All from The Quotable Lewis. It’s no wonder Piper considers Lewis one of the 3 most influential dead men in his life. I’ve loved his Christian devotional writing (remember: doctrine = devotion) since reading Mere Christianity back in the summer of 05 (or was it 06 – I only remember the strange looks from English Literature classmates on reporting my holiday reading record)
He says it better than I can, so no apologies for lengthy quotations
Salvation (Quote 1311, from Mere Christianity, Bk IV, pp. 137-140)
The point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can “become Sons of God.” … God has brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us, and in that way is like a father. But when the Bible talks about us “becoming” Sons of God, obviously it must mean something different. …
One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God, “begotten, not created”; and it adds “begotten by his father before all worlds.”
… To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies. … But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. … A man makes a wireless set, or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man creates is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God. …
… What man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life – the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. …
And that is exactly what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
I’d always passed over Paul’s comments about us “becoming like Sons of God” – who could believe such a haughty claim? But is this flagrant boast, that we will become “partakers in the Divine nature” correct? Can the truth be so glorious? And to what extent does this apparent apotheosis permeate our New Creation being? I need to look into this.
