Mere Christianity - Forgiveness

I'm almost finished with this book now and I am getting much more out of it the further I go. I have read past the chapter on forgiveness (because I couldn't put it down last night). And there's a lot I want to share from several chapters I've read. But my posts tend to be long anyway, so I will share one subject at a time, beginning with Lewis' thoughts on Christian forgiveness.

We've all heard that saying, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." But that has always sounded a bit of an over-simplification to me. I don't know. I just haven't always liked or understood it. It makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it's because I so dislike the word hate; especially connected in any way to another person. But I really liked the way Lewis explained what this statement should actually mean to us as Christians.

He begins by explaining what it means to love your neighbor as yourself:

...'love your neighbor' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive.' I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.


To me, this would mean that we should not look down on another person, consider ourselves morally superior to another person, think or speak about them with disdain or contempt, and never stop feeling compassion for them in their weaknesses. But it does not mean we won't ever be angry about wrong actions.

...we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves -- to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. This is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

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