repentance

(it has been brought to my attention that my posts are way too long. it's true. so skim through this first paragraph if you want, i get to the point in the second)

so for the past few weeks, i've been trying to sneak in a bit of reading here and there between school, clinic stuff, and studying. i'm reading c.s. lewis' mere christianity and it has been taking a bit longer than expected. something i found interesting is how he claims that nothing in the universe is simple. god isn't simple and life isn’t either (neither is his book for that matter). a table may seem like a simple thing at first, but if you look at it scientifically, the fact that it's made up of atoms and how light reflects from its surface and reaches your eye, travels along your optic nerve, where chemical messengers in your brain relay the information as 'table' etc, etc, it's really not all that simple. it's a mystery how it all works really. lewis argues that our understanding of god need not be simple either. atheism on the other hand, he says, is too simple. he says one argument against god is that the universe seems meaningless. he admits he has held this view himself at one point. but his argument against it really is quite brilliant. i'll summarize, although i'm sure i won’t be doing it enough justice. he basically says that the fact that he is able to claim that the universe has no meaning, proves that it has meaning. for example, one can't call a line crooked without knowing what a straight line looks like. or if a man falls in water, he feels wet, whereas a fish, if dropped in water does not. the man is not a water creature, so when he is in water, knows he ought to be dry. so the fact that he recognizes 'wetness' as being bad and undesirable is directly related to his knowledge of 'dryness' as being good and right. yeah, pretty confusing. okay, here's the best metaphor i found, in his own words, "if the whole universe has no meaning, we should have never found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there was no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should have never known it was dark. 'dark' would be a word without meaning."

what i really wanted to talk about was something i read a few chapters later. staying true to the complexity of it all, lewis tries to explain the death of christ. he argues against the idea that christ died so that he could bear the punishment instead of us. he says that god could have just forgiven us and let us off the hook. what's the point in killing an innocent person? christ's death he says (i absolutely love his interpretation), is all about one thing. repentance. repentance is a complicated concept. it involves humiliation, suffering, surrender, submission, and even death. you’re killing part of yourself, admitting your wrongs, un-learning your self-conceit, and purifying your soul. only a bad person needs to repent (this is hypothetical, since in reality we're all bad and all need repentance) and only a good person can repent perfectly. so basically, the worse you are, the more you need to repent and the less you can do it. to repent perfectly requires a good person, and they don't need repentance. so now what? well, this is where god comes into play. little bits and pieces of the nature of god are found in us. love, compassion, intellect, etc. but the one thing we need help with, repentance, is not found in god's nature at all. god doesn’t surrender, or suffer, or die. "the one road for which we now need god's leadership most of all is a road god, in his own nature, has never walked." if our nature which can surrender, and suffer, and die is somehow made one with the nature of god, then a magical thing happens. he could do all these things which we can do as men, and he can do them perfectly because he is the ultimate good, he is god. he will suffer, when he need not suffer at all, in order to achieve perfect repentance on behalf of all mankind.

:-)