Abstract
This article corrects C.S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity” in its view of divine Christian love as merely volitional, a matter just of willing right. It argues for a needed alternative in the teaching of Jesus on the compassionate heartfelt love of (that is, from) God, in the parable of the prodigal son and elsewhere. In doing so, it contrasts Christian love with the conduct of mere “do-gooders,” on the ground that such affections as compassion, empathy, and sympathy are central to what Jesus taught regarding love as representative of God’s character. The article suggests that the needed divine compassion is received by humans through Jesus’s advice to “ask,” thus relating the human inward reception of divine love to petitionary prayer. It also proposes that Lewis was hindered by a Platonic philosophical assumption of divine impassibility. Overall, the article recommends Jesus’s perspective on love over Lewis’s merely volitional approach. It defends its interpretation of Lewis with special attention to his mature work, The Four Loves. It also brings The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 to bear on its topic.
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