Thursday, July 17, 2014

C. S. Lewis On The Conditionality Of Love

In The Horse and His Boy, King Peter asks his sister, Queen Susan, if she plans to marry her boyfriend, Prince Rabadash. She answers, "No, brother, not for all the jewels in Tashbaan." Now that she has gotten to know Rabadash better, she sees that he is a bad person. Peter replies, "Truly, sister, I should have loved you the less if you had taken him." Peter could not figure out why she had ever liked him in the first place.

Most evangelicals today find morally repugnant any sentence that begins with the words, "I should have loved you the less if...". They would regard Peter as a terrible man for letting his love for his sister rise or fall in response to her moral performance. But Peter does not apologize for saying it, and Susan is not offended by it, and C. S. Lewis, who wrote the dialogue, clearly regards the sentiment as valid. All three believe that Peter would not have sinned by loving his sister less if she had knowingly married a bad man. (What might have motivated her to marry that villain? His money and good looks? For shame.) Peter rejoiced to see his sister choosing wisely, and that enabled him to love her more than he could have had she succumbed to baser motivations of wealth and appearance. The degree of his love was frankly conditional. It was set, at least in part, to the gauge of her moral behavior.

Christians in former times understood this principle, and, as best as I have been able to determine, never challenged it. The better the person, the more you can love him. Christians likewise understood that the better person you are yourself, the more you are able to love someone else. In 1649, Richard Lovelace, explaining to his girlfriend Lucasta why he had to leave her to go fight in battle, wrote, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more." That is a profound insight into the nature of love and its degrees. Because Lovelace loved honor more than he loved Lucasta, he was able to love her more than he could have had he been a coward. Righteous behavior increases love in all directions.

Lamentably, leading voices in evangelicalism over the past 30 years have labored to sever this intuitive and long-cherished connection between goodness and love. They have taken rhetorical sledgehammers to the mortar that binds the increase of love to the increase of moral excellence. They have been so successful in dismantling this conditional aspect of love that they have rendered the words of wise King Peter repulsive to the modern Christian ear. This is a bad thing.

Peter is not the only victim. So also is Sarah Smith, the holiest character apart from Aslan that C. S. Lewis ever dreamed up. In The Great Divorce, Sarah is dead on earth but wonderfully alive in heaven, where she meets with her newly arrived husband Frank. Frank is a damned soul and a selfish jerk who is only visiting Paradise so he can rebuke it. He hides behind a false front, a Tragedian actor, who does the talking for him. As Frank resists Sarah's invitation to leave pretense behind and begin an ascent to the higher mountains of heaven, he becomes smaller and smaller until he disappears completely into his spokesman. Sarah then says to this facade:

"Where is Frank? And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me. Or stay, if you prefer. If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me."

The Tragedian responds, "You do not love me."

She answers, "I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go."

Sarah's love is conditional. She can only love Frank if he truly is, and he cannot be unless he repents. When he has so identified with corruption as to be subsumed into it then there will be no real person left to love. But if he fulfills the condition of repentance then he will become more solid and more lovable. If he disappears into evil, then her love also, of necessity, will disappear. Neither God nor his saints can love evil.

The notion of becoming more lovable is a constant theme in Lewis. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes that God's love "must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us more lovable." God, in love, works to expunge from us the things that keep him from loving us even more. Good pet owners do this to their dogs. Lewis writes that a man "interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely." Because the dog is "so nearly lovable...it is worth his while to make it fully lovable." So stand we in relation to God.

Regrettably, the current rhetorical climate in evangelicalism renders it nearly impossible to make this point. Week after week in pulpit after pulpit we are told, "God loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make him love you any more or less than he does now." I have witnessed the indoctrination of this profoundly unbiblical teaching firsthand, and have almost despaired of getting Christians to read their Bibles and believe what it actually says - repeatedly! - about the love of God. (For detailed Scriptural documentation, please see the August 30, 2012 post, "God's Conditional Love".) The depth of the problem might be illustrated by a book we're reading at the church I attend. Amazingly, in a book co-authored by a C. S. Lewis scholar(!), there is a barrage of affirmations that God's love is unconditional, including this doozy: "The good news is that [God] loves us, and His love is not conditioned on our behavior. It is not increased by our performance nor diminished by our failures."

Oh well - what can you do? God is not dead, but sometimes I fear that sound theology is.

Listen, this is important. If you choose to become proud, petulant, cowardly, lazy, impure, greedy, unkind, selfish, covetous, undisciplined or dishonest, God will not love you exactly the same as he always has. That is a lie of the devil, and I beg you to oppose it as firmly as our Lord opposed Peter's satanic resistance to his march to the cross. So what if you heard it from your pastor, whom you know to be a good man, and so what if it made you feel really good inside when you heard it. Error is error no matter how captivating it sounds and no matter how worthy is the man who spouts it. C. S. Lewis taught the right thing about God's love - though he did little more than express ordinary biblical truth and the consensus of 19 centuries of Christian tradition. It is in our day that Christian teaching about God's love has gone off the rails. Here is the truth: God so loves us that he longs to remove every impediment that keeps him from loving us more. If you rebel against his will and become morally corrupt, then, though you comfort yourself all day long with the devil's lie, "God loves me just the same as ever!", that will not make it true. Be warned. There exist real-life Frank Smiths who, defying God and loving only themselves, render themselves unlovable.

But it does not have to be that way. Be encouraged: there are also Sarah Smiths, who, holy as they are and holier than you or I will ever be, still have not fully plumbed the depths of the love of God. There remains yet more of it before them - more of it before you and me, and every step of obedience will draw us deeper into it and swell our hearts in joyous celebration of the fact that God's love, great as it was, has grown greater still.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

A Christian Welcome To M. Ward's "Chinese Translation"

You are in for a treat if you go to YouTube now and listen to the song Chinese Translation by M. Ward. Spoiler alert: below I talk about how the song turns out. If you have not heard it, it would be better to listen to it first and let its cleverness hit you fresh.

A young man goes searching for answers and winds up at the top of a tall, tall mountain where an old, old man will respond to three questions. He asks the wise man,

What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
How can a man like me remain in the light?
If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

The old man answers:

See I once was a young fool like you, afraid to do the things that I knew I had to do. So I played an escapade just like you. I played an escapade just like you.

He explains that he too had once sailed a wild, wild sea and climbed a tall, tall mountain where he found an old, old man and asked the same three questions. And that old man proceeded to give the same answer he was giving now. When he was a young fool...

One perceives that the same quest had been going on since there were wild seas for young men to sail on and tall mountains for old men to meditate on.

The beauty of the song is that it actually contains an answer, it actually shows the way forward to the bewildered and heartsick youth. The answer is in the old man's prologue to his tale. He explains that what spawned his quest was the fact that he was afraid to do the things that he knew he had to do. Rather than doing his duty, he "played an escapade". That is, he went on a wild and foolish adventure that was - truth be told - nothing more than an escape from the moral obligations that stared him in the face. (The word escapade comes from the word "escape".)

When you flee duty, you'll try to justify your flight as "a search for answers" or a lofty quest to "discover yourself and your purpose." But that is just a cruel joke you're playing on yourself. Small wonder you wind up confused and heartbroken. Instead, do the things that you know you are supposed to do - even if they are troublesome and inconvenient or require the kind of courage that you just don't feel you have. Do what you ought. Repent of your sin. Embrace goodness. Do the simple thing that is right in front of you that you have been putting off. In so doing, you will find that you have already arrived at the goal of the quest you thought you needed to go on. The questions that you had will either be answered or will lose their relevance. Joy and wisdom lie in the path of the one who simply puts down one obedient foot after another.

I myself know very well what to do with the pieces of a broken heart. My own heart has been mashed to bits more than once - more than twice, now that I think about it. I am the last person in the world to say that I have succeeded in re-assembling those broken bits through the shockingly simple expedient of doing the things that I knew I had to do. But I know that is where the answer lies. It is all of a piece with what my Lord Jesus Christ taught when he said, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own" (John 7:17). Jesus affirmed that the choice to do God's will would precede the assurance that his own teachings were anything more than the platitudes of an itinerant Jewish carpenter. Do good, and you will know.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

A Message To Atheist Friends

Assume that those of you who are atheists are right and there is no God. Let me further assume that you have led a relatively comfortable life. By "relatively" I mean compared to the world population through the history of human existence. You live in America or some other prosperous nation, you have not known famine or plague, you do not experience daily chronic pain, your family was not wiped out in a disaster, you have not spent years in slavery or in prison for a crime you did not commit. The society you call home is closer to Lake Wobegone where "the men are handsome, the women are strong, and the children are above average" than it is to hellholes in the Congo where the men die violently, the women are raped, and the children have AIDS.

I give you a microphone, comfortable and correct atheist. What would you like to say to those who really suffer?

I ask because I have found some of you to be mean-spirited and cruel to people who experience soul-crushing sorrows that you have been spared and can only imagine. I know it is not your intention to be mean. On the contrary, you think you're compassionate. I do not assail your motive, nor accuse you of perverse and deliberate cruelty. I am merely accusing some of you of thoughtless and casual cruelty.

Case in point: the following comments from a former minister, presumably now an atheist, that were recently posted on the website "Humans of New York":

It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel.

Is it? Is it cruel, as this man insists, to say, "there is a purpose to their suffering"?

There is a question I would like to ask him. "Sir, do you actually think it is kinder, instead, to say that there is no purpose to their suffering?" Think about it. I think you're the cruel one here. Telling a sufferer there is no purpose to his pain is like booting a cup of cold water out of the hands of man dying of thirst. Why deny him his only possible hope, his only source of comfort? Is your truth of hopeless despair so important to you that you cannot rest until those who are miserable embrace it as you do, and relinquish their grip on the only thing that might give them joy? Your proselytism for purposelessness does not merely kick a man when he's down - it stomps all over him until his ribs are crushed and he cannot breathe. Do you then walk away with a clean conscience, glad that you disabused the tortured soul of his stupid delusion that someday his life would make sense? Is that kind of you, or cruel?

A commenter piled on. She wrote,

Yesterday a 3 year old child was crushed by a security gate at a Rita's Water Ice here in Philadelphia. And in the comments on the news article, so many people said "its so sad, but it happened for a reason" and I'm like what possible reason could there be to crush a child's skull with a security gate while she was waiting in line to get some ice cream. Bullshit. That's what it is, bullshit.

This commenter and I probably share the good fortune of never having seen one of our children's skulls crushed before our eyes. It is a pain beyond our reckoning. We can only try - and fail - to imagine the devastation. But my question to this commenter is, "Why in the world do you want to compound the parents' misery now? Who gave you the right? Was your child mangled to death in an unspeakably gruesome accident? Did you suffer this loss? How dare you proselytize now and seek to shove your despairing misery down other people's throats! The parents who lost this child in all probability feel a grief that robs every waking moment of its potential for light and joy. And you choose this moment to chip in with your, 'And there was no purpose to it, by the way. Just random pain and grief. No hope. No redemption. The pain your child experienced in the moments before death and the fathomless grief you experience now have no point to them and never will. And any other view is just bullshit.'"

Wow. Thanks, atheist. You've been a tremendous help. If my son had died in this accident, I would find your contribution to be about as welcome as those "God-Hates-Fags" signs carried by sons of hell from Westboro Baptist "Church" at the funerals of military heroes. It seems that some hate-filled people - whether they hate gays or the idea of God - just do not know how to keep their big fat mouths shut.

I find something sinister in the eagerness with which certain atheists seek to dismantle the hope of those who have suffered immeasurably more than they. What could possibly motivate such passionate diatribes? One suspects an underlying current of, "Because I do not believe there is purpose behind suffering, I cannot bear to see others find purpose behind their suffering. No! They must abandon it. When they suffer, they must suffer hopelessly. Their pain must never know the mitigating balm of faith in a purpose that will render meaningful their miserable lives and miserable futures." Do such nihilists gain satisfaction from extinguishing others' hope? Have they really sunk that low?

It's enough to make you think there's a devil after all.