THE ATONEMENT SERIES: PART 9
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QUESTION: We are often told in the NT to repent for the forgiveness of sins. Do you think that we can, on our own, sufficiently repent so as to repair our broken relationship with God? If repentance means the death of our sinful self, can Christ’s submission, obedience, and death be helpful and/or enable our ability to repent in a way that is acceptable to God?
C.S. LEWIS (Clive Staples, 1898–1963) is best known for his The Chronicles of Narnia books but was also a highly impactful Christian apologist. His most popular apologetic works include The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, but he also published many others. Lewis is not considered by many as an academic theologian but did have some original theological ideas such as his theory of atonement as presented in Mere Christianity. The following reading presents this theory, which I refer to as Repentance Enablement.
READING: Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie … It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person–and he would not need it. […] Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. … But unfortunately, we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all–to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not. […] But supposing God became a man–suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person–then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all. [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 56-58]
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