The Seeds of This Heresy

It all started with C. S. Lewis. But doesn't everything in evangelicalism these days?

I was about 19 and my girlfriend's mother gave me Chuck Colson's autobiography Born Again for a birthday present. Mr. Colson gave a lion's share of credit for his conversion to Lewis' Mere Christianity. So I bought a cheap book entitled Three by C. S. Lewis, if I remember correctly, published with The Screwtape Letters and "Screwtape Proposes a Toast". As always, the stories hit me more deeply than the exposition, the parable more than the explanation. In other words, for all that I loved Mere Christianity, to this day I still prefer Screwtape.

In Letter XIV to his nephew, a young apprentice tempter named Wormwood, Satan's Undersecretary Screwtape expresses his love for the doctrine of humility, not true humility, but what most Christians have been mistakenly taught humility to be. Screwtape exults that "thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools."

Isn't that the way you were taught humility? And haven't you paid for it? How many times have you paid someone a compliment, only to be insulted? "Are you crazy? My hair's a mess, this dress is just about to go in the rag pile, and I just couldn't get my makeup right this morning?" Not only can she not accept the possibility that she looks nice, she must not only insult her looks, she must also insult you.

We have trouble dealing with our own gifts and talents, because the way we're taught to think of ourselves is sometimes a lie. And how can a lie glorify God? Earlier in the same letter, Screwtape writes, "The great thing is to make [humans] value an opinion for some quality other than the truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue."

Now true humility, what God wants for his loved ones is:

to bring the man into a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him in the end to be so free of any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

My wife has the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen. But why should she be proud of them? She didn't make them, she didn't special order them, she didn't choose them. Her beautiful eyes serve her no better than do my more ordinary-looking ones. And, worst of all, she can't even see them! She can see pictures of them, reflections of them, but her eyes' beauty does her no good. Why did God bother to make her eyes beautiful? Perhaps for those of us who can see them? Maybe he didn't bless her with beautiful eyes; he blessed US with her beautiful eyes!