Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis once wrote a book, a famous book amongst Christians of all stripes, called mere Christianity. And in it, he cut off the fat, and made Christianity simple. The purity of the faith, without denominational spin. I absolutely love that concept.
And it makes me think. That is the goal of Anglicanism. Granted, Anglicanism has not done this perfectly, but it tries.
We cut down Christianity to its core. The basics. The Word, the Sacraments, and the Salvation of sinners.
posted by Mathaytace_Christou at 10:08 AM
2 Comments:
It's nice to think of cutting Christianity down to the basics, but even there you are bound to disagree...Calvin thought he had the five basics nailed down in TULIP, right? But those are hotly contended. I'm not saying this to contest Mere Christianity...it is a great work, just perhaps to show that he wasn't the only one.
2:25 PM
Calvin didn't actually put TULIP together, the five points didn't come into existence until after the Arminian "remonstrances". The calvinists then formulated their five points in refutaton of the five points of Arminianism.
In both cases the five points were not intended to be a reduction of christianity or christian theology to its essential core, but rather were contructed as points of defining difference between two theological view points.
The Arminian remonstrances (which took the form of five points) were formulated to show the specific differences, or disagreement between arminian teaching and strict calvanistic teaching (as both were within the reformed tradition). The five points of Calvinism (TULIP) were specificly formulated to rebutt the Arminian remonstrances.
This is a marked difference with CS Lewis' Mere Christianity because he specificly wrote the book to outline a core of christian belief to which all reasonably orthodox christians could subscribe, regardless of theological school or denomination.
The motivation behind this effort was Lewis' recognition that the label "christian" or "christianity" had become so muddled for most people that it had lost most of its real meaning. People are called christians if their name is on a church membership list somewhere.. or if they are a nice guy.. etc, regardless of wether or not they actually subscribe to the core doctrines of christianity. Thus Lewis felt it necessary to outline exactly what those core doctrines were, because when they become lost in the muddle, the gospel becomes lost in the muddle as well.
7:08 PM
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