PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
MERE CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER 6: Two Notes
Before starting, number your paragraphs 1-4
Paragraph 1:
Why would Lewis even bring up these 2 questions? Lewis is not just meditating and speculating; he is actually addressing here questions he had to field while at Oxford. He was a part of debating societies which threw out these objections to Lewis. These are serious questions.
Paragraph 2:
What is the easy part to this question?
Why were people able to turn away from God centuries ago?
What are the 2 things automata can never do and never know?
What is the difficult part of the answer?
When we find ourselves asking "Why didn't God beget more and more sons other than Jesus, what do we find ourselves in?
Do the words "Could have been" make any sense when applying them to God?
You can say that this person or that person could have been different; however, you can't really say that about God because God is the "rock ________________, _________________ Fact on which all other facts ___________________. . . . It _______ what it __________, and there is the __________ of the matter."
Lewis though says he would have found it difficult for God to have had many Sons like Jesus. Why does he find this difficult?
It's kind of like this: according to the Bible Jesus is the image of God; He is like the mirror-image of God, totally like Him without being Him. What would be the benefit of Him begetting another mirror image of Himself? Wouldn't they be the same? If they were different, at least one of them would not be the mirror image. And yet they must be mirror images in order to qualify as Sons of God. They can't be different and yet at the same time be mirror images (Sons). That would be impossible.
Why does Lewis think that God made Nature (space and time and matter) in the first place?
Paragraph 3:
What examples does Lewis give of some things being alike and yet different?
Instead of thinking of human individuals as mere members of a group or items in a list, how does it think of people?
What should you remember whenever you try to turn people (children, pupils) into people exactly like yourself?
What though must you remember whenever you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are "no business of yours"?
What will you become if you forget that other people belong to the same organism as yourself?
What will you become if you forget that other people are different organs from yourself? What will you become if you forget that other people belong to the same organism as yourself?
Paragraph 4:
What is the devil always doing?
What does he rely upon?
What should our goal be?
We have no other concern than that with either of them.
Book Four
Chapter 6
In paragraph 1 Lewis simply states that he is adding 2 notes in order to clear up some misunderstandings which might have arisen from the previous chapter on Obstinate Toy Soldiers.
What question did one critic ask Lewis?
What 2 ideas must not be confused with each other?
Which of the 2 errors is the worse of the 2, the Individualist error or the Totalitarian error?