, staying in dangerous places when you would rather go somewhere sager, keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Reality of the Law

We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

• Matt made the point that, not only is Christian behaviour inconvenient, it is hardly the morality that anyone would come up with to impose on themselves.

03. “Convenient to Society”

• Is the Law of Morality simply something that is useful to us?

04. “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”

• My outline for the Chapter 3 is available here.
  
• Some people might say that the Moral Law is simply what pays society as a whole. While a “fair” society does indeed help people to flourish, this argument rather misses the point. Unless it affects me directly, why should I care about what’s good for society?
• Matt and I discuss Game Theory in relation to the idea of society good. Matt describes The Problem of the Commons and I then I talk about The Prisoner’s Dilemma.
• Doesn’t it make sense that a good God would write on our hearts a Moral Law which would encourage our flourishing? (Aside from Aries in the movie Wonder Woman, of course)