Book 3, Chapter 4: Morality and Psychoanalysis

Don’t be too hard on Lewis’s favorable assessment of Jung and psychology. We have been given 65 years more than Lewis had to evaluate the offspring conceived in the illicit affair between the Church and psychology. The real point, anyway, is that there is something fundamentally wrong in us that needs changing. Even secularists agree on that point. The difference is not in diagnosing a problem but finding a cure. Lewis is, I think, doing the same thing in this chapter that Paul did in Romans 1-3. He is classifying the covetous Sunday Schoolers with the pagan thieves; the lustful preachers with the premeditated rapists. Some of us have our fundamental wrong-ness coming out in socially destructive ways. That segment of society may end up in prison or dying prematurely. Others of us contain the ticking time bomb of pride or anger or lust that permits us to kill and commit adultery in our hearts innumerable times and never be “caught.” Where does that leave you and me? Can you see why this brings us to a “Cross-Centered Life”?

Book 3, Chapter 3: Social Morality

Which presidential candidate do you support? Would you consider it morally wrong to support certain candidates from either major party? With those thoughts in mind, consider the two things Lewis says we need to get clear about “Christian morality.”

1. Christ did not come to preach any brand-new morality.
2. Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political program.

Rather than staking out his political positions (I have my guess as to how C. S. Lewis would vote these days), Lewis reminds us that our Savior did not die to set up a kingdom that is “of this world.”

Okay. Most of us conservative evangelicals vote the same way these days. But the way conservative evangelicals apply obedience to the gospel in this decade is very different than the way our parents applied it or how our children (if by God’s grace they still care) will apply it. I think Lewis is trying to say that Christianity is timeless. Rather than trying to find the Christian party or the Christian candidate we should first be living as Christian people.

The party that appears very compassionate today may have policies that will one day encourage sloth and dependency. The party today that calls people to take personal responsibility may have policies that will one day victimize middle-class working people. But Jesus never changes. The first and second great commandments transcend political systems.

The challenge here is not to become apathetic toward public affairs. It is to shun the idea that you are pleasing God when you step over the top of the homeless guy in the street to get into the polling place to vote for Righteous Ralph.

What do you think?