Mere Christianity (Student and Young Adult Edition)

U.S. customers: Though this title isn’t distributed in the U.S., Americans may legally buy printed copies from Canadian sellers (use eBay link). U.S. copyright law restricts reproduction and distribution, not ownership. Under the First Sale Doctrine, purchase and resale are legal.

When I first read Mere Christianity, I couldn’t help but wonder if the average North American reader could fully understand this book without an English-to-”English” dictionary at their side. I even found myself Googling the meaning of some of Lewis’s sayings from the 1940s. Additionally, Lewis had no issues with writing a single paragraph that could span two pages!

After releasing Mere Christianity in Everyday English, I realized that to make Lewis’ work more relevant to today’s youth and young adults, this book needed to be further modernized, leading me to create this second version, An Adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity for Students and Young Adults –Understanding God.

Even Lewis acknowledged the shifting nature of language and word usage over time.

Please note that I have taken poetic licence in a few instances to bring clarity to certain of Lewis’s arguments. I hope that this does not diminish the essence of his work in any way.

C.S. Lewis, the renowned Professor of English at Oxford University, was a literary giant. Clive Staples Lewis authored many famous novels including the Chronicles of Narnia series and The Screwtape Letters. The most recent estimate for sales of his books is in excess of 200 million copies. One of his most famous books is Mere Christianity.

Adaption (example):

Original:(3) We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity-as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him; wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble-delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off-getting rid of the false self, with all its “Look at me” and “Aren’t I a good boy?” and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

Adaptation: (3) God doesn’t tell us not to be proud because it hurts His feelings or because He’s proud himself. He doesn’t care about His own importance like that. The point is, He wants us to really know Him and give ourselves to Him completely. When we do that, we naturally become humble—really happy and relieved to get rid of all those silly ideas about how important we are that just make us feel restless and unhappy. He wants us to be humble so we can connect with Him and stop pretending to be something we’re not. I wish I was better at being humble myself, because then I could explain better how good it feels to let go of all that fake stuff and just be real. Even just catching a glimpse of true humility, even for a moment, feels like getting a drink of cold water when you’re really thirsty in the desert.