Mere Christianity

“We cannot see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge”
This quote from Mere Christianity really stuck out to me as I read this passage. Sometimes We can see that people are so busy judging other people. And as much as we try not to judging is something that can naturally come to us, I know that I do it without hesitating and after the fact realize that I made a snap judgment. This quote is important for me because it highlights how point less it is for us to judge. We can ponder whether or not we like a person and then we can place judgment on them, but in the end what we think about a specific person is completely irrelevant. Lewis reminds us to leave the judging up to the one who knows all and can see everything inside a person’s heart. God.

I really liked how in this reading Lewis used lots of music metaphors. He has a gift for describing a certain idea in many different ways so that people of many different thought processes can understand what he is trying to say. While explaining the difference between the moral law and our instincts he says “The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.” I didn’t really understand what He was trying to say until I read this quote because I understand music and this made it much easier to relate to. This just made me think of making a nice melody. Every note on a piano sounds good on its own, but only certain notes put together will sound good. Our moral law direction being situational is the same as playing a song on the piano, you can only play a certain note when another note is already being played for the song to make sense and sound as beautiful as it can.

One other thing about the reading that we discussed was the preface where Lewis says that he does not like to emphasis the views or point people in the direction of a certain denomination within Christianity. Lewis specifically said “Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus.” I think he is so right when he says that we need to all stand together in the church and not put our disagreements out there for the whole world to see, because if people see a divided church there is no way they are ever going to want to join in on something that’s already broken. Lewis emphasizes that we need to stop focusing on the things that divide us, but instead focus on what we do have in common and those are the things that will bring us closer together as part of the body of Christ.