I stand in debt to C. S. Lewis for teaching me two essential facts about sin that have both freed and challenged me in my Christian walk. The first is that it is not, as I had long thought, a theological and psychological contradiction to ask a Christian to love the sinner but hate the sin. The second is that God does not judge and condemn us for our raw material but for what we do with that raw material. Together, these two lessons from Lewis have also provided me clarity on the nature of legal punishment and the limits to “reforming” a prisoner.
Loving the Sinner and Hating the Sin
I used to think loving the sinner and hating the sin was an impossible feat, but in Mere Christianity III.7, Lewis reminded me that I did so every day—to 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.”[1]
1. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 105-106.
I hate when I do or say something mean or spiteful, and yet, at the same time I condemn those actions in myself, I continue to love the person whose actions I am condemning. Indeed, my hatred for the action is motivated precisely by my love for myself and my remorse that I should commit a deed that would strip me of the virtue and decency which I know I am capable of.
“Christianity,” Lewis continues, “does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. . . 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.”[2] Our orientation toward our sinful neighbor should be like our orientation toward ourselves: as hopeful that he can be freed from his sins as we hope to be freed from our own.
2. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 106.
Lewis then offers us a convicting test to see if we are truly loving our neighbor in the same way that we love ourselves. Suppose you were to learn that a politician or celebrity or colleague or fellow parishioner you dislike was less bad than you thought. Would that news make you happy or sad? If the latter, if you are upset to find that the person is not so black a sinner as you thought, then, Lewis warns, you are on the road to hell. Those are sobering words for a church that contains parishioners passionately polarized on a lengthy list of social and political issues.
Now, Lewis is quick to add, loving one’s enemy is not the same thing as refusing to punish him.
[L]oving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. . . It is no good quoting ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. . . All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.[3]
3. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 106-107.
Christ did not do away with punishment; he taught us to love all people, including those punished justly for their crimes—even when that person is me! “We may kill if necessary,” Lewis explains, “but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.”[4] Our hatred of the sin must be focused on our hope that the sinner will repent and be released from his bondage to sin. Because the Christian is not motivated by revenge, he can be happy that justice has been done on the sin while yet praying mercy for the sinner—as he would if he were the condemned criminal.
4. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 107.
Judging Our Choices, Not Our Raw Material
Three chapters earlier (III.4), in a chapter titled “Morality and Psychoanalysis,” Lewis offers further illumination on the nature of sin by distinguishing, not between sinner and sin, but between the sinner’s raw material and what he does with that raw material. God tells us not to judge, Lewis argues, because none of us really knows the struggles that another person is facing. That does not mean we overlook sin or abdicate our responsibility (as a society) to punish it, but it does mean that we try to understand the baggage that our fellow sinners are burdened with.
Lewis does not let his readers get off easy.
Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler?[5]
5. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 86.
In no way does Lewis diminish the grave evil committed by Nazis like Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi secret police. They sinned and were justly punished for their crimes. But we who study such historical villains would do well to examine ourselves with humility rather than boast, in holier-than-thou fashion, of our great virtues.
Again, Lewis means that in the most direct and challenging way.
When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.[6]
6. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 85.
God knows our raw material; what interests him is what use we make of it. We who have been graced with good parents, good health, a college education, and a healthy psychological makeup should be bearing more fruit and dispensing more charity to others than those who grew up without any of those gifts.
Lewis speaks plainly:
Most of [a] man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.[7]
7. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 86.
God knows our struggles, our inner demons, and he desires to liberate us. In the end, if we let him, he will set us free from every psychosis and neurosis, every perverse and disordered desire, so that we can grow into the creature he created us to be. For now, the twists and the phobias remain as obstacles, obstacles that our Savior knows about and for which he extends grace. To borrow and alter a line from The Lord of the Rings, what we must decide is what to do with the raw material with which we have been straddled.
That, of course, does not let us off the hook for our perverse raw material. We sin in word, deed, and thought, and the guilt that naturally accompanies disordered desire is real and should be confessed and repented of. But it does highlight our responsibility to make a proper use of our raw material.
Our choices matter, Lewis insists, not just because they show what kind of a person we are, but because
every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.[8]
8. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 86.
It is true that sin is a state of disobedience and rebellion against God, but it is not a static thing that we committed once or twice in the past. Sin is a dynamic process: something we become over a life-long series of bad choices. With each choice we progress toward heaven or hell, not merely as destinations, but as creatures shaped for heaven or hell. Here is how Lewis ends the passage just quoted: “To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”[9]
9. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 86-87.
The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment Is Not
In the light of what Lewis has to say about sin in Mere Christianity, what might his views be concerning the legal status of punishment and reform? Thankfully, readers of Lewis do not have to speculate on this topic, for Lewis wrote an essay in 1954 titled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” which is anthologized in God in the Dock. In his essay, which is as relevant today as when it was written, Lewis argues that the modern humanitarian theory of punishment, which treats punishment as a deterrent and/or a cure, is finally crueler than the traditional, retributive system, which treated punishment as the giving and receiving of a criminal’s just deserts. The Humanitarian theory of punishment is the kind of philosophy that gave Norwegian Anders Breivik a maximum prison sentence of only twenty-one years for the mass murder of seventy-seven people.
“The Humanitarian theory,” Lewis explains, “removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust.”[10] There is no such thing as a just or unjust deterrent or a just or unjust cure; there is merely a deterrent or cure that works or does not work. To move from a moral to a utilitarian system of punishment is to cut off punishment from any fixed, transcendent standard and leave it in the hands of experts. It also means treating the criminal, not as “a person, a subject of rights,” but as “a mere object, a patient, a ‘case.’”[11]
10. C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 288.
11. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 288.
It sounds more humane to cure a patient than punish a sinner, but the shift is made at the expense of the patient’s humanity. When I break a law, whether it be the biblical or the natural law, I know the nature of my crime, the reason for my incarceration, and the manner and length of my punishment. All these can be determined with relative accuracy, for they take place within a commonsense world of guilt and innocence, punishment and reward, action and consequence.
Not so the “humanitarian” world, which punishes apart from any traditional standard and in the absence of a higher divine or natural law to appeal to. They call it healing rather than punishing, but the result is frighteningly the same. Here is Lewis’s scenario, one that smacks of Orwell, Huxley, and Kafka, but that was played out brazenly (back then) in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and more subtly (today) in progressive Europe and Canada:
To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not?[12]
12. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 290.
In The Abolition of Man (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945) Lewis imagines—first in non-fiction and then in fiction—a dystopian world run by expert conditioners who remake man in the image of principles that they imagine are humanitarian, but which are as inhumane as they are anti-humanistic. A decade later, reflecting on a real-world theory of punishment that he considered equally inhumane and anti-humanistic, Lewis exclaims that it might “be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”[13]
13. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 292.
In a retributive justice system, the sinner is punished, but he remains human: a sinner whose sin we can hate while still loving him as a person of essential value and intrinsic worth. Not so the objects of humanitarian cures, who are often reduced to the level of “infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”[14] Far better is the old retributive system that allowed criminals to retain their human identity: “to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.”[15]
14. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 292.
15. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 292.
Sin, like the imago Dei, is a Christian category, though it has stood side by side with secular natural law in Western jurisprudence for a millennium and a half. If we allow that alliance to be broken, if we replace natural law with legal realism, the result will not only threaten justice; it will put a target on the back of every Christian who clings to such old-fashioned prejudices as sin and retribution, guilt and punishment. Under the new regime of the humanitarian theory of punishment, no
one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and . . . all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers [jailers] to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge.[16]
16. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock, 293.
Such is the upshot of a humane system that treats sinners like victims and criminals like patients. Today, its experts speak of mercy and tolerance. Tomorrow, they begin the forcible reeducation of those superstitious members of society who have yet to be enlightened on the subject of sin.
