Thursday in the 4th Week of Lent: Letter 24
Letter 24 is all about spiritual pride. Picture in your mind someone who would actually be proud of their humility! That is close to what we will see in our Letter today.
Our Old Testament lesson from the book of Exodus offers an excellent example. The Israelites are in the wilderness at Mount Sinai. Moses is on top of the mountain talking to God. The Israelites below - on the other hand – make a golden calf and start worshipping it. Think about it. They know that Moses is talking to the God who brought them out of Egypt and across the Red Sea. Exodus tells us that they can see flashes of lightning and hear loud thunder coming from the cloud on top of the mountain and they know that God is in that cloud. They know all this and decide it is ok to offer sacrifices and worship a golden calf?
Our Psalm retells the same story and verse 20 sums it all up.
And so they exchanged their
Glory *
for the image of an ox that
feeds on grass.
Spiritual pride exchanges the Glory of God in our lives for the vainglory of our own ego. This is exactly the temptation Screwtape recommends to Wormwood in our Letter today.
It begins with some communication from Slumtrimpet, the demon in charge of the girlfriend. They may have found a weakness in her Christian life.
It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief and it consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous.
I would encourage you to listen to John Cleese read this section YouTube. It is marvelous and I will post the link on my blog.
Anyway, it seems the girlfriend is quite proud of her faith as the right way to believe. We have all encountered people at one time or another who proclaim that they have the answers when it comes to the Bible and Jesus. A lot of this goes back to our earlier discussion in a previous Letter about creating God in our own image so that we can find a god who does what we want when we want.
My favorite Christian denomination is the Two-Seed in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. There are only a few left and you will find them in Texas and Indiana. Taking Galatians 3:16 literally, they believe that all persons are either of the “good seed” of God or the “bad seed” of Satan – hence the Predestinarian part of their name.
Now I had the opportunity to meet one of their ministers while serving as a hospital chaplain during seminary. We had many good conversations about faith and our different churches. I asked him during one of our visits how you would know if you had the good seed and thus were predestined to heaven or if you had the bad seed and going the other way. With a smile he said that if you had the good seed then you would not be able to resist attending a Two-Seed Church.
Screwtape believes that while there is little chance of corrupting the girlfriend, there are a number of possibilities for tempting the Patient. He believes the young man is enough in love and still a very new enough Christian that this spiritual pride can be used to Wormwood’s advantage.
Now the Patient is feeling a new thrill being included in this inner circle of new Christian friends via his girlfriend and her family. These are mature Christians who have developed their system of beliefs for many years. As Screwtape points out:
He (the Patient) is there daily meeting Christian life of a quality he never before imagined and seeing it all through an enchanted glass because he is in love.
But even more, this new circle of Christian friends impresses the young man in more than just spiritual ways. He sees them as better educated, more intelligent, and more agreeable. In other words, they are raising him to a whole new status within the Christian community so that now, his old acquaintances no longer fit in his new life. Little does he realize that he still has a long way to go.
He thinks that he likes their talk and way of life because of some congruity between their spiritual state and his when in fact they are so far beyond him that if he were not in love he would be merely puzzled and repelled by much which he now accepts.
Now success with the Patient depends on confusing him. Screwtape instructs Wormwood to not only make him proud of being a Christian, but with this “special” knowledge he now possesses to see his new position as something of a WE versus THEM situation.
The idea of belonging to an inner ring, of being in a secret, is very sweet to him. Play on that nerve.
Ultimately the goal is to lead the Patient to believing that he now is the possessor of special, even secret, knowledge about the true faith in God.
There are any number of examples of this kind of thinking in Christian history. The Gnostics were an early Christian group who believed in a secret or hidden knowledge as the key to salvation. They taught that Jesus was a Divine messenger who came to bring knowledge of the true God that was revealed to only the select few who embraced this Gnostic knowledge. Gnostics believe that within each person was a divine spark or fragment of the true God which needed to be awakened through the special knowledge they had in order for the person to escape the material world and return to the divine realm.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip were early Gnostic writings.
Screwtape closes his letter with more warnings to Wormwood. First, he should focus on corrupting his Patient and not reporting on the War. Wormwood should be less distracted and more focused on tempting his Patient.
Let us close with our Prayer for today.
Almighty and most merciful God, drive from us all weakness of body, mind, and spirit; that, being restored to wholeness, we may with free hearts become what you intend us to be and accomplish what you want us to do; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.