Is Learning Really Secondary?

War is all around us indeed. The lives of millions of people are in jeopardy each and every day, and often for reasons they do not even know about. But their earthly lives are not the greatest problem, according to CS Lewis. In his essay “Learning in War-Time,” Lewis reminds us that each person holds a piece of eternity within them, an never-ending spirit that will live on either in heaven or in hell, and that is the real tragedy of war. Death without the knowledge of God leads to eternal damnation, and the premature death of a non-believing soldier in wartime is thus infinitely tragic and eternally sentenced.

As Lewis draws our attention to this tragedy, he draws us also to think about our own situation as students and scholars outside of this war. He raises a throbbing and uncomfortable question: Should we really be studying literature and history and biology when death is at our doorstep? Is a useful, worthwhile use of time? Should we not use every effort make to stop these wars and this death and witness to the ones who are not yet saved? The answer would seem to automatically be “Yes, we are filling our heads with knowledge and savoir-faire, but this ought to be secondary in our list of priorities; our utmost priority is to serve our suffering brethren.”

This reaction is not necessarily wrong, but as Lewis sees it, it cannot be the entire response. Yes, we need to practice service, especially to those whose life might depend on it. And yes, this ought to be a very high priority in our lives. But the fact of the matter is that we cannot give what we do not have; we cannot expect to be of much real help if we do not know what “real help” looks like or how it is administered. As Lewis and Plantinga both say, learning is one of our godly callings in life, and through it we draw closer to Christ and His Word, and so we have a strong duty to learn. As Lewis so cleverly points out, we would never start learning if we waited until all the ailments of the earth were purged. With this knowledge, we can then go out into the tormented world and be of real assistance: nurses on the battlefields, diplomats between warring nations, aid workers in the slums torn by poverty and violence. Through such learned service, we can then attempt to witness to these people and work on their spiritual life, but we will be far more affective if we know how to do it and do not simply want to do it.

Learning, however, does come with a warning. As Lewis says, if you are so self-absorbed by your learning and abilities, then the time has come to “pluck out your right eye.” When learning becomes an idol, it is void of any value to anyone other than the detainer. The slippery slope of self-adoration and narcissism is fatal, and leads to inaction and wasting of skill, which God certainly did not intend.

The Fall and Common Grace

The Fall of humanity, as we are told, is the loophole that sin used to enter God’s perfect world. Without it, we would supposedly be living in blissful communion with our Creator and the rest of His creation, but alas we were not capable of upholding such standards. Since then, sin has taken up dominion in this world, pervading all parts of life, as Plantinga brings to light in chapter 3 of Engaging God’s World.

One element Plantinga develops is the notion of “sin” versus the notion of “evil.” As he says, “All sin is evil, but not al evil is sin.” This shook my perception of what evil is, as I would throw both terms around loosely and interchangeably, not thinking that one could be divorced from the other. Evil, however, is something more vast than sin. Evil is the cause of the fallenness of the world, through both human and non-human ways. Only humans are capable of actually sinning, as we were created with a conscience and a soul, but animals too are capable of evil. Plantinga’s example is that of cruelty and savagery, particularly as is pertains to the food chain; animals slaughter, maul, and maim each other, and this is apparently a result of evil in the world. Since evil is the perversion, in any shape or form, of God’s perfect world, it does indeed have a hold of the earth and blocks our connection with the One that truly is in charge of it. Although it is difficult to say whether carnivores are actually a result of the Fall, it still seems evil in many circumstances.

Just like many things throughout the rest of creation, though, evil has its opposite to balance it out: good. Plantinga shows us that “evil needs good in order to exist,” as it is a relative term and must be compared to something to determine its “evilness.” This then leads into the topic of “common grace” (a term I previously had not understood), and the idea that God created good in the world, and it is spread not only by Christians but by all parts of creation. Indeed, it would be foolish (if not downright scary) to think that all good in this world was of Christian doing, since Christians have had such a negative impact on much of history (e.g. the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition). To think that they only can give off goodness means that their power of corrupting it is as great as their potential to spread it, and would thus be a very tenuous single source. Also, there is so much good attributable to people of all faiths (or, in many cases, people of no faith at all) that common grace must indeed be a part of the whole concept of good and evil on this earth.

The Poison

CS Lewis’ writing has had a rather firm tone in his last few passages. Mere Christianity is very systematic, building up the argument for a divine Being behind the Moral Law; “The Weight of Glory” clearly but calmly denounces the kind of vainglory that we oftentimes seek. However, in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” he seems to simply be fed up with the supposedly destructive moral subjectivism pervading society.

From his point of view, “Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the diseases that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values.” And indeed, Lewis may very well be right. In a sense, we are playing God by adhering to such a school of thought, believing that we hold the reins of justice, morality, and even sin in our own hands. Our reason can lead us down so many different paths by merely observing reality around us, making it a shaky foundation to base absolute truth on. Surely when one person says that “abortion is wrong,” and the other that “abortion is right under certain circumstances,” one of them must be right and the other wrong. In such ambiguous cases, where two opposite views can ostensibly be justified, it would seem that something higher up than our personal reason is governing the “right” and “wrong” of a situation, as Lewis discusses in Mere Christianity; as a result, one cannot assume that they can make the moral law for themselves, and must be in tune with this Moral Law to determine what is just.

The real danger, as Lewis describes it, is that we will begin to start justifying anything and everything if we believe to heavily in moral subjectivism. As he notes, “Unless there is some objective standard of good, […] then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours.” There are definite rights and wrongs, and they must not be bent around to accommodate our own views (or Hitler’s views). Because we are fallen creatures, our reason cannot fully discern the world and its intricate patterns of justice and morality, and therefore we must adhere to Something separate from the human world. Indeed, “Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.”

Thus, in playing God by inventing new morals for humanity (such as “all religions lead to heaven”), we are treading in dangerous waters, since we are dealing with a God who created the Moral Law and who also does not change, unlike us. How, then, can we expect that morality can evolve in such circumstances? As Lewis says, “All idea of ‘new’ or ‘scientific’ or ‘modern’ moralities must therefore be dismissed as mere confusion of thought.”

Corrupting the Quarrel

CS Lewis’ thought process seems impenetrable. Never will he start on some shaky, unsupported premise and build precariously from there; he lays down the foundation of his argument carefully and elaborately before coming to his bottom line. This intensely systematic methodology is most evident (and, indeed, appreciated) in Lewis’ Mere Christianity, in which he masterfully puts together the case for a “Moral Law” and its intricacies that reigns over all of humanity, but that is often contested. He then goes even further, explaining that for such a thing to exist, there would need to be Something behind it, creating it and planting it in us.

 As Lewis points out, an interesting byproduct of this overarching Law is “quarreling”:

Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

This seems to often be neglected in argument and debate, especially as it pertains to religion. I certainly am guilty of doing so. I remember getting into the middle of an argument between a Jewish friend and a Muslim friend of mine as they fought over the rights women should have in society; my Muslim friend, for example, thought it natural to prohibit women from revealing more than just their faces in public. As the quarreling raged on, I finally attempted to stop the ruckus by throwing in that “It all depends on your culture, anyways.”

What a useless thing to say.

What I had just done was contradicted the whole concept of a universal Right and Wrong. In a way, I had “Bulverized” on behalf of both sides: “You’re right because you adhere to the standards of Judaism, and you’re also right because you adhere to Islam.” Where did that get us? Nowhere. The fact that the two were quarreling in the first place was because they wanted to call on “some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality,” as Lewis puts it, and awaken the other to the fact that they were breaching the boundaries of said Law in this or that way. But simply stating that they were both right by virtue of being from different backgrounds just sent the argument into a circle: “I’m right because I’m right.” They never got closer to the truth of the situation because both had decided that they needed not listen to the other any further. This is the danger of not recognizing that we all quarrel under the same umbrella; we turn off our sensitivity to the other and dismiss their claims as being foreign and completely detached from our own claims. We are basically claiming that the other is a different kind of human being altogether, which certainly does not help to hinder the spread of “racism.”

Quarreling is surely a good thing, a necessary thing, as it allows us to test our views and values against each other and against the Law; such misguided quarreling, however, leads to dissention and “Bulverism,” and must be called to our attention if we ever wish to work together on finding out more about the One behind the Law.

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.