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Being the random thoughts of a middle aged overeducated physician, father, and citizen. James M. Small MD PhD. Send me a reply to jmsmall @ mycap.org.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Screwtape Letter 2.
For letter 1, see here.
Letter 2 begins with the horrifying news that the Patient has become a Christian, tempered with the reassurance that lots of adult converts revert to their old ways and can be reclaimed. Some evangelicals don't believe that you can "lose your salvation." I claim no expertise but don't want to take the chance!
The letter goes on to describe the church in England in the 1940's and the opportunities it gives the Devils. The people the patient used to avoid are in the church, including grocers and people with ridiculous squeaky boots. In my church, yesterday, you would have found kids with piercings and bald older men that Screwtape would have found equally amusing.
The meat of the letter describes how God wants people to be free, and so refuses to make life easy for them. Soon after the excitement of conversion, the man will feel disappointment or anticlimax. This, he says, is true of all human endeavors. I have to say, I have this experience all the time. The beginning of any new project is exciting, but finishing it is usually work and often I run out of steam. My conversion was exciting (like Lewis, I came to christianity as an adult) but then there were these long dry spells. At times, I wonder while reading Screwtape how Lewis knew me ten years before I was born...
And the end of the chapter really stung me. The patient really doesn't believe his own sinfulness, and believes he "has run up a very favourable credit balance in the Enemy's [i.e., God's] ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all..." Sigh. Guilty as charged.
Oh, there is another great line, where Screwtape tells Wormwood about how we humans can avoid seeing our own shortcomings while focusing on our neighbor's (meaning, anybody else handy.) "...'if I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?' You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. IT IS, Wormwood, IT IS!"
My hope is that you will find some of the same growth and knowledge I did when my wonderful wife got me this book on tape. We humans are all alike in so many ways and Lewis finds so many of them.
For letter 3...
Letter 2 begins with the horrifying news that the Patient has become a Christian, tempered with the reassurance that lots of adult converts revert to their old ways and can be reclaimed. Some evangelicals don't believe that you can "lose your salvation." I claim no expertise but don't want to take the chance!
The letter goes on to describe the church in England in the 1940's and the opportunities it gives the Devils. The people the patient used to avoid are in the church, including grocers and people with ridiculous squeaky boots. In my church, yesterday, you would have found kids with piercings and bald older men that Screwtape would have found equally amusing.
The meat of the letter describes how God wants people to be free, and so refuses to make life easy for them. Soon after the excitement of conversion, the man will feel disappointment or anticlimax. This, he says, is true of all human endeavors. I have to say, I have this experience all the time. The beginning of any new project is exciting, but finishing it is usually work and often I run out of steam. My conversion was exciting (like Lewis, I came to christianity as an adult) but then there were these long dry spells. At times, I wonder while reading Screwtape how Lewis knew me ten years before I was born...
And the end of the chapter really stung me. The patient really doesn't believe his own sinfulness, and believes he "has run up a very favourable credit balance in the Enemy's [i.e., God's] ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all..." Sigh. Guilty as charged.
Oh, there is another great line, where Screwtape tells Wormwood about how we humans can avoid seeing our own shortcomings while focusing on our neighbor's (meaning, anybody else handy.) "...'if I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?' You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. IT IS, Wormwood, IT IS!"
My hope is that you will find some of the same growth and knowledge I did when my wonderful wife got me this book on tape. We humans are all alike in so many ways and Lewis finds so many of them.
For letter 3...
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