For What I Want to Do I Do Not Do

Our lives are more corruption-prone than we think they are. It’s incredible how the Devil can use our inability to recognize our true spiritual situation to gradually whittle away at us until we are eternally his. Such is the subject matter of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’ fictional documentation of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his junior tempter nephew, Wormwood, who is in charge of his first human “patient” and seeking advice from his experienced uncle. The downright ordinariness of the patient’s life and the subtle angles from which the devils act on it come together to create a truly disturbing description of the Hell’s methods, and Lewis helps us to draw our attention to some of these ways.

Although we generally seek refuge from such demons by ostensibly following Christ and communing with other fellow Christians, Lewis points out that we can still be up to our ears in sin without even realizing it. In Letter XII, Screwtape’s main tool of choice is the “dim uneasiness” that comes after having lived the Christian life for some time. He says something rather astonishing to Wormwood, that he is “almost glad to hear that your patient is still a churchgoer and a communicant.” It would seem intuitive that Hell would want to extract humans from the church as quickly as possible in order to remove that field in which “the Enemy” (God) can act, but Lewis argues that the church can be the demons’ battle ground, too. Screwtape says that “as long as [the patient] retains the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one”; in other words, he must trick himself into believing he is still favorable in God’s eyes, but actually be gradually turning away from Him. The patient can focus on the awkwardness of someone’s hat or look condescendingly on others, as Screwtape suggests in earlier letters, and miss out on the real point of being in church altogether. This sort of subconscious behavior can cause our faith life to plateau, and bring us into a state of oblivious indifference that our “tempters” can use.

The grave danger of this situation is that if it goes unexamined, it could turn from a plateau into a flatline. We can be so unaware of our “dim uneasiness” – the humdrum spiritual state that the patient is in – that we do not even call it into question. This is precisely what Screwtape prescribes, since “if it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game.” Thus, we can wallow in our mediocrity until it numbs our desire to engage in spiritual nourishment.

We can even develop an aversion to the thought of our religious practices or of God Himself. This can then cause a downward spiral; since we will replace the thought of Christ with anything on hand, the tempter can supply useless, time-consuming ideas that we can entertain for hours if not days. “Now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart,” says Screwtape. I think Lewis’ power of insight is at its peak here, because so often I find myself hiding God in the recesses of my mind, hoping that He will not need to be brought forward, and all of this just for the sake of not wanting to think about it. It’s painful to think about Him, it’s almost infuriating, because you always know that He is there and that you should be engaging Him, but the will is not there.

Thus, we waste our time and our lives covering God up with “anything or nothing” due to our longing for distraction. We then ultimately realize (and, alas, maybe too late) that “I spent most of my life doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” It is against this squandering of life that we need to be on our guard against, even in seemingly safe environments like a Bible study group or church.

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Paul in Romans 7:15-24)

The Dance of Fellowship

The second chapter of Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World, “Creation,” deals largely with the portrayal of God’s works, how He relates to them, how He acts in them, and what parts of His character He instilled in it. More specifically, Plantinga elaborates on how we, as humans, are created in God’s image (Gen. 1:24) and what exactly the characteristics we derive from Him are. From the seven-day account of creation, the fact that we are “beings of speech and silence, of work and rest, each in its place, each in its turn,” just as God spoke to create, continued to created, and rested after creation. Plantinga then describes three more common characteristics: our granted authority over nature, our conformity to the martyred lifestyle He lived on earth, and our need for relationship in our lives.

Most of the content of the chapter was fairly trivial and basic information that people having grown up in a Christian home will have inevitably heard in some for or fashion. However, Plantinga’s development on our relationships as reflections of God’s person was fascinatingly new to me. He explained that God’s perichoresis, the sort of dance of communion that God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit do continually with each other, is why we desire relationship in our lives: relationship with God, relationship with each other, and how we view these two relationships. This, I think, is a beautiful image; the perpetual dance shows the exuberance with which God regards communion with others. It accurately portrays the fervor with which we ourselves seek after relationship, as it is one of the most fulfilling and, in its most pure form, selfless endeavors.

However, just as Lewis writes in “The Weight of Glory,” “our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously–no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.” In order for our relationships to be truly godly, we have to approach them with humility and expect to treat these people with the same respect God has for them. As Lewis also points out, “you have never met a mortal person,” as each one was either an “eternal horror or an eternal splendor.” Each soul will live on long beyond its earthly shell, and will either join God in the dance or be forgotten entirely be the One that created it. We must therefore recognize each other as such, and build serious relationships that will reflect God’s relationship with us. Our communion with Him is one of our best ways to be blessings to others, and is therefore a business worthy of merriment, but requiring serious commitment and intentions.

For Whose Glory?

Missions trips have always been a passion of mine. I love traveling to some remote part of the world’s society to a place where my team can truly make a difference – a tangible, observable difference that I supplied to the lives of the underprivileged. The feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction after a long day of painting houses or building new ones thrills me, and I would leave each trip feeling like I could live just for the look on the people’s faces once they received our kindness.

But then I heard something that rattled my perception of “service.” My youth group went to Brussels in Belgium this summer to join with other youth groups in Europe to do random acts of kindness and service to people on the streets. Just as I was about to head out deliver sandwiches we had made to homeless people on the street, however, my leader turned to us and read us an article on Christian service. It was fairly straightforward, nothing really radical or groundbreaking; nothing special, except for one line that struck me between the eyes. It read something like “We should be just as happy serving others behind the scenes as out directly helping the people being served; we should feel just as satisfied laying down bricks for a schoolhouse as finishing it and presenting it to the exuberantly grateful community.”

None of my friends reacted to this, but I was stunned.

What this had made me realize was that I might have been loving service for the wrong reason entirely. As evidence, just notice the number of first-person singular pronouns in my opening paragraph. The reason I loved serving so much was, in fact, more selfish than selfless; I loved feeling the reward of performing good deeds: recognition. This “glory” of sorts is what CS Lewis address in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” with its misconceptions and misleading nature.

The first thing Lewis draws attention to is the nature of the reward itself. He says that “We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward [from faithful acts of Godliness] makes the Christian life a mercenary affair,” but then goes on to address much the same issues as Plantinga addresses in the first chapter, “Longing and Hope,” of Engaging God’s World: The longings we feel and the rewards we see behind them can so easily divert us from our true divine longing, our summum bonum. Hence we create “dumb idols,” as Lewis puts it, which may give us instant gratification, but in the end detract from our vision of God and of His promises of reward to us. My love for service was (at least in part) misguided, and so I mercenarily sought acclaim and praise.

Thus, the distinction between two different types of glory must be made, as Lewis discusses in his sermon. The first one can most easily be summarized as vainglory; as Lewis describes it, it is the “competitive passion” and “deadly poison of self-admiration” that he sees as being “of hell rather than heaven.” This is the definition of glory as it relates to fame, fortune, and other such combative goals in which the “I” is glorified. Glory in this form is so tempting and so dangerous sometimes because it seems legitimate and wholesome. My own example of vainglory seemed completely innocuous until I was awoken to the reality of it. Temptation in this area is subtle, since it deals with the some of the most basic human longings within each of us. This is our pursuit of “luminosity,” as Lewis calls it.

The second is the one worth pursuing: the glory that comes from serving God and receiving the satisfaction of doing so. In fact, as Lewis mentions, in serving the Lord with the right intentions, this “turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which [we] had not noticed.” This points to the fact that God made us in His image (Gen.1:26), since our longings and desires point to our sense of God, and that the pursuit of them for what they are will ultimately give us Godly glory. This form of glory is the “weightier” of the two, as Lewis describes it, and feels like an actual burden on us. As he writes,

To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God not merely pitied, but delight in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son–it seems impossible, weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

It is a glory so full of wonder and responsibility that it impresses hard on our small, feeble human frame. It must be used to further God’s Kingdom in ways that aren’t necessarily self-gratifying or radiant. In Brussels, I should have been just as happy making the sandwiches we distributed behind the scenes as I was handing them directly to the homeless people. Lewis says that “perfect humility dispenses with modesty,” not with gaudy expressions of what we consider worthy of praise, and so we need to responsibly show God’s love without drawing too much attention to ourselves.

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside.

Redesigning Our Syllabus

Many of us probably came to Calvin College to “get a good education.” CS Lewis would have scoffed at us if he heard those words uttered. In the introductory message to his English course at Oxford University, titled “Our English Syllabus,” Lewis explores the way in which we ought to approach studying in university, and how to make the subtle distinction between “learning” and “education.” Education, Lewis quotes from Milton, serves the purpose of equipping an individual “to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of war and peace”; in other words, it bestows upon us the tools with which to make our living, in the career/life path of our choosing. From the rest of the Syllabus, it becomes obvious that Lewis, interestingly, has great contempt for an institution in which “education” is the goal.

This seems contradictory at first; are we not enrolled in an institution of higher education here at college? Indeed we are, and education is an essential part of what we should seek here: It ultimately makes us into a “human,” as Lewis puts it, by giving us the tools to dissect and decipher reality. In speaking of “humanity,” Lewis is speaking not of “kindness” or charity, as the word often denotes, but rather “the realization of the human idea,” in which we seek edification and competence. Furthermore, it allows us to “actualiz[e] that potentiality for leisure” in our lives, since we can work hard with the skills we have acquired and subsequently play hard afterwards, “which is man’s prerogative.”

However, beyond our desire for making a good living with leisure and repose tied into it, there is something more edifying, more compelling than simply acquiring skills for your trade. That something, as Lewis defines it, is learning: the act we commit when we truly are interested in what we study and pursue knowledge like a wolf ravenously pursuing his dinner. Lewis clearly states that, in his view of higher education, universities are “homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge,” where the instruction should be of much higher importance than the instructor. This pursuit is part of what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, since the others are natural born “professionals” of their trade. We have the capacity, potential, and thirst to become more than aspiring professionals: we have an urge towards our humanity. Lewis believes that “knowledge is the natural food of the human mind: that those who specially pursue it are being specially human.” Therefore, the roles of students and professors alike must be put into question, as both sides pursue knowledge and wisdom to the best of their ability.

The ideal role of the educator is, if we adopt Lewis’ view of learning, a delicate one. Lewis writes to his English students that “we [at Oxford] are not going to try to improve you; we have fulfilled our purpose if we help you to see some given tract of reality.” In other words, educators need to recognize that they should not be teaching for the purpose of molding students according to their own view of a “good man,” but should be a resource that the students use in their learning. They can impart their knowledge and experience to their students, but be viewed by the class as (and I mean this in no demeaning way) a living textbook. Just as we discern what the author of the book wrote, checking it for bias and making an accurate judgment as to its reliability, so too we should understand our professors’ personal paradigms and leanings in order to take their teaching with a pinch of salt and check their validity against our own experience and research in the subject. Ultimately, the professor is there as a doorway into the subject they are teaching. As Lewis says, we ought to be thinking more “about the subject” and less about the instructor, if we truly are interested in pursuing knowledge.

On the other side, Lewis declares that “the proper question for a freshman is not ‘What will do me the most good,’ but ‘What do I most want to know?’” We must recognize that we are now “human,” as we have all been educated, and that we must now stand on our own feet and really want to learn, as opposed to what we think we ought to learn. According to Lewis, “nothing that we have to offer will do him good unless he can be persuaded to forget all about self-improvement for three or four years, and to absorb himself in getting to know some part of reality, as it is in itself.” The drive to learn should supersede the desire to be presentable in the job interview, and we should take full advantage of the privilege of being in an institution devoted to the continuation of our pursuit of learning.

...And Then He Created "Longing"

I have always longed to return to the USA. Ever since my family moved to Geneva, Switzerland when I was just seven years old, I have had this feeling of “in-betweenness”: Geneva definitely grew to be my home, and I identified heavily with this new country, but some part of me always felt like a stranger there. Some part of me felt so relieved to be back whenever we would return to the States to spend the summer at the cousins’ or the grandparents’ house. And some part of me would feel like it got left behind when it was time to return back to Geneva.

This yearning I felt – that we all feel for something at some point – is the sense of “longing” that Plantinga’s first chapter of Engaging God’s World deals with. He writes of this insatiable desire for what we do not have, what we crave with all of our being. What we do not always see, however, is that our longings are pointing towards something much larger beyond their immediate target. They are, in fact, proof of our sensus divinitatis, our “sense of divinity,” of God Himself: we long for fulfillment, and we will keep searching until we find what satisfies our yearnings. Of course, being the God-breathed creatures that we are, we are ultimately longing to connect with our Creator, and thus our longings are really signs of our search for Him. As St. Augustine found, He is our summum bonum, our “ultimate good” that will satisfy our longings, and He does so through our relationship with Him.

We, however, most often cannot see the reality of such yearnings, since we also desire the petty things life has to offer. We all long for sexual fulfillment, which is a beautifully divine longing at its essence, but sex has become such a meaningless, loveless, empty treat people seek out in ways God did not intend. As C.S. Lewis remarks, God surely “finds our desires not too strong, but too weak […] We are far too easily pleased.” Even when our longings are not specifically impure or degrading, they can often be misguiding and downright confused. Since arriving in Michigan and seemingly fulfilling my craving for returning to the U.S., I now find myself very much wishing to be back in Switzerland with my family, friends, and European culture. I do not know exactly where I want to be (maybe somewhere right in the middle of the two, like the Atlantic), and thus my longings seem to point in conflicting directions. As Plantinga writes, “these longings [we try to satisfy] are unfulfillable,” leaving us aching for more, or better, or even something complete different. Only once we discover the underlying direction of these longings can we truly expect to feel lasting satisfaction and continuous fulfillment.

Of course, the element of hope also plays into this sensus divinitatis. I held on to the hope that eventually I would come to the States for university studies and leave Europe, just as I now hope to someday move back to Europe. The hope that someday our desires will be satiated is what fuels these longings, and that is why we must be careful with it. The Bible calls for a selfless kind of hope, one for all people, for all of God’s children. We must therefore be, as my missions trip leader once challenged me, “just as happy in delivering a sandwich to a starving homeless person as in making the sandwich ‘behind the scenes’ and sending it out with others.” We must long for good to befall the whole world, regardless of our part in the process. This is challenging, and the Devil tricks into believing we are doing this, when really we are being selfish once again, as Lewis demonstrates in The Screwtape Letters.

Ultimately, however, if we entrust our hope and our longings to God, and exhort others to do the same as well, we can be hopeful for the final goal: shalom. Perfect peace, in which “death and mourning and pain will have passed away” (Plantinga) should be our objective, and this should put all other longings into their worldly perspective and help us strive for the New Kingdom, where one will not need to long for physical pleasure or a far-away continent.

The Pursuit of... What Again?

Why is that while a man is in the early stages of his love life for his wife, he feels as though this feeling of bliss and attachment is permanent? And why then is it considered normal for a man to impulsively leave his wife eventually, despite his marriage and his initial feelings, and find greater satisfaction in another woman? This strong human attraction towards happiness – that intrinsic force to justify our impulses – is what CS Lewis addresses in “Have No ‘Right to Happiness.’” Such “longings,” as Cornelius Plantinga defines them in Engaging God’s World, are supposed to be manifestations of our desire to seek God and commune with Him, since this is what He created us for. “Our [longing for] God runs in us like a stream, even though we divert towards other things” (Plantinga), and the diversion that Lewis discusses in his essay is, more specifically, sexual longing. This precious gift from God is one we distort frequently, turning it into a highly egocentric longing.

The reason for this distortion comes from the freewheeling sense that sexual desire gives us. Since the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the overarching rights we have, we tend to think that we have a right to divorce our spouses in pursuit of sexual happiness with another partner. We also give in more readily because of the strength of the desire, the “strong erotic passion” (which, ironically, was the initial reason we thought we would be swimming in bliss with the same person forever). These desires are thus given the “privilege of freedom,” and create what Lewis calls “sexual morality”: a duty, separate from conventional morality, to fulfill these longings. Lewis’ fictitious character, Clare, defends two people who each left their previous families to marry each other by using this “duty” as a legitimate cause for their actions.

Thus comes into play the issue of the “Natural Law,” as it relates specifically to the “laws of the state” regarding such duties. The concept of an unwritten canon we seem to perceive, by virtue of being human, is one that John Locke defines in his political commentary, “The Social Contract,” believing that this is the result of human reason. This concept is further explored in Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, where the heroine Antigone is executed for burying her deceased brother, despite being forbidden by state law to do so because of his traitorous acts before his death. Since she believed that her duty to her family superseded her legal obligations, she acted on her own view of morality. In the end, it was unclear whether she or the state was in the right, but state law was strict and unwavering regarding her case. Lewis is writing about the same kind of personal morality, where Clare maintains that Mr. A. had a duty to himself “to act as he did,” thus condoning his actions. The difference, however, between Mr. A.’s situation and Antigone’s is that the law of the state is actually on Mr. A.’s side. He is legally allowed to divorce Mrs. A. and “pursue happiness by all lawful means.” Sexual morality can therefore be highly subjective, with legal approval. (Note: domestic violence is another issue.)

The duty to pursue personal happiness, coupled with the (largely) lawful subjectivity of morality, produces a trend running though society today which epistemologists call “moral relativism”: the belief that morality, ethics, and truth are entirely subjective in all circumstances. This concept is what Lewis hints at in the closing paragraph of “Have No ‘Right to Happiness,’” bleakly remarking that “we thus advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.” This post-modern mindset is a particularly slippery slope, and it could ultimately change the concept of the Natural Law as we see it. If we were to fully adopt moral relativism, each person would adhere to his or her own perception of morality, and thus the term “Natural Law” is rendered meaningless; there would be no universal standards to abide by, and it would become a happiness free-for-all. Just as a right provided by the state to one individual is “correlative to an obligation on someone else’s part,” as Lewis says, the morality-free satisfaction of one will surely infringe on the happiness of another. Mr. A., in pursuing his own happiness, surely destroyed Mrs. A.’s, but moral relativism seems to excuse this.

The irony is that, in the end, everyone will end up unhappy, since we will have returned to our primitive “instinct for self-preservation” which philosopher Thomas Hobbes calls man’s “state of nature” in which perceived “happiness” is nothing more than survival impulses. This, obviously, is not in any way what God intended happiness to be for us; He desires, more than anything, for us to find true, fulfilling happiness by following His Word. As John Piper quotes from one of Lewis’ letters, “It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can,” and His Word should be our standard for morality, despite what Clare would say.

Bulverism: It's Here, Too

Ezekiel Bulver led an easy life. After all, how hard could it be to go through one's day in arrogant denial? Every time someone made a comment Ezekiel disagreed with, he would just respond with "You're wrong because you're old," or "You only say that because you have brown eyes," and they would melt and go along with his delusion. He was the self-proclaimed king of his world, unable to be disproven due to the barrier of obtuseness he so cleverly upheld around his ignorance. His mother could be credited for his rise to power; it was in hearing her dismiss his father simply "because [he was] a man" one day that Ezekiel understood the secret to debating: Present causes with no reasons and you will win automatically.

Fortunately, both Ezekiel Bulver and his world are fictitious, but how far from accurate are they, really?

In fact, the guidelines within which Bulver debates are close representations of society today, CS Lewis would have us believe. In his essay on "Bulverism," Lewis calls our attention to the infuriating belief that "refutation is no necessary part of argument," as people often seem to think today. Politicians’ campaigns focus largely on deteriorating the opposition’s public acclaim by attacking the person’s family life rather than their proposed policies or agendas. History students dismiss scientists from the time of the Roman Empire as complete imbeciles because they believed that the earth was flat. Simple, categorical, arrogant rejection of another’s point of view with little to no grounds to support this dismissal has grown in our culture, remarks Lewis, and he attributes the title of “Bulverism” to this phenomenon. Causes are presented for rejecting an opponent’s proposition, but no reasons follow it to give the argument weight or credibility.

In light of Lewis’ observation, the class was then asked a challenging question: Are we guilty, here at Calvin College, of being Bulverists ourselves? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Of course, every person on this earth is guilty of Bulverism, but certain aspects of this cultural parasite rear their heads particularly often in a Christian college setting.

The most visible example is probably the debate between so-called creationists and theistic evolutionists here at Calvin. The creationists accuse the evolutionists of refuting the authority of God’s Word, whereas the evolutionists accuse them of being blind, closed-minded mules, too stubborn to open their eyes to the dynamic reality we live in. Both sides bicker and fight with the other, never really stepping back and discussing their different viewpoints without the brandished swords and the slinging mud. This is creating a chasm even within the circle of Christianity, and Christians are divided despite our same Lord and same desire to serve Him. God explicitly states in His Word that we must “be careful [...] that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block” to other fellow believers (1 Cor. 8:9), but this is precisely what we are doing by attacking each other from within. Calvin, being an academic institution, is highly engaged with the debate, to the point where the fight becomes an intensely personal battle of wits, and this blatant Bulverism seems to be running with little restraint through the faculty and students.

Furthermore, we must be aware of the danger of Bulverism we could create by just being Christians in a Christian environment. We must resist the temptation to refute non-Christian thought as flawed or ungodly because it originated from outside of Christianity. As Lewis says, we mustn’t discredit a thought because of the underlying wishes of its presenter, and we must therefore be open to examining all thoughts and disregard the origin of the thought, so long as the thought is valid. These areas are pitfalls that lead to Bulverism, and we must especially aware of them and bring humility to the table to create an environment of acceptance and listening, at Calvin College, in our respective communities, and in the world in general.