“There are three kinds of people in the world” is how Lewis begins his short essay “Three Kinds of Men”. There aren’t, of course, only three kinds of people, though there are (I would suggest) three kinds of “Men” (humans). There are many different kinds of people, depending on how we count, what sorts of criteria we use to categorize ourselves. Jeff Crabtree has a funny little song categorizing people as jelly beans – yellow and black and white…. We become aware through it that all the standard depictions of race which are in fact nothing to do with colour at all. In the midst of this diversity (and our nervous defence of the necessity of diversity, in case we should infringe upon someone’s individual right to define themselves). Lewis insists (as Christians around the world do) that from a God’s eye view, we are all individually loved but recognizably grouped as one of “three kind of Men”. Indeed the story of redemption is in part the story of release from the life of the herd, the realization of true individuality. On the other hand, it is not a release from our common nature – our oneness remains with us forever, our humanness an unmistakable part of who we shall always be even in our heavenly state. Like God himself – one and multiple – so does humanity come into the kingdom of heaven.
The state they come out of, however, has alternative modes of being. There are three kinds of men, says Lewis – there are those for whom the world is a storehouse of diversions for their own pleasure, those who recognize the existence and claims of divinity and try to placate Him, and those who can say with Paul “for me to live is Christ….” Lewis is less concerned here with the first and third classes of people than with the second. In his short essay, he descries this “neither hot nor cold” crew as in the worst of the three situations. Elsewhere, Lewis refers to the phenomenon of being “spoiled for Christ”, of having known Him and therefore not being left the option of not recognizing His existence. Lewis’ aim here is to demonstrate that the costs of not being “hot”, not being able to say “to live is Christ”, are higher than simply relaxing into the arms of grace. For the lukewarm (which I would think includes most of us from time to time) this is not a condemnation but a description of painful accuracy, a pen portrait of what Douglas Adams described in his acute little title “the long, dark tea-time of the soul”. Trying to calculate what God wants and then apportioning one’s life so you can “pay the tax” required by divine government voids the fatherhood of God and the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is (says Paul) “love, joy, peace…..” It is not a divine autocracy, a state of domination, but a continuous becoming of revelation and wholeness, a state of transformation. We cannot say enough to placate God and expect that there will be enough left over to live on. Until what is mine is His, what is His cannot be mine. And given that everything is His, we can understand why “the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy”. Lewis refers to the taxation mentality as “the taxation of moral conscience”, or the resolution into law and technique that which can only properly be grasped in terms of grace and relationship. Lewis of course is speaking to the members of a national church, for whom bureaucratization and nominalism was an everyday reality. Taxation to support the national church had been a fact of history, compulsion toward adherence to the destruction of a faith-filled conscience, a national scandal. It is not so in our contemporary churches which are voluntary associations of people seeking common ends. Yet even where the permutation of Presence into moral conscience takes place, in the tyranny of rosters and events, in the framing of “the word” with “the announcements” and “the giving message”. We have an unfailing capacity, we humans, of putting lightning in a bottle, and then burying it under tons of concrete. It is what Weber and others have referred to as the “institutionalization of Charisma”, and it is not the particular fault of churches so much as a reflex of all human beings – for whom the search for safety and a guaranteed food supply has been dominant ever since we discovered caves. The ‘cave man reflex’ in churches, however, results in the condition of the lukewarm, of emerging from the cave to placate the Gods and hunt, only to return to the cave. In times of plenty, the spiritual lack is less evident, though no less in existence. In difficult or barren times, however, the cave becomes a trap as much as a shelter, and it is then that we realize that the true and living God is not placated with the blood of bulls or bison, but only with us coming out of our caves and surrendering all that is ours for all that is His.
Now Lewis poses a problem for himself. Because there are three kinds of men, he suggests, “any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous”. It is disastrous on functional grounds, because it foreshortens graciousness, and so cuts off from view grace. And assuredly, there are few less gracious sights in the world than a Christian who preaches grace but practices Law. Lewis tries to avoid this foreshortening by allowing for a middle space – a space for those who want to be permanent residents of the kingdom rather than citizens, to pay the tax but avoid the “loss of identity” contingent on making one’s own will over to Him. But the state is an illusory one, as Lewis notes: “we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have.” The real point is his second: “back or on we must go, but there is no going on simply by our own efforts”. Residence in the middle space is not a factor of not wanting to be happy. It is a result of the season of Grace which must arrive before the gaining of new skin, a new identity can become bearable to the soul which fears nakedness. “If the new self, the new will, does not come at his own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically”. Crossing the line into the kingdom is not a matter of will (though surely a conversion of will is necessary), but an expectation of transformation, an awaiting of the breathe which will stir into flame the constitutive desire. Perhaps it would be better, Lewis implies, if we lost the language of “sinners” and “saved”, and spoke rather of stages of “coming to be” in the streetscape, forecourt and household of God. This, after all, is the language of the New Testament, which contrasts the koinonia of the household, made possible (John tells us) through the shared experience of a gospel we have heard and seen and touched, with those who are not of the household (that household which is the oikos or economy of God). There are those who are not, and by their choice, never will be, of that household. There are those who are not, but who are carrying the load of permanent residency, and who are listening for the wind. And there are those who are crossing or have crossed the threshold into the household.
None of us have gone far in, for the House is a large one – and even the oldest of us has only seen a few of the rooms laid before us. But we share one thing in common. Our desire is met with delight as we walk through every new door, around every corner of the hallways and staircases of that household. There is nothing left to pay, no lack to fill- for we are in His household, which is by nature abundantly supplied from the life which flows from beneath the throne. In the end, there are not three kinds of people at all, once we discover the fullness of what we were meant to be as people. As the stone is rolled away and we emerge into light, surprisingly we discover ourselves to be not shades, facsimiles of human beings, but living souls with many faces but one nature.
Notes:
1. First printed in The Sunday Times, no. 6258 (21 March 1943), reprinted in W. Hooper (ed), C S Lewis: Present Concerns, Collins/Fount, 1986.
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