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Good Infection | C. S. Lewis · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to reformed thinking. I'm so glad you were here with
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  us today. It's.
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  Good to be here. We are going to be pulling a
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  specific volume off the shelf that I think a lot of us, you
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  know, we assume we know it, but maybe we haven't dusted off the
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  deeper chapters in a while. Oh, I think I know where you're
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  going with this. We are looking at CS Lewis and
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  specifically his work Mere Christianity.
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  It is a classic for a reason. But we are not doing the
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  Introduction to Christianity part today, are we?
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  We're going past the basics. No, definitely not.
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  We are skipping the introductory arguments and going right to the
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  deep end of the pool. We are looking at the section
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  Lewis calls good infection. Yeah, it is where he tackles the
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  doctrine of the Trinity, right. And I don't know, as soon as I
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  say Trinity, some listeners might be instinctively, you
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  know, reaching for the volume not.
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  Sure, it sounds abstract. It sounds like high level
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  calculus for theologians. Exactly.
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  It doesn't sound practical for a Tuesday afternoon.
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  But Lewis actually addresses that feeling right at the start.
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  He knows that for the average person, Trinity can feel like a
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  math problem. You know how can 3 be 1?
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  Yeah, a Riddle you have to solve.
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  It feels like a Riddle you have to solve to pass a seminary
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  exam, rather than something that actually effects how you get
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  through your day. But in our tradition, and
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  certainly in the Westminster Confession, we understand that
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  knowing who God is in his fullness is the only way to
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  really know anything else. And that is the mission for this
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  deep dive. Lewis argues that the Trinity is
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  actually the most practical thing in the universe.
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  The most practical It's a bold claim.
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  He calls it a dynamic pulsating activity, and honestly, if we do
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  our job right today, we're going to move away from viewing the
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  Trinity as a static diagram and start seeing it as the heartbeat
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  of reality. That phrase pulsating activity
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  is so vivid. We want to get away from the
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  idea of God as some kind of static statue and move toward
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  this idea of God as a kind of dance or a drama that has been
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  going on forever. To get there, though, we have to
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  start with a Riddle. This is something Louis poses in
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  the text, and I want to throw it at you and at you, the listener.
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  It breaks your brain a little if you're not careful.
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  OK, I'm ready. Here's the question, how can one
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  thing cause another thing if they both existed at the same
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  time forever? It stops you in your tracks.
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  It sounds like a logical impossibility.
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  It does because in our world, causality is tied to the
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  calendar. It's tied to time.
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  That is right. We live in a timeline.
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  Cause comes first, effect comes second.
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  It's sequential. I strike a match and then the
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  fire starts. I eat the bad seafood and then
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  an hour later I get the indigestion.
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  We are conditioned to think that the cause must be older than the
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  result. But Lewis says if we want
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  understand God, we have to step out of that timeline.
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  We have to unlearn that assumption.
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  He gives us this mental image of two books on a table table to
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  hel us visualize it. I want to walk through this
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  slowly because it sets U everything else.
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  It's a great little illustration.
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  Imagine the table. On that table you have a book,
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  what's called Book. A OK, I'm picturing book A maybe
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  a heavy systematic theology volume.
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  Perfect and stacked directly on top of it is book B.
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  Got it. Now, physically speaking, why is
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  book B2 inches off the table? Because Book A is holding it up,
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  Book A is the support. Its position is the cause of
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  book B's position. Simple enough.
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  If you slide book A out, book B falls, so A causes B.
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  That's just gravity and physics, no mystery there.
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  But here is the Lewis twist. He asks us to imagine that these
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  two books have been in that position forever.
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  Not just for a long time, Eternally.
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  And this is the crucial pivot point.
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  This is where our brains start to short circuit A.
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  Little they do because they've been stacked like that forever.
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  There was never a time when book A was there and book B was not.
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  They are Co eternal. Correct.
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  Book B has never existed after book A in terms of time and yet.
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  And yet Book A is still the cause.
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  Still the reason B is where it is.
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  Book A is still supporting Book B.
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  So we have a cause and effect that happened simultaneously and
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  eternally. Precisely.
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  And this shatters the assumption that cause requires before.
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  This is Lewis's way of handing us a tool, a new way of thinking
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  to understand the relationship between God the Father and God
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  the Son. Because in Christian theology,
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  and certainly in the sources we are looking at today, we use
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  language like father and son. We do.
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  And human language carries baggage.
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  When I hear father, I think of a guy who existed before his kid.
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  Right. Your dad was around for 20 or 30
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  years before you showed up. It's baked into the word itself.
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  So when we project that onto God, the natural human
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  assumption is OK. God the Father must have been
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  hanging out alone for eons and then at some point he decided to
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  create the sun. Which is a major theological
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  error, a heresy. In fact.
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  It's the air of Arianism. Effectively, it turns the sun
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  into a created being. It makes him a creature,
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  something less than God. But Louis uses the book analogy
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  to say no, look at the table. The son, the second person who
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  flows from the father, just as the position of the top book
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  flows from the bottom book. Yes, but there was never a time
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  when the Father was alone. They are Co eternal.
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  So the sun exists because the father exists, but he did not
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  begin after the father began. That is it, that's the key.
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  It allows us to hold 2 truths that seem contradictory to our
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  time bound minds. The Son is begotten of the
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  Father, He comes from Him, but he is also eternal.
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  He's not a creature. Not a creature.
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  This is why the creeds are so specific about begotten, not
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  made. It's trying to capture that book
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  on a table relationship. Lewis admits, though, that the
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  book analogy is a bit dry. It is.
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  It is static. Books just sit there.
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  So he moves to something a bit more active to help us get the
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  concept. He talks about a mental act.
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  This one resonates a bit more with how we actually experience
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  life. He asks you to imagine thinking
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  of a picture. Like if I close my eyes right
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  now and imagine a sailboat on the water.
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  Right, the act of your will, you deciding to imagine is the
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  cause. The image of the sailboat in
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  your mind is the result, but there is no time gap.
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  No, it's instant. You do not will it wait 5
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  seconds and then the sailboat appears.
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  The moment you will it, it is there.
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  And if I stop willing it, it is gone.
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  The cause and the effect are simultaneous.
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  Now scale that up to God, if God is an eternal mind and he is
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  eternally thinking or speaking. Then that image, that word is
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  eternally present. It has to.
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  Be that gets us closer to the biblical language of the Word of
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  God from John's Gospel. It does, and he uses one more
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  analogy that I think is the most traditional one.
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  Light from a lamp or heat from a.
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  Fire right from the Nicene Creed life.
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  From life exactly. You cannot have a fire without
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  heat. The moment the fire exists, the
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  heat exists. If you have a fire, heat is
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  streaming out of it. The fire causes the heat, but
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  the heat is simultaneous with the fire.
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  There's no delay. And so the sun is like that
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  heat. Lewis says the sun is the
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  streaming forth of the father. He is the self-expression.
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  Just as light streams from a lamp, the sun streams from the
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  father. There was never a time when the
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  father was not expressing himself, so there was never a
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  time without the Son. But then, and I think this is
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  where Lewis shows his brilliance, he stops.
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  He does. He spends all this time building
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  up these analogies, the books, the mental picture, the light.
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  And then he basically says, but be careful, these are all
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  flawed. Why would he undercut his own
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  examples like that? Because they are impersonal.
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  That is the danger of analogies. Books, light rays, mental
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  images, these are things. They are not people.
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  If we stick to strictly to the light analogy, we start thinking
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  of Jesus as just a force field or a beam of energy or some kind
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  of impersonal emanation. Who lose the personhood?
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  Spot on. A ray of light does not look
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  back at the lamp and love it. A mental picture does not have a
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  conversation with the mind that thought it.
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  But the Christian claim is that the Father and the Son are
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  persons. They relate to each other.
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  So we use the analogies to fix the time problem in our heads,
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  Yeah, but we have to drop them when we talk about the
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  relationship. Right, we have to come back to
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  the Bible's terminology, father and son, Lewis says.
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  It is the only language that captures the relationship.
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  Why that 1 specifically? Because it implies authority,
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  yes, but it also implies love. It implies delight, as Lewis
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  puts it. The father delights in his son.
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  The son looks up to his father. You simply do not get that
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  emotional and relational depth from a book sitting on another
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  book. That relational depth brings us
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  to a phrase we hear constantly. If you walk into a greeting card
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  aisle or scroll through Instagram, you will see it
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  everywhere. God is love.
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  It is absolutely everywhere. But Lewis argues that this
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  phrase, God is love, is basically meaningless unless you
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  accept the Trinity. Which is a bold claim, a really
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  bold. Claim it is.
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  Why does he think the Trinity is required for God to be loved?
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  It comes down to the definition of love.
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  Love is a verb, sure, but it is a transitive verb.
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  It requires an object. You can't just love into a
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  vacuum. You cannot just love in a
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  vacuum. To love, you must love someone
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  or something. I cannot just sit in an empty
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  room with nothing, nothing else in existence and be loving.
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  There's nothing to direct it toward.
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  Correct. So let us do a thought
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  experiment. Imagine a Unitarian God.
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  A God who is just a single person, no Trinity, just one
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  solitary consciousness. OK.
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  Before the universe was created, before angels, before humans,
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  who did that God love? There's nobody else.
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  Right, so he could not be love in action.
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  He could possess the capacity for love, perhaps, but he was
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  not loving anyone. For that God to become love, he
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  would need to create something. You would need to make a
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  universe just to have an object for his affection.
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  And that leads to a massive theological problem.
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  It implies that God needed the creation.
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  It makes God dependent on us. It means he was not fully God,
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  fully love until we showed up to complete him.
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  It denies his isiety, his self-sufficiency.
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  That is a needy God. That is not a self-sufficient
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  God. Precisely.
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  But the Trinitarian view solves this perfectly.
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  Because God is Father, Son, and Spirit, the dynamic activity of
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  love has been going on for all eternity within God Himself.
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  The father has always loved the son.
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  The Son has always loved the Father, and the Spirit is the
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  love between them. So God did not need to create
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  the world to know what love is. He is love.
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  Yes, love is the very substance, the stuff of the relationships
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  between the Persons of the Trinity.
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  It means creation was an act of pure overflow, not an act of
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  need. That distinction changes
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  everything about how we view God.
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  Yeah, he is not lonely. He's a community.
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  He's a Society of persons. Louis uses the word dance here.
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  He says if you will not think him irreverent, the life of God
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  is like a kind of drama or a dance.
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  A dynamic pulsating activity. Exactly.
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  It is alive. It is not a static ruler on a
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  throne. It is a movement of infinite
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  energy and love. And Louis contrasts this God is
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  love concept with that the modern world usually means by
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  it. Oh yes, he says.
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  People often flip this sentence round.
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  They do. They turn God is love into love
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  is God. Meaning my feeling of love is
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  the ultimate authority. That is it.
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  It is a subtle shift, but it is fatal.
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  When people say love is God, they usually mean that they're
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  human. Feelings of affection, however
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  they arise, are the divine standard.
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  So if I feel love for something or someone, that feeling
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  justifies anything I do. It becomes a license.
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  It becomes a kind of emotional trump card.
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  I am following my heart, so it must be right.
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  Right, but the Christian statement God is love is the
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  opposite. It means that this concrete,
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  living, Trinitarian life that existed before the universe is
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  the definition of love. We do not define God by our
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  feelings. We define love by looking at
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  God. Our feelings have to conform to
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  His reality, not the other way around.
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  Exactly right. So we have established the
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  Father and the Son, the eternal relationship, the dance of love.
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  But we have left someone out. We need to talk about the third
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  person. The Holy Spirit.
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  And Lewis is really honest here. He admits something that I think
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  a lot of believers feel but might be afraid to say in
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  church. What's that?
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  He says the Holy Spirit can feel a bit vague, a bit shadowy
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  compared to the Father and the Son.
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  It is a very common experience. I think most Christians would
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  admit to that if they're being honest.
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  You know, we have a clear mental image of Father.
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  We know what that role looks like.
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  We have a very clear historical image of the Son, Jesus Christ.
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  We can picture a human face. But spirit ghost, it feels
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  nebulous. It's hard to get a handle on.
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  So how does Lewis help us get a handle on this?
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  He goes back to that idea of the dance or the community.
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  He uses the analogy of a community spirit or team spirit.
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  OK. So like when a group of people
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  works together really well, we say that team has a great spirit
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  or there's a good spirit in this family.
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  Right. Think about a family, a club or
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  a trade union. When those people get together,
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  a certain something develops. A vibe, a way of talking, a
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  shared identity. We call it a communal
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  personality. But in a human club, that is
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  just a metaphor. The spirit is not a literal
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  ghost floating around the locker room.
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  No, it is just description of the mood.
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  Exactly. And this is the hard pivot Lewis
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  makes. This is the leap of faith, if
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  you will, he says. Imagine a union so tight, a love
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  so intense, between the Father and the Son, that the Spirit
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  becomes concrete. It's not just a mood anymore.
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  It's not a mood in God. That spirit that grows out of
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  the joint life of the Father and the Son is so real that it is a
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  person. That is mind bending.
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  The love is so real it becomes a person.
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  Lewis says the union between father and son is such a live,
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  concrete thing that this union in itself is the third person.
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  We are used to unions just being agreements or feelings, but in
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  God the union is a he, not an it.
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  So it's not just that the father and son feel a certain way about
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  each other. It's that the feeling the
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  relationship itself has personhood.
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  And Lewis also offers a practical reason why the Spirit
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  feels vague to us. It is not because he is less
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  real, it is because of where he is standing.
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  Yes, this is a matter of perspective.
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  This is so helpful. Lewis suggests that the reason
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  the spear feels shadowy is that he is the one acting through
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  you. The spatial imagery here is
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  helpful, he says. If you think of the father as
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  out there or in front of you, and the son is someone standing
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  at your side. And the Holy Spirit is inside
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  you or behind you. He is the internal drive.
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  He is the one enabling you to pray.
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  He's the one turning you toward the Father and the Son.
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  It is like trying to see your own eyes.
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  Precisely, you can't. You can't see your own eyes
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  because you are seeing with them.
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  In a similar way, it is hard to objectify the Spirit because He
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  is the agent of your spiritual sight.
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  He is the subjective power that allows you to relate to the
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  objective Father and Son. This aligns perfectly with the
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  reformed understanding of the Spirit's work in applying
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  redemption. He is the one who regenerates
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  the heart so we can even see the Kingdom.
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  So if we step back, we have this incredible picture, the Father
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  eternally speaking the Word, the Son being that Word, the Spirit
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  being, the eternal love flowing between them, and this dynamic
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  dance happening outside of time. It's a breathtaking vision of
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  reality. Which brings us to the big
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  question Lewis asks. So what?
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  The ultimate So what question? Why does this theology matter to
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  a regular person? Is this just for monks in a
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  library? Right.
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  Is this just an intellectual exercise?
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  And Lewis says no, Absolutely none.
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  He says the whole purpose of our existence is to enter that
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  pattern, to take our place in that dance.
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  And this is where we get to the title of the chapter.
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  Good Infection. Which is a strange phrase for us
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  today. We hear infection and we think
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  masks and hand sanitizer. It has negative connotations.
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  It does now, but Lewis is using it in a very specific way.
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  He's trying to describe how we acquire the spiritual life.
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  And he compares it to getting warm or getting wet.
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  Right. If you want to get warm, what do
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  you do? You do not stand in the middle
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  of a frozen field and try really hard to generate heat with your
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  willpower, no. You go stand next to the fire.
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  You get close to the source. And if you want to get wet, you
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  have to get into the water. You cannot acquire these
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  attributes warmth, wetness without being close to the
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  source it's about. And Lewis applies this to
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  spiritual goods. Yeah, he says joy, peace,
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  eternal life. These are not just prizes God
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  hands out. Right.
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  It is not like God reaches into a bag and hands you a peace
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  token and says here you go, thanks for behaving.
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  That's not how it works. So what are they?
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  No. Those things, joy, peace, life,
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  they are God. They are a fountain of energy
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  spurting up at the center of reality.
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  God is the fire. God is the fountain.
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  So if you want the warmth, you have to be near the fire.
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  If you want the life, you have to be united to God.
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  You have to get close enough to get wet, so to speak.
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  He says once a man is united to God, how could he not live
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  through him? What can he do but wither and
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  die? It creates a binary that is
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  quite stark. There is no source of life
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  outside of the Trinity. You are either plugged into the
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  source or you are like a battery running down.
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  There's no third option. And that leads us to the crucial
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  distinction Lewis makes between the two types of life.
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  This is the core vocabulary this section.
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  We need to talk about BIOS and Zoe.
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  These are two Greek words for life, but they mean very
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  different things. BIOS is the biological life.
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  The word we get biology from. Exactly.
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  It is what we all have by nature.
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  It comes through nature. It's the life of the body.
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  And it has a fundamental problem.
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  Yes, and BIOS has a fatal flaw. It runs down, it decays, it
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  needs constant maintenance, food, air, water, and
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  eventually, inevitably, it stops.
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  It is a temporary fuel. And Zoe, Zoe is the spiritual
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  life. It is the life of God.
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  It has existed eternally. It does not run down.
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  It is self-sustaining. It's the kind of life that was
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  going on in the Trinity before anything else existed.
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  So the human predicament is that we have BIOS, but we need Zoe.
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  Precisely, we are running on a battery that is dying and we
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  need to be plugged into the main power grid.
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  And this brings us back to a distinction we hinted at earlier
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  making versus begetting. This is a distinction Lewis
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  harps on, and it's so important. He reminds us that humans are
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  made by God, not begotten. Right when you beget something,
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  you produce something of the same kind as yourself.
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  A man begets a human baby, a Beaver begets a Little Beaver.
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  But when you make something, you make something of a different
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  kind. Like a sculptor making a statue.
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  Exactly. A sculptor can make a statue
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  that looks like himself. It has the shape of a man, but
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  it does not have the life of a man.
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  It is stone. So God made us.
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  In the same way God made us, we are liked him.
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  We have his image, we can reason, we can love, but we do
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  not naturally have his Zoe life. We are, spiritually speaking,
• 18:58
  statues. This is a humbling thought.
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  We tend to think of ourselves as pretty alive.
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  We are running around doing our jobs, feeling things.
• 19:06
  We feel very alive. But Lewis is saying, compared to
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  the life of God, we are basically marble.
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  We are sophisticated biological machines that are slowly
• 19:15
  breaking down. We are cold, hard statues
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  compared to the pulsating life, the Trinity.
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  That's a sobering image. It is.
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  But the offer of Christianity, and this is the Gospel in a
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  nutshell, is that God wants to turn the statues into living
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  sons. He wants to inject Zoe into our
• 19:32
  BIOS. And how does that happen?
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  Because a statue cannot try really hard and suddenly grow a
• 19:38
  beating heart. I cannot will myself into
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  spiritual life. No, that's the whole point.
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  The statue is dead. It can't do anything.
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  It has to be given. It has to be an infection, and
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  the carrier of that infection is Jesus Christ.
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  Lewis says this is the specific reason Christ became a man, not
• 19:54
  just to be a moral teacher. Not at all.
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  Think about the logic here. Christ is the one person who has
• 19:58
  Zoe, naturally. He is the begotten Son.
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  He has the. Eternal life of the Father.
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  He came down and took on BIOS. He took on our biological
• 20:06
  nature, our human limitation. He brought the Zoe down into the
• 20:08
  BIOS. He crossed the streams by
• 20:11
  becoming human, dying and rising again.
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  He created a new kind of humanity, a humanity that is
• 20:17
  infected with divine life. He established a beachhead.
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  A beachhead of Zoe inside the world of BIOS.
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  That's a great way to put it and now the offer is that if we are
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  united to him, if we get close enough to catch the infection,
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  that Zoe life starts to spread in us.
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  It spreads from him to us. By faith, through the work of
• 20:39
  the Spirit. And what is the result?
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  It is not just that we become nicer people.
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  Right, that is the trap. We think Christianity is just
• 20:46
  about polishing the statue. Don't say bad words, be polite,
• 20:49
  give to charity, making the marble look a little shinier.
• 20:52
  Being nice is just a polished statue, Lewis says.
• 20:54
  The result of Zoe is much more radical, he says.
• 20:57
  The Holy Spirit arises in us. We begin to love the Father as
• 21:00
  the Son does. We're not just looking at the
• 21:02
  dance from the outside anymore. We essentially get caught up in
• 21:05
  that Trinitarian dance we talked about earlier.
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  We start sharing in the life of Christ.
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  He uses a phrase that is quite shocking if you really think
• 21:12
  about it. He says the goal is to become
• 21:14
  Little Christs. Every Christian is to become a
• 21:16
  little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a
• 21:19
  Christian is simply nothing else.
• 21:21
  That is a massive statement. It's huge.
• 21:23
  The whole religion, the church services, the theology, the
• 21:27
  morality, the Bibles, the cathedrals, it all exists for
• 21:31
  nothing else but to turn statues into living sons of God.
• 21:35
  It reframes the whole game. It is not about rule keeping, it
• 21:38
  is about a change of nature. It is structural.
• 21:42
  It is ontological. It changes what you are.
• 21:44
  You stop being a creature that just dies and start being a son
• 21:48
  who lives forever. You are moving from the
• 21:49
  biological library of BIOS to the spiritual Kingdom of Zoe.
• 21:54
  It's a fundamental change in your being.
• 21:56
  So let us bring this home. We started with books on a
• 21:59
  table, moved through light and lamps, talked about the internal
• 22:02
  spirit and ended up with statues coming to life.
• 22:05
  It is quite a path we have walked.
• 22:06
  It is the path of the gospel. It starts with the eternal,
• 22:09
  self-sufficient Godfather, Son, and Spirit living in a perfect
• 22:12
  dance of love, and it ends with that God coming down to invite
• 22:15
  us into the dance. To infect us.
• 22:17
  To infect us with his own life, to give us Zoe, it's an act of
• 22:23
  incredible condescension and grace.
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  I think the take away here is really about how we view our own
• 22:28
  spiritual lives. It is easy to get caught up in
• 22:31
  the doing Did I pray enough? Did I do the right thing?
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  The. Performance Treadmill.
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  Exactly. But Lewis is pointing us to the
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  being. Yes.
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  The question is not just did I follow the rules, The question
• 22:43
  is am I close to the fire? You cannot manufacture the heat.
• 22:48
  You can only position yourself near the flame.
• 22:50
  That is what faith is, positioning yourself in Christ
• 22:53
  so that his life can flow into you and.
• 22:55
  Remember that it is a gift. The statue does not earn its
• 22:58
  heartbeat. That is the ultimate Reformed
• 23:00
  reflection here. It is entirely grace,
• 23:02
  monarchistic. The Father sends the Son, The
• 23:04
  Son brings the life. The Spirit applies it to us.
• 23:07
  We are the recipients of this incredible pulsating activity of
• 23:09
  God. We do not create it, we just
• 23:11
  catch it. I want to leave you with a
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  thought to chew on as you go about your week, Lewis says.
• 23:15
  The whole point is to become a little Christ.
• 23:17
  A challenging thought. It is so.
• 23:20
  Look at your life today. Do not look at it as a checklist
• 23:23
  of things you have to do for God.
• 23:24
  Look at it as a statue that is slowly, perhaps painfully,
• 23:28
  waking up. You might feel some growing
• 23:30
  pains. You might feel things you did
• 23:32
  not expect. That's a good way of thinking
• 23:34
  about sanctification. But ask yourself, are you trying
• 23:38
  to just be a good statue? Polished, shiny, but ultimately
• 23:41
  cold and dead. Or are you letting the infection
• 23:45
  of spiritual life take over, even if it messes up your plans
• 23:48
  and makes you a little less predictable?
• 23:49
  That is the question, are you content with BIOS or do you want
• 23:53
  Zoe? Thank you for joining us on this
• 23:54
  deep dive into reform thinking. We will see you next time.