Book Review: The Case for Christianity

I just finished reading The Case for Christianity by C. S. Lewis and if you haven't read it yet I say go do it now!!  It's a very short book (only 56 pages) and its a pretty easy read.  Lewis definitely thinks much deeper than I do and I love seeing a short view of his perspective on Christianity.  

There were a few passages that I felt I needed to share because they just lept off the page at me...

First speaking of free will:

Of course God knew that would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.  Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him.  But there's a difficulty about disagreeing with God.  He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you couldn't be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source.  When you are arguing against Him you're arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all:  it's like cutting off the branch you're sitting on.  If God thinks the state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it is worth paying.

And second, speaking of Jesus 'just' a great moral teacher:

I'm trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly thing that people often say about Him:  "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God."  That's the one thing we mustn't say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher.  He'd either be a lunatic - on level with the man who says he's a poached egg - or else he'd be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But don't let us come with any patronising nonsense about about His being a great human teacher.  he hasn't left that open to us.  He didn't intend to.

Wow.  Amazing.  Powerful.  At least to me.  Read it for yourself and let me know what you think...