A friend of mine got me into a guy named Dr. Frank Turek a while back. He was really good at debating people on the side of Christianity. I read one of his books, but I still continued to listen to him speak. One of the books he would often cite was the one I am reviewing today.
"Mere Christianity" is a book by C. S. Lewis. It was published in 1952. The entire concept of the book was supposed to be the very bare facts of what Christianity is and what was expected from someone that wanted to be a Christian. It is one of the most focused Christian books you can possibly read for this reason.
This is a difficult book to review because the point is more about what the book is rather than what it says. You have to really be interested in the basics of Christianity in order for you to even care about what's in there. In fact, the author even often warns people that there may be reasons you would not want to read it. There may be, after all, a lot of stuff in there that you may not want to see. And after reading it myself, I agree.
"Mere Christianity" is not a feel-good book, per se. It certainly could make you feel good. There were several passages from it that made me smile, but there were others that made me feel pretty bad. The latter happens mainly because this book tends to make you look back at yourself at things you probably don't think about very often. Whether some of those things are perfectly true are uncertain, but you can tell that C. S. Lewis had decided to take this path. He also chose to share it with the world.
The first and foremost thing that really helped me appreciate this book was the fact that C. S. Lewis stripped the entire book of denomination. He does mention that he was a member of the Church of England, but he went out of his way to point out that he was not going to go into the specifics of his own church or any other. He only wanted to give us Christianity at its very basic.
To someone that might be interested, Christian or otherwise, this is a good book to have the whole thing spelled out with out all the noise. It explains it fully, talks about expected behaviors, and then promptly ends. For that reason, it is a very solid read, but, like I said, there will almost no one in the world, including the author, that will find one or many things in the book that they will dislike. The reason for this is that Christianity is all about transformation.
The end result of Christianity is to become something different. This isn't about sinning or not sinning. This is just about going from being a human being into whatever the next stage is after that. I won't go into the details. The book does that well enough, and I think the book will deliver the material better than I could. I recommend it for anyone who is actually interested in Christianity for what it truly is.
This blog was written on May 8, 2025.
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I shall read it. Reducing the faith to its gist cleanses it of all the distractions and assumptions. The TRUTH is its gist, not all the rigmarole.
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteHaving read a few of his books about philosophy, I can attest that they are very deep. This one entails the basics, which provides a foundation that was built on. Digest this before delving deeper.
ReplyDeleteThis should be a good starting point.
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