Lewis on the Christian Life

The Gospel: God Came Down

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CHAPTER 2

The Gospel: God Came Down

Along with the historical Christian church, Lewis believes that God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible.” Now, all of these attributes, while truly applied to God, are in some way misleading. They are essentially negative attributes; they deny that God has certain creaturely limitations.

As we saw before, God transcends time and space; he is totally present at every point of space and time, and locally present in none. To say that he is infinite is to deny that he has finitude or limitations. Immutability (along with its cousin, impassibility) denies that God changes or is subject to anything outside himself. He is without passions because “passions imply passivity and intermission,” and God is never passive.

The danger is that we take these negative attributes as the whole story. We strip God of creaturely characteristics, and are left with no positive statements about him at all. But the truth of the matter is that the negative attributes are simply the result of a positive, concrete reality that transcends and excludes the creaturely limitations.

The problem is that, as creatures, we have “no resources from which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity which ought to replace it.” As a result, our idea of God may become so diminished that we wind up envisioning him as “an endless, silent sea, a sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance.”

Thus, in denying that God possesses creaturely characteristics, we must take care to remember that God is not less than these things but more. The negative attributes suggest that God lacks something that we possess; the reality is that God is so full of life and energy and joy and being that we say that “he transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like.” “He cannot be affected with love, because He is love.”

For example, when we say that God does not change, we are tempted to think that he is static, inert, and unmoving, that the rest and peace which God has (and is) is like the stillness of a mountain lake with no breeze. But in reality, “there is no movement because his action (which is himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different—perhaps a less misleading—way of approach.”

In other words, God is so active, so alive, so vibrant, so pulsating with vitality, that we cannot ascribe anything to him so dull and lifeless as “change.”

Or, again, we say that God is a spirit and incorporeal; he has no body. But often we confuse being a spirit with being a ghost. Ghosts are half men, shadowy echoes of true men, “one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh.” But God is no ghost.

He is a spirit, and, according to Lewis, spirit is more solid than body (think of the way he depicts the saints, angels, and even the grass and trees in The Great Divorce). “If we must have a mental picture to symbolize Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.” God is invisible not because he is a ghost but because, in comparison to him, we are. Here in the Shadowlands, we cannot see the things that are truly real.

The Author and His Story

A moment ago I noted that Lewis believes we have no resources for supplying the blindingly real and positive attributes that leave the negative attributes in their wake. But that is not entirely true. God has not left himself without a witness.

For the God who transcends all creaturely realities is also the Creator of all creaturely realities. He is the almighty Maker of heaven and earth. “He is so brimful of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything.”

God is not, like the gods of paganism, a nature god. He is “the God of Nature—her inventor, maker, owner, and controller.” Or, to use an analogy that Lewis is especially fond of, God is an Author, the world is his story or play, and we are his characters.

For the God who transcends all creaturely realities is also the Creator of all creaturely realities.

Christianity teaches that “God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story.”

God is Shakespeare; we are Hamlet. He has invented us, made us up out of his own head, imagined us into existence. This is why Christians say that God made the world ex nihilo, from nothing. Creation is an act of pure gift.

Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness.

But God doesn’t just create everything and then leave it to run by its own power. We are not deists, believing that God is a watchmaker who has left his timepiece on the beach. Instead, God sustains everything that exists, upholding the cosmos, as Hebrews 1:3 says, “by the word of his power” (ESV).

“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God,” so much so that “every man, woman, and child all over the world is feeling and breathing at this moment only because God, so to speak, is ‘keeping him going.’” Just as it is Shakespeare’s will that keeps Hamlet in existence, so also it is, Lewis says, “only God’s attention [that] keeps me (or anything else) in existence at all.”

Elsewhere, Lewis compares the relationship between God and creation to a painter and his picture, or a composer and his music. And as with human authors, painters, and composers, God’s work of art reflects his skill and creativity. It shows us what he is like. Creation thus furnishes us with at least some positive conception of God.

Or, as Paul says, God’s “invisible attributes . . . have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20 ESV).

Space is like Him in its hugeness: not that the greatness of space is the same kind of greatness as God’s, but it is a sort of symbol of it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is like God in having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like Him because it is alive, and He is the “living God,” But life, in this biological sense, is not the same as the life there is in God: it is only a kind of symbol or shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get the beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the love that exists in God: but it is like it—rather in the way that a picture drawn on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be “like” a landscape. When we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God which we know of.

Human sonship is thus an echo and dim reflection of divine sonship, just as human kingship is an echo of God’s majesty. I’ll return to the idea of nature revealing God later.

For now, I’ll simply note that because creation bears some likeness to God, Lewis regarded creation as a Great Dance. This is because “in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”

Content taken from Lewis on the Christian Life by Joe Rigney, ©2018. Used by permission of Crossway.
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