What you read plays a pivotal role in shaping the person you will become.

In the pages of Indelible Ink, twenty-two Christian leaders discuss the books that shaped their faith. Many of the names are familiar: Joni Eareckson Tada, Charles Colson, Calvin Miller, Michael Card, Jill Briscoe, Luis Palau, Josh McDowell, Walter Wangerin, Jr., J.I. Packer, Ravi Zacharias, Larry Crabb.

I was honored to have my own essay included among them. My prayer is that it will encourage you to share a book like Mere Christianity with others who are asking hard questions and looking for honest answers.

WaterBrook Press
Copyright © 2003

Heart of a Rebel

by Liz Curtis Higgs

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement:
he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

February 1982

The ceilings were high, the windows drafty, and the heat in my century-old apartment house was little more than a rumor. Curled up in a sagging club chair, intently reading, I hardly noticed the midwinter cold, warmed as I was by the words before me and the late-afternoon sun pouring through the long, narrow windows of my study.

“Read this book,” two friends had urged me. Because I’d grown to love and respect them, and because the title intrigued me, I purchased Mere Christianity and began, as all serious readers do, with the Preface: “The contents of this book were first given on the air…”¹ Well, now. Hooked from the very start. Hadn’t I spent the last five years working as a radio broadcaster? I burrowed deeper into my faded chintz cushions and kept reading, intrigued by the writer’s strong sense of who he was and who he was not. “I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else.”² Odd. My friends had insisted he was a genius. Three pages into the book, humble seemed a much better fit.

I knew nothing of Lewis’s work or reputation. A title like The Chronicles of Narnia left me shaking my head. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., lived on my bookshelf, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Not J.R.R. Tolkein. And not C.S. Lewis. Perhaps that was for the best. I came to Lewis without my defensive shield at the ready. Even had I been prepared, the honesty of his words would have disarmed me: “There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think I have the answer.”³ Uh-oh. I had nothing but questions—questions about the existence of God, the validity of faith, the necessity of church. Such things mattered a great deal to my two friends, which bewildered me. Intelligent, talented, well-read, much-traveled people, yet they were genuinely enthusiastic about going to church. How was that possible?

“Read this…”

And so I kept reading, all through the wintry afternoon. There was no denying this Lewis guy had me pegged: a disillusioned young woman of twenty-seven who’d gotten turned off by denominational infighting and hypocritical churchgoers. At least that’s what I told people. Fear was the real reason: fear that I’d gone too far, done too much. Fear that, if God was real, I’d blown it, big time. Enter Lewis, a middle-aged British male, a scholar and a soldier, who put into words the deepest longings of my soul: “There is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”⁴

I’d heard that voice as a child. When I sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” I really did know. I’d sensed Jesus nodding in agreement. Heard him say, “Yes, child.”

When had I stopped listening? And would that voice still speak to me, after all I’d done? All the men, all the drugs, all the booze, all the lies—after all that, would the Someone I once called God the Father care about his long-lost daughter?

I kept reading, pulled from one paragraph to the next by Lewis’s clarity of thought and ironclad logic. Within five pages he’d not only convinced me that Right and Wrong existed—me, the queen of loosey-goosey, do-what-feels-good relativism!—he’d also assured me that none of us was any good at keeping that sacred law. Ouch. Even worse, Lewis stated that when we stumbled we invariably shifted the responsibility for our failures elsewhere and conjured up flimsy excuses. “It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.”⁵ Ouch again.

Tempted as I might have been to toss the book against the wall at such bold claims, I couldn’t bring myself to do so because his arguments were irrefutable: I did know Right from Wrong. Although I’d spent ten years convincing myself that I enjoyed being a bad girl, the ugly truth was, I hated it. Living at the bottom of a dark pit had grown lonelier with each passing year. Shocking people with my edgy lifestyle had lost its appeal. The term paper from my sophomore year of college—“Why I Don’t Believe in God”—suddenly felt like blasphemy.

Chastised, I continued reading, certain that after he built a strong case against my moral failures, Lewis would offer a ray of hope. He seemed genuinely concerned that I understood what was at stake. Nothing short of eternity; nothing less than everything. Surely he wouldn’t quit before giving me some good news, some way of escape. He was leading up to a critical conclusion, that much was clear. Something monumental. Undeniable. Change was in the air, tangible as the dust motes in my study.

True confession: I’m the sort who chafes at persuasion, bolts the room at manipulation. There was none of that in his writing, nothing unkind or judgmental about his tone. Nor did I need to know a single verse of Scripture to grasp what he was talking about. Mere Christianity depends very little on quoting the Bible by chapter and verse to prove what is false and what is true. Lewis realized that humans, made by our Creator, have the capacity to recognize truth when it is presented as such. Hadn’t my friends lived out that truth in my presence for five months? “We are imperfect people loving a perfect God,” they’d said, welcoming me into their home and into their church to experience the fellowship of the saints. When I began asking probing questions, they’d pointed me toward a bookstore. “Read this…”

Rather than quoting Scripture, Lewis paraphrased it. Romans 7:15 states, “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.” (nasb) Lewis simply wrote, “[T]he Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.”⁶ Clever man, to use a phrase like Human Nature, capitalizing it as though it were important, as though our own opinion mattered above all others. It made me trust him. Feel safe around him. He wasn’t going to take me anywhere I didn’t want to go. At one stage, as if sensing his readers’ potential withdrawal, he cautions, “Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe.”⁷

Oh, is that all? Never mind that he’d escorted me—and a few million other readers over the last sixty years—a thousand miles, from not believing in God to agreeing that God exists. Right there in my armchair, within easy reach of a toasted-cheese sandwich and a cold beer. I’d been guided by a benevolent stranger over the dividing wall between belief in nothing to belief in Something. He’d done it with nothing but words on a page, spilling nary a drop of blood on my study floor.

How does a writer like C. S. Lewis manage such a feat? With great care and by the power of the Holy Spirit. He invites us to examine our own lives and see if we agree with his assessments. He asks questions that beg answers: “Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?”⁸ “Yes,” we whisper, only too aware of our propensity to buy into such faulty logic a week earlier. He woos his readers, appealing to our common sense, our day-to-day lives, and our very Human Nature. He spins simple scenarios about letter carriers and clocks and insists he has no intention of preaching, even as he presents the gospel with a foundation more solid than the ground beneath any mahogany pulpit. “Shrewd as a serpent, innocent as a dove,” that one.

I’m reminded of Susan in Lewis’s novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and her question about the great Aslan, “Is he—quite safe?” To which Mr. Beaver wisely answers, “Who said anything about safe?… But he’s good.”⁹

Lewis is not safe. But he’s definitely good.

Lewis is also not for the casual reader, nor is Mere Christianity meant to be read in a single sitting. That February long ago I allowed his dangerous words to sink in, first one evening then the next, reading with a mix of dread and anticipation as he described “the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”¹⁰ I’d been hiding from God for a decade. Was it too late for this bad girl? Was redemption no longer an option, and goodness beyond my grasp? Lewis came to my rescue on that question: “Badness is only spoiled goodness.”¹¹ Ah. Hope, then.

We spent a week together—Lewis on the printed page, I in my armchair—wrestling demons of doubt and despair. More than once, he made me laugh: “When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”¹² Ha, ha, ha. Chain saw, please.

He didn’t mince words, stating in no uncertain terms that God did “not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.”¹³ I was a product of the self-indulgent ’60s, honed by the feminism of the ’70s. Kill my natural self? Humph. This God of his was expecting a lot. And yet…each time my temper notched up a degree, Lewis would touch a cool drop of water to my lips: “When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side.”¹⁴ Oh. I wasn’t expected to manage things on my own, then.

Assuaged once again, I kept reading.

Well-crafted phrases like “asinine fatuity” demonstrate his mastery of the English language, yet it was the profoundly simple ones that I underlined. “Mere improvement is not redemption;”¹⁵ “Good and evil both increase at compound interest;”¹⁶ and one aptly describing Lewis himself as he explains what our God wants from us: “a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head.”¹⁷

In the dead of that distant winter, I had just the opposite of what was called for: the hardened heart of a wayward adult and an infantile knowledge of God’s Word. But I was willing to listen and Lewis was more than willing to teach. I did not agree with every word then, nor do I now. He seems to approve of capital punishment, insisting it’s “perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death.”¹⁸ From my own viewpoint, the story of the woman caught in adultery (see John 8:1-11) gives us a different answer. That decidedly guilty woman, sentenced to death for her crime, was set free by Jesus, who said to her, “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:11). She was not required to “pay” for her obvious sins because Jesus would pay the death penalty for her soon enough, even as he paid for all our sins. Elsewhere Lewis himself declares, “by dying He disabled death itself.”¹⁹ Indeed.

In another instance, Lewis describes a child in utero using terms that suggest we aren’t fully human from conception forward: “We were once rather like vegetables, and once rather like fish; it was only at a later stage that we became like human babies.”²⁰ My only concern with such a statement is that it might be used to further the efforts of the proabortion movement—“it’s not a baby, it’s a cauliflower.” I don’t think for a minute Lewis was making any such case; I only fear that others might.

Why draw attention to such tiny sticking points in an otherwise glorious work? Because (1) Lewis wisely taught me, at the very dawn of my Christian walk, to think seriously about God and the creatures he made in his image; and (2) based on Lewis’s own summation, the author would have welcomed such dialogue: “How gloriously different are the saints.”²¹ The fact that Lewis invites, even applauds, differences of opinion says a great deal about his confidence in his beliefs and his focus on the central issue of Christianity, the Mere of the book’s title. How simply that core truth is stated: “Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.”²² And how cunningly we avoid such surrender, to which Lewis warns, “If you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel.”²³

That was me back then, rebellious to the core. On many days, that still is me. Chafing against God’s will for me, preferring my own carefully plotted calendar. Daily I have to lay down my rebel’s weaponry and embrace the eternal truth, eloquently stated by Lewis in the final pages: “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.”²⁴

And are you wondering what became of that young rebel, reading C. S. Lewis in her drafty apartment many Februarys ago? On a Sabbath evening, I closed Lewis’s book in stunned silence, only one thought left banging around in my head: If a man that brilliant, that educated, that seasoned by love and war, believed with all his heart and mind that “there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son,”²⁵ then who was I to argue with such a man?

So I did not argue. Nor did I stop with Lewis, turning instead to a more seminal work. Seated at an old maple table rescued from my mother’s attic, I opened my Bible to the book of Romans (also recommended reading from my helpful friends) and soon found Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (nasb).

This rebel’s heart was finally and completely undone. My forehead fell onto the pages and I drenched them with my tears. Sorrow and joy flowed, mingled down. Deep inside me, the truth beat like a drum: I was a sinner. I was loved. And I was forgiven.

Copyright © 2003 Liz Curtis Higgs

All Rights Reserved.

Endnotes

¹ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 5.
² Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 6.
³ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 7.
⁴ Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 8-9.
⁵ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 21.
⁶ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 28.
⁷ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 34.
⁸ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 35.
⁹ C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1950), p. 86.
¹⁰ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 38.
¹¹ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 50.
¹² Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 53.
¹³ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 169.
¹⁴ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 144.
¹⁵ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 183.
¹⁶ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 117.
¹⁷ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 75.
¹⁸ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 106.
¹⁹ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 59.
²⁰ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 175.
²¹ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 191.
²² Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 66.
²³ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 183.
²⁴ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 190.
²⁵ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 6.