C. S. Lewis On The Conditionality Of Love

In The Horse and His Boy, King Peter asks his sister, Queen Susan, if she plans to marry her boyfriend, Prince Rabadash. She answers, "No, brother, not for all the jewels in Tashbaan." Now that she has gotten to know Rabadash better, she sees that he is a bad person. Peter replies, "Truly, sister, I should have loved you the less if you had taken him." Peter could not figure out why she had ever liked him in the first place.

Most evangelicals today find morally repugnant any sentence that begins with the words, "I should have loved you the less if...". They would regard Peter as a terrible man for letting his love for his sister rise or fall in response to her moral performance. But Peter does not apologize for saying it, and Susan is not offended by it, and C. S. Lewis, who wrote the dialogue, clearly regards the sentiment as valid. All three believe that Peter would not have sinned by loving his sister less if she had knowingly married a bad man. (What might have motivated her to marry that villain? His money and good looks? For shame.) Peter rejoiced to see his sister choosing wisely, and that enabled him to love her more than he could have had she succumbed to baser motivations of wealth and appearance. The degree of his love was frankly conditional. It was set, at least in part, to the gauge of her moral behavior.

Christians in former times understood this principle, and, as best as I have been able to determine, never challenged it. The better the person, the more you can love him. Christians likewise understood that the better person you are yourself, the more you are able to love someone else. In 1649, Richard Lovelace, explaining to his girlfriend Lucasta why he had to leave her to go fight in battle, wrote, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more." That is a profound insight into the nature of love and its degrees. Because Lovelace loved honor more than he loved Lucasta, he was able to love her more than he could have had he been a coward. Righteous behavior increases love in all directions.

Lamentably, leading voices in evangelicalism over the past 30 years have labored to sever this intuitive and long-cherished connection between goodness and love. They have taken rhetorical sledgehammers to the mortar that binds the increase of love to the increase of moral excellence. They have been so successful in dismantling this conditional aspect of love that they have rendered the words of wise King Peter repulsive to the modern Christian ear. This is a bad thing.

Peter is not the only victim. So also is Sarah Smith, the holiest character apart from Aslan that C. S. Lewis ever dreamed up. In The Great Divorce, Sarah is dead on earth but wonderfully alive in heaven, where she meets with her newly arrived husband Frank. Frank is a damned soul and a selfish jerk who is only visiting Paradise so he can rebuke it. He hides behind a false front, a Tragedian actor, who does the talking for him. As Frank resists Sarah's invitation to leave pretense behind and begin an ascent to the higher mountains of heaven, he becomes smaller and smaller until he disappears completely into his spokesman. Sarah then says to this facade:

"Where is Frank? And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me. Or stay, if you prefer. If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me."

The Tragedian responds, "You do not love me."

She answers, "I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go."

Sarah's love is conditional. She can only love Frank if he truly is, and he cannot be unless he repents. When he has so identified with corruption as to be subsumed into it then there will be no real person left to love. But if he fulfills the condition of repentance then he will become more solid and more lovable. If he disappears into evil, then her love also, of necessity, will disappear. Neither God nor his saints can love evil.

The notion of becoming more lovable is a constant theme in Lewis. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes that God's love "must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us more lovable." God, in love, works to expunge from us the things that keep him from loving us even more. Good pet owners do this to their dogs. Lewis writes that a man "interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely." Because the dog is "so nearly lovable...it is worth his while to make it fully lovable." So stand we in relation to God.

Regrettably, the current rhetorical climate in evangelicalism renders it nearly impossible to make this point. Week after week in pulpit after pulpit we are told, "God loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make him love you any more or less than he does now." I have witnessed the indoctrination of this profoundly unbiblical teaching firsthand, and have almost despaired of getting Christians to read their Bibles and believe what it actually says - repeatedly! - about the love of God. (For detailed Scriptural documentation, please see the August 30, 2012 post, "God's Conditional Love".) The depth of the problem might be illustrated by a book we're reading at the church I attend. Amazingly, in a book co-authored by a C. S. Lewis scholar(!), there is a barrage of affirmations that God's love is unconditional, including this doozy: "The good news is that [God] loves us, and His love is not conditioned on our behavior. It is not increased by our performance nor diminished by our failures."

Oh well - what can you do? God is not dead, but sometimes I fear that sound theology is.

Listen, this is important. If you choose to become proud, petulant, cowardly, lazy, impure, greedy, unkind, selfish, covetous, undisciplined or dishonest, God will not love you exactly the same as he always has. That is a lie of the devil, and I beg you to oppose it as firmly as our Lord opposed Peter's satanic resistance to his march to the cross. So what if you heard it from your pastor, whom you know to be a good man, and so what if it made you feel really good inside when you heard it. Error is error no matter how captivating it sounds and no matter how worthy is the man who spouts it. C. S. Lewis taught the right thing about God's love - though he did little more than express ordinary biblical truth and the consensus of 19 centuries of Christian tradition. It is in our day that Christian teaching about God's love has gone off the rails. Here is the truth: God so loves us that he longs to remove every impediment that keeps him from loving us more. If you rebel against his will and become morally corrupt, then, though you comfort yourself all day long with the devil's lie, "God loves me just the same as ever!", that will not make it true. Be warned. There exist real-life Frank Smiths who, defying God and loving only themselves, render themselves unlovable.

But it does not have to be that way. Be encouraged: there are also Sarah Smiths, who, holy as they are and holier than you or I will ever be, still have not fully plumbed the depths of the love of God. There remains yet more of it before them - more of it before you and me, and every step of obedience will draw us deeper into it and swell our hearts in joyous celebration of the fact that God's love, great as it was, has grown greater still.