Resisting the Prowling Lion – 40 Days with Screwtape

Day 32 – Thursday after 5th Sunday of Lent

To Read:

From The Screwtape Letters:

Screwtape, a senior demon, is offering advice to Wormwood his nephew, an apprentice demon.  The language he uses is ‘upside down’ referring to God as ‘the Enemy’ and the devil as ‘Our Father Below’.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD

About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate.   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.   On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything – even to social justice.   The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.   For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience.   Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.   Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner.

Your affectionate uncle


SCREWTAPE

To Reflect:

The ‘corner’ around which we are to avoid being lured in today’s reading is the one that sees our faith as a means to an end: being tempted to use the victory of Christ as a rallying cry for our particular flavour of politics.  Such are the banners under which Crusaders, Jihadists, and modern-day Maccabees blindly march!

The three great (so-called) monotheistic faiths of the world all believe that the end purpose of their faith is to realise the reign of God and each has an implicit belief that God/Yahweh/Allah rules over all of creation.  God is the One who gives order and purpose to the world but God’s followers seem to be all too readily tempted into giving the Lord God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, just a little helping hand.  We do not seem to be able to trust God to be God, so somehow have to work, and even go to war against God’s children, to establish Christendom, a Caliphate, or restore the Land of Promise.  No wonder the world finds itself in such a sorry state!  Saddest of all is the fact that all this is propagated in God’s Name.

It is easy to understand the desire of the British Humanist Association^[i] to see the removal of religion from the public realm – using Christianity (or any other faith) to justify our politics so often ends up in corrupting both!  What are we to do?  

There is a thin line which Screwtape asks Wormwood to walk, and we must do so as well.  Faith can, and should, overflow into our public life but we are called to be leaven in the lump;  (Matthew 13v33) transforming, feeding, enriching.  Instead politicians who use religion too often end up chastising, marginalising and condemning.  Like the angel standing with Joshua before Jericho (Joshua 5v13-14) we must not make the mistake of thinking that we can convert God to our cause.  We are called to be in the service of God and may not call God to serve us!

Like a perverse version of the Gentiles gently mocked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6v25-33),  we not only refuse to trust God to meet our needs and ‘seek first’ the righteousness and reign of God but endeavour to enlist God to the cause of building our own Babel-like realm.  Having spent time in South Africa during the apartheid era, and witnessing what happened during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, I have learnt to be wary of politicians who lead public discourse from the pulpit.  The Apartheid government of South Africa proudly proclaimed themselves to be ‘Christian’…

Yes, religious people must allow their faith to add salt to public life – after all I am a minister of the Established Church of England – but public politics is not the ground whereon a personal faith can be prosecuted.  When that happens we all too often end up, to Screwtape’s glee and delight, using our faith as a convenience for our own personal preference instead of building the Realm of God.

With the psalmist our anger rises at the harm we human beings cause one another.  We cry out for the oppressed and defenceless – Let the arrogant and mighty crumble under the weight of their own evil!  Let them be plunged into the quaking mire!  Let burning coals rain down on their heads!  Let them be hunted to an exhausted and terror-struck end!  Bring them to their knees at the last, restrained, confined, powerless to harm, at the mercy of those they have wronged.  AMEN.     (Jim Cotter)

 

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^[i] Of course Humanism, along with any other system of ethics, can just as easily get caught up in the same downwards spiral which proclaims ‘my good’ to be better than the ‘Common Good’