Week 5 Notes and Slides

 

Letter 21 Notes

Today we begin with Letter 21 and I will tell you that this is definitely one of my favorites.  In it, C. S. Lewis through Screwtape and Wormwood explores the philosophical and theological questions of what I am going to call “TIME and MINE.”  

 It seems that Wormwood needs a new approach with his temptations.  Since the Patient has experienced a profound second conversion experience, many of the previously tried tactics are no longer working.  So Screwtape suggests to his nephew demon an attack on the Patient’s PEEVISHNESS.

 Now if you had to look that one up, so did I!  Peevishness is another word for those times when we are CRANKY, IRRITABLE, and just plain GRUMPY.  And this is best used as a subordinate attack.  In other words, use something that makes the Patient feel GRUMPY and Screwtape suggests TIME.

Do we ever have enough time to get everything done?  Screwtape instructs Wormwood on that common human misconception that time is ours.  There is the unwelcome visitor who stops by at just the wrong time, or the meeting that goes on and on, or the line we are forced to stand in and wait for others who are taking up way too much time.  These and many more examples we can all think of will make anyone PEEVISH.  And this is the perfect opportunity for effective temptation.

Screwtape tells Wormwood:

They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels it is being stolen.  You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption, “My time is my own.” Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.

By the way, if you are wondering about SLOTHFUL in the sentence before – Sloth is another of the 7 Deadly Sins and it means to be excessively LAZY. 

Now, Wormwood is to put in his Patient’s mind the idea that stolen time means he has suffered a personal injury.  On the flip side, when he does devote time to anything, it is a GIFT of his personal time. 

 Screwtape immediately points out just how absurd this idea is:

The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence.  The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift….

Think of it this way.  We are finite human beings with a beginning and end point in time – BIRTH and DEATH.  We live in time with the future approaching and the past being what has already happened.  We live moment to moment. 

 God acts in time but is not limited by it.  God has always been and always will be.  As we have said before, God has created everything that is - which includes time.  Nothing can be created any other way.  So, rather than being owners of the time that is given to us by God, we are instead called to be Stewards of this gift of time.

 Screwtape also encourages Wormwood to use this sense of ownership to tempt his Patient. 

The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. 

He shows his nephew how a demon can take this sense of ownership to include just about everything in life.  “My dog” and “my wife” lead to “my country” and “my God” with same sense of “Mine.” 

And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say “My God” in a sense not really very different from “My boots”, meaning “The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit – the God I have done a corner in”.

 In other words, we create our own “god” in our own image who is supposed to act and do like we want him to do.  And when God doesn’t or we don’t get what we want, we reject God.  This is the history of the Israelites in a nutshell.

Now this temptation is countered by giving our whole lives to God.  This is what we mean when we talk about a daily walk with God and the key is recognizing that nothing is actually “mine”.  It may sound cliché but life and all that comes with it needs to be treated as a gift.  Imagine if every encounter we have with another person can be understood that way rather than an inconvenience or a theft of “my time”.  Loving our neighbor wouldn’t be quite so hard.

Screwtape closes out this letter telling his nephew that it all comes down to who his Patient chooses to serve.   As Jesus says in the Gospels, we all serve God or the Devil, but you can’t serve both.  God calls us “Mine” because he created us and calls us His own.  Satan wants to claim us by conquest so he can consume all that we are.


Letter 22 Notes

We begin Letter 22 with 2 important events.

1.       The Patient is in love

2.      There is growing stress between Screwtape and Wormwood.

It seems that Screwtape has been caught.  He is now under the intense scrutiny of the powers that be in the Kingdom Below and the Secret Police for certain statements made in letters to a certain nephew that seem to almost extol the virtues of the Kingdom Above and criticize the Kingdom Below.

Fortunately, Screwtape has been able to smooth things over with the demonic hierarchy.

Now Wormwood is in trouble for tuning in Screwtape and soon shall pay. 

And from this I think we must assume that if demons work against each other and cannot be trusted, why would we even imagine they would work FOR us and to our advantage. 

But before we get into the heart of Letter 22, we need a couple of definitions.

1.      Hedonist - someone devoted to the pursuit of pleasure as the most important thing in life.  This is someone who literally LIVES for personal pleasure and does so only for their own personal benefit.

2.      Insipid – lacking spirit; boring.

3.      Miserific Vision – this is a word Lewis made up.  It is the opposite of Beatific Vision which is an actually theological term meaning “the immediate knowledge of God which the saints and angels enjoy in heaven. 

4.      Bourgeois Mind – Screwtape is using this as an insult saying that God has no more than a dull and common intention.

5.      One Human Writer – at the end of the 3rd paragraph and it refers to a passage written by George McDonald in his book, Unspoken Sermons.  Lewis often credited McDonald and his works as a key influence on his own 2nd Christian Conversion.  This quote is one of my favorites in The Screwtape Letters.

6.      Pshaw – is an allusion to the Irish playwright and philosopher, George Bernard Shaw who wrote extensively about the Life Force concept referenced in this letter. 

7.      Life Force concept – Influenced by the scientific theories of the 19th century, this thought sought to explain the evolution of life without refence to a higher or originating power.  In other words, life just happened.

 

In Letter 22, the immediate problem is that the Patient is in love and the new girlfriend is the worst kind according to Screwtape.  She is a Christian who actually lives out her faith. Screwtape describes her as:

Now only a Christan but such a Christian – a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread and butter miss.

And the problem is that it is rather hard to get rid of this kind.  No longer can she be thrown into the arena of the 1st century to be eaten by the lions.  Furthermore, she is the type who laughs in face of demons and temptations. 

Screwtape then expresses a great deal of confusion as to why The Enemy acts the way he does when it comes to this creature.  Wormwood calls God “a hedonist at heart” and you might remember that a hedonist is

It is pretty clear that demons cannot understand love so instead they look for ways to tear a couple in love apart because there is no other way to battle such a heavenly virtue.  Pleasures, as learned in previous letters, are from God.  Demons can only twist pleasures from their intended purpose. 

Pleasures are for our joy and growth in the love of our Lord.  And I think we need to be clear about what actually constitutes a heavenly pleasure.  Remember what led to the Patient’s second conversion – a good book and a walk in the country.  Other pleasures that come to mind are times spent with those we love, worship when we know that God is with us, and service to others. 

Pleasures are created by God for our joy and growth in the love of our Lord.  And we need to remember from earlier letters that demons, no matter how hard they have tried, our not able to create pleasures for their own benefit, they can only corrupt the ones God creates. 

Therefore, if everything begins with God and demons can only corrupt or twist, then everything can ultimately return to God.  As Screwtape says:  We fight under cruel disadvantages.  Nothing is naturally on our side. 

Screwtape returns to what he refers to as disinterested love.  It seems the girlfriend’s family are as Christian as she is and this family is a perfect example of how love grows and supports others.   Screwtape quotes George McDonald:  The regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.

Here we have 2 realities of heaven straight from scripture.  We know from the Bible that music was first heard in heaven as the heavenly host praise God in chorus.  This quote also takes us to the OT book of 1st Kings where Elijah finds God – not in the wind or the earthquake but in the shear silence.

Noise, on the other hand according to Screwtape, corrupts and confuses.  Noise is all the stuff that gets in the way of our relationship with God and our neighbor.  Screwtape tells Wormwood: 

We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.  We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth.  The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.

So if music = praise and silence = prayer, then noise = sin.

Letter 22 closes with this strange note that Screwtape has now become a large centipede and is dictating the end of the letter to his secretary, Toadpipe.  John Milton in Paradise Lost describes these transformations as periodic punishment for evil doing.  In other words, you literally become what you are.  Screwtape prefers, however, to think of this in terms of Shaw’s concept of the Life Force.  It a reflection of a greater glory for his service to our Father Below.


Letter 23 Notes

Letter 23 opens with Screwtape continuing to complain about “this girl and her disgusting family.” 

The Patient is getting to know more and more intelligent Christians which makes it quite impossible to remove Christianity from his life.  It is time for a new approach. 

Rather than REMOVING, Wormwood should move to CORRUPTING.  Screwtape says:

The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third Power remains.  And success of this third kind is the most glorious of all.  A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician makes better sport in Hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.

A “debauchee” would be a person give to excessive indulgence in pleasures of the senses.

Now before we continue, I want say that this Letter 23 is very dense and if it seemed confusing, don’t worry, I will walk us all through it. 

It deals primarily with the question, “Who is Jesus Christ?” and let’s face it, Theologians and other church folks have been studying the answers for over 2000 years.  I am confident that Lewis does not intend to sum it all up in a short Screwtape Letter.

Screwtape wants to corrupt the Patient’s Christian faith by means of the intersection between politics and theology. 

Now I think it is important for us to understand that Lewis is not talking about politics that we see on CNN or Fox News every day.  Rather he is referring to the classical definition. 

If you asked a Greek philosopher to define “Politics” he would say that it is about WHO GETS WHAT, WHEN, AND HOW. 

As Screwtape says, it is about the social impact of our actions.  This will become important as we go further in the letter.

This is important because Screwtape wants to corrupt the Patient’s faith by tearing down his understanding of Jesus.  And he will do this by means of “The Historical Jesus.”

Now I want to make 2 points going forward.  First, understanding the Historical Jesus is a legitimate field of academic study.  There are a number of first rate scholars studying what the world was like when Jesus walked in Judah, Jerusalem, and Galilee. 

I think it is fascinating to talk about how the New Testament connects to the Old and how Jesus would use Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets to show how God loves us. 

Second, we are not OT or NT scholars.  We are ordinary Christians and so we need to stick with our beliefs and not allow ourselves to be tempted into unbelief because of what I will call “Popular Theology.”   

Some years ago there was an Episcopal Bishop who wrote a number of What-if books.  He would say things like “What if – Mary the mother of Jesus was not a Virgin?”  He would then write a few more pages and by the end of the chapter he was acting like what he had said was fact.  It was not!

So, with all that said, Screwtape advises Wormwood to go after the Historical Jesus in the mind of his Patient.

It seems that every 30 or so years there is a new idea of who the historical Jesus really was. 

Screwtape tells his nephew:

In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each “historical Jesus” is unhistorical.

The second step is to highlight some particular theory that Jesus supposedly taught, said, or did so that the Patient no longer thinks of Jesus as the Son of God but rather a philosophical teacher who imparted great truths.  This makes him mortal. 

The third step is to destroy the devotional life by substituting God who we are continually coming to know with   a “merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago.” 

Fourth, we make Jesus into some sort of historical figure who we study but only believe in through the lens of those who taught our earliest Sunday School classes. 

This Jesus is nothing more than an academic pursuit who we seek to understand rather than believe. 

Strangely enough, Screwtape gives us a perfect summary of believing in Jesus rather than simply understanding.

The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had…

Now Screwtape warns Wormwood to keep things in the right order. 

Politics should always corrupt faith rather than faith informing our politics. 

Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster.

And the last sentence of this letter is a good reminder to us that we should always view temptation with a healthy dose of skepticism since in is all a game to the demons.


Letter 24 Notes

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.  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 believed 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.