Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course Part 2 

C.S. Lewis on Christianity  

By Reverend Lonnie C. Crowe 

I have recently finished an online study from Hillsdale College entitled “C.C. Lewis on Christianity.  The lecturer was Michael Ward, a fellow at Oxford in England as well as Hillsdale.  The course stretched both my mind and my soul and, therefore, my spirit.  I am delighted to share some of my notes from the course. Remember these are my notes.  They are what captured my thoughts.  They are not an outline of the course. 

 Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course 

C.S. Lewis on Christianity 

Lecturer Michael Ward 

“Conversion and New Life” 

 

Human beings believe they should act in a certain way.  They do not act in that way.  They know the natural law and they break it.  It brings guilt and shame.  It can come even to those who do not believe in God. This thought is an argument against law.  A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.  

This led to Lewis becoming a theist. At this point in his life, Lewis believed in God, but did not accept the doctrine of salvation in Jesus. He believed that the natural law (moral law) is an expression of God's nature. 

Goodness cannot be separated from God.  Then the Tao, considered from a particular point of view, is the Word Himself.  God is an expression of the moral  law.  The objective moral law is the nature, the essence of God. 

The Tao is the way of being moral.  Jesus is the way.  Jesus is the one who keeps the moral law. 

We not only have the moral law, we have a law giver and a law keeper. 

Lewis wrote, "If I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself...I liked it  and was moved by it provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels." 

Encouraged by his friends, Lewis looked at the sacrifice of Jesus simply as a story rather than as allegory.  He came to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.   

 

Christianity tells people to repent and receive forgiveness.  It has nothing to say to people who do not know they need any forgiveness.  If you come to realize there is a real Moral Law and a Power behind that law that you realize a need to repent and be forgiven. 

Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected. (The anguish of conversion.)

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself.