4. The Perfect Penitent
We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are
talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or
something worse. 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. God has landed
on this enemy-occupied world in human form.
And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did He come to do? Well,
to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or any
other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking about
something different-about His death and His coming to life again. It is
obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies here. They
think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed.
Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the
first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what
the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish
men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered
to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit that even this
theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly as it used to; but
that is not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that
neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central Christian
belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us
a fresh start Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many
different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians
are agreed on is that it does work. I will tell you what I think it is like.
All sensible people know that if you are tired and hungry a meal will do you
good. But the modern theory of nourishment-all about the vitamins and
proteins-is a different thing. People ate their dinners and felt better long
before the theory of vitamins was ever heard of: and if the theory of
vitamins is some day abandoned they will go on eating their dinners just the
same. Theories about Christ's death are not Christianity: they are
explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how
important these theories are. My own church-the Church of England-does not
lay down any one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit
further. But I think they will all agree that the thing itself is infinitely
more important than any explanations that theologians have produced. I think
they would probably admit that no explanation will ever be quite adequate to
the reality. But as I said in the preface to this book, I am only a layman,
and at this point we are getting into deep water. I can only tell you, for
what it is worth, how I, personally, look at the matter.
On my view the theories are not themselves the thing you are asked to
accept. Many of you no doubt have read Jeans or Eddington. What they do when
they want to explain the atom, or something of that sort, is to give you a
description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then they warn
you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. What the
scientists believe is a mathematical formula. The pictures are there only to
help you to understand the formula. They are not really true in the way the
formula is; they do not give you the real thing but only something more or
less like it. They are only meant to help, and if they do not help you can
drop them. The thing itself cannot be pictured, it can only be expressed
mathematically. We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of
Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely
unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot
picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not
going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully
understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to
be-the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking
down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good will it be to us if
we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his
dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can
accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he
certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed
out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the
formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories
we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite
secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us,
and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All
the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before -the one
about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment
instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was
prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible
point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all
that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense.
On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a
person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if
you take "paying the penalty," not in the sense of being punished, but in
the more general sense of "standing the racket" or "footing the bill," then,
of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got
himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind
friend. Now what was the sort of "hole" man had got himself into? He had
tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other
words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement:
he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms,
surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the
wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground
floor-that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender-this
movement full speed astern-is what Christians call repentance. Now
repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating
humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we
have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing
part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man
to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only
a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it
and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would
be a perfect person-and he would not need it.
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a
kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you
back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description
of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without
it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It
cannot hap pen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same
badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if
God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We
mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little
of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His
love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child
writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the
letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves
and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen,
that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in
order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all-to
surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds
to this process at all. So that 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.
God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
But supposing God became a man-suppose our human nature which can
suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person-then that
person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die,
because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and
I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it
only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we
men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it
is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's
dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the
sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not
suffer at all.
I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man,
then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, "because it must
have been so easy for him." Others may (very rightly) rebuke the ingratitude
and ungraciousness of this objection; what staggers me is the
misunderstanding it betrays. In one sense, of course, those who make it are
right. They have even understated their own case. The perfect submission,
the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus
because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. But surely
that is a very odd reason for not accepting them? The teacher is able to
form the letters for the child because the teacher is grown-up and knows how
to write. That, of course, makes it easier for the teacher, and only because
it is easier for him can he help the child. If it rejected him because "it's
easy for grown-ups" and waited to learn writing from another child who could
not write itself (and so had no "unfair" advantage), it would not get on
very quickly. If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one
foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout
back (between my gasps) "No, it's not fair! You have an advantage! You're
keeping one foot on the bank"? That advantage-call it "unfair" if you
like-is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you
look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement.
But remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing
itself: and if it does not help you, drop it
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect
because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man. Now the
Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of
Christ we shall also share in His conquest for death and find a new life
after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures.
This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching.
People often ask when the next step in evolution-the step to something
beyond man-will happen. But on the Christian view, it has happened already.
In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began
in Him is to be put into us. How is this to be done? Now, please remember
how we acquired the old, ordinary kind of life. We derived it from others,
from our father and mother and all our ancestors, without our consent-and by
a very curious process, involving pleasure, pain, and danger. A process you
would never have guessed. Most of us spend a good many years in childhood
trying to guess it: and some children, when they are first told, do not
believe it-and I am not sure that I blame them, for it is very odd. Now the
God who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind
of life-the Christ life-is to be spread. We must be prepared for it being
odd too. He did not consult us when He invented sex: He has not consulted us
either when He invented this.
There are three things that spread the Christ life to us: baptism,
belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by
different names-Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. At least, those
are the three ordinary methods. I am not saying there may not be special
cases where it is spread without one or more of these. I have not time to go
into special cases, and I do not know enough. If you are trying in a few
minutes to tell a man how to get to Edinburgh you will tell him the trains:
he can, it is true, get there by boat or by a plane, but you will hardly
bring that in. And I am not saying anything about which of these three
things is the most essential. My Methodist friend would like me to say more
about belief and less (in proportion) about the other two. But I am not
going into that. Anyone who professes to teach you Christian doctrine will,
in fact, tell you to use all three, and that is enough for our present
purpose.
I cannot myself see why these things should be the conductors of the
new kind of life. But then, if one did not happen to know, I should never
have seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the
appearance of a new human being in the world. We have to take reality as it
comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or
what we should have expected it to be like. But though I cannot see why it
should be so, I can tell you why I believe it is so. I have explained why I
have to believe that Jesus was (and is) God. And it seems plain as a matter
of history that He taught His followers that the new life was communicated
in this way. In other words, I believe it on His authority. Do not be scared
by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing
them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy.
Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I
believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I
could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I
believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man
believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the
blood on authority-because the scientists say so. Every historical statement
in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman
Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure
logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because
people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact,
on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people
do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion
as things that will do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ. Your
natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay
there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can
drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it:
but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life
you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the
Christ-life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep
it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own
steam-he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have
acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as
the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that
body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A
live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent
repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes
wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over
again after each stumble-because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing
him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of
voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people
who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there
is one; or-if they think there is not-at least they hope to deserve approval
from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the
Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are
good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof
of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes
bright because the sun shines on it.
And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life
is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they
speak of being "in Christ" or of Christ being "in them," this is not simply
a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They
mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of
Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts-that we are.
His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains
one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by
purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy
Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like
evolution-a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to
be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual
creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the
new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does
not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully
unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of
Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us
what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can
be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him
can be saved through Him, But in the meantime, if you are worried about the
people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside
yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which He works.
Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help
those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who
alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of
getting him to do more work.
Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this
enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to
undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it dial
He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in
force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to
give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I
would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were
marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will
invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and
directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When
that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the
stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the
good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural
universe melting away like a dream and something else-something it never
entered your head to conceive-comes crashing in; something so beautiful to
some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice
left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so
overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible
horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side.
There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible
to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time
when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it
before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right
side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever.
We must take it or leave it.
