New Book Discussion Next Week : Mere Christianity

My friends Jason and Sarah will be hosting another book discussion.  This time the book is C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity".




My husband dug out his copy and gave it to me, so I will be participating in the discussion here at Random Musings, as will Duane Scott and Dusty Rayburn.   I'm sure DS and DR will be far more insightful than I'll be.  I'm afraid I just don't have the head for philosophy that I did half my life ago...




However, I am still looking forward to reading and discussing Lewis.   Lewis is as relevant now as he was in the middle of the twentieth century!  Lewis's trilemma will always be relevant.


"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

He wrote that in Mere Christianity, but truth be told,  I found it as a quote at the end of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. The only C.S. Lewis I've read are the Chronicles of Narnia, and a book of quotations. I'm torn between looking forward to reading this book, and fearing that I won't be able to wrap more poor little brain around most of what he has to say.  Luckily it has been decreed that we can pick a segment from the chapter to discus in our posts, rather than a synopsis of the whole chapter.    I'm not sure my mind can feast on Lewis, but it will definitely nibble!