November 30, 2025 - Understanding One of the Greatest Strategies in Diminishing Our Lives

The context for C. S. Lewis’ book, “Mere Christianity,” was drawn from a series of wartime BBC broadcasts on the Christian faith in which he spoke on the problems of suffering, pain, and evil from 1942 to 1944. You can then imagine when, in one broadcast, Lewis spoke on the issue of forgiveness. The book was published ten years later, in 1952. During WW2, 800,000 Londoners lost their homes to the Nazi ‘Blitz’. Night after night, hundreds of planes bombed not only London but also many other cities in the UK. Later, jet-propelled rockets turned civilians and their towns into the front lines, designed to put pressure on the government to surrender.

One address that Lewis broadcast was the Christian idea of forgiveness.

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. …And half of you already want to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew? So do I. I wonder very much, just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death and torture. I wonder very much what I should do at that point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do—I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, I find ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made clear that if we do not forgive, we shall not be forgiven.

…we might try to understand precisely what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

…my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. …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 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 was 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-- myself.

However much I might dislike my own cowardice, 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 those 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 [sin] 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.”

If we could hate sin in us and in our world, yet still love people and ourselves, we would begin to understand the heart of God. That is the way of compassion toward others.