The God Who Destroys False Impressions

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-06-02). A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 51). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

After C.S. Lewis' wife died, he filled nearly four journals with his thoughts and impressions, chronicling and hopefully channeling his grief. The four volumes were published under a pseudonym, for fear that if anyone knew what he was really thinking, it would turn them down a path he didn't wish them to go. It's one thing for an anonymous griever, as it were, to think such things about God. It's another thing for a cherished Christian author to feel that way. Or at least such was the theory.

Eventually the volumes were correctly attributed to him and they are fascinating because of their honesty and for the depth of thought that Lewis is known for bringing to the table. As he processes his grief, he moves from a state of anger with God, where he cannot possibly fathom why it feels like God would be so distant now as opposed to when things were going well to a state of...is it acceptance? It's a deeper understanding, that is for sure. 

One such understanding stood out to me, above. It's true that we have an idea about God. We think certain things about God. Each of us has an impression of who God really is, much of which is wrong, but all of which falls ultimately short of a true understanding. I've often quoted A.W. Tozer who said that what we believe about God is the most important thing about us. It's a true statement in it's own right. Our view of God will shape how we view the rest of the world; it is certainly to be the central thought in the life of the Christian person, but the thought is equally true of the skeptic. Not believing in God, or simply not thinking of him at all, is just as important in determining how we view the rest of the world and the cosmos and everything in it.

Lewis would agree, but he would add a caveat. Not only is whatever we believe about God the most important thing about us, but it's so important, in fact, that God himself will seek to root out and destroy any false thoughts or false impressions that we have about him. It does us no good to pray to a God who doesn't really exist; whatever we think God is, Lewis points out, is not a divine idea at all. It's typically our own idea or our own interpretation. As such, it falls short in such immeasurable ways that it is the only loving thing that God can do to weed out such falsities. We need to know the real God, not the one that we made up.

This is another of the "temptations" that C.S. Lewis points out in his book The Screwtape Letters. Wormwood the demon is instructed not so much to stop his subject from praying–although that would be the ideal–but rather to have him pray in such a way where the God he is praying to or the outcome that he is praying for is not based on truth of who God actually is, but rather is based on his own impression of who God is. Thus he will walk away feeling as if he did his righteous duty, but will have had zero impact at all, since whatever he prayed was almost certainly his own will, based on his own idea of God, rather than based on the truth of God and his actual will. 

So God takes great pains to destroy the image that we have of him that is inaccurate, and one of the ways that he does that is through suffering. We humans are somewhat of a self-centered bunch, and no matter how righteous or others-focused we appear to be the reality is that most of our efforts and energies are poured into a world that revolves around us. God's blessings toward us, his enthusiasm towards us, his love of us, all seem to wrap around our own self-interest. The second that something appears to not be in our self-interest, we immediately turn on God; we act as if he's this spiteful, vengeful being who, after all this, would make our lives terrible. But here is the trouble: it was never about us to begin with. It wasn't about our self-interest, at least not the way we define it (another mythical area of our belief, the one in which we think we have the means to articulate what really, ultimately, is in our best interest.) If it is about our self-interest, then our self-interest stems from our knowledge of the real God, the real source of life, and not the fanciful version that we learned about in Sunday School. Anything else is a fraud.

So C.S. Lewis would say in his masterful lecture, The Weight of Glory, that we go on settling for mud pies in a slum because we cannot possibly understand what is meant by a holiday at sea. We settle for the mundane and the false, rather than pursuing the truth and the life. And God would have none of that for his most favorite creation.

Finding Your True Self in the Valley

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself— creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Screwtape Letters (pp. 38-39). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Suffering is a strange thing. Lewis talks about it as the "trough". In Letter 8 of "The Screwtape Letters" (Lewis' writes from the perspective of Screwtape, a demon who is writing to his nephew and protege as he works to derail the faith of a human) he contrasts what God wants for us, and what the realm of evil desires for us. The chief difference is that evil takes, and God gives.

The irony is that we would tell ourselves that if we can live how we truly desire, if we can make our own choices, if we can control our own destiny, then we will be a sort of pseudo-god; certainly we'll be the gods of our own universe. This was the lie that was told since the beginning, when the bond between God and man was shattered when man decided that instead of accepting the psuedo-God likeness he already had, he would attempt to replace it with an image he found more desirable. Rather than replace the image, what we found (and find, in our own lives), is that sin doesn't give us more identity, but actually robs us of our identity. The status we thought we'd gain turns out to be a lie. We end up being less ourselves than we would have been otherwise.

This is often the result of suffering. All that we would identify with begins to be stripped away and we find that at the core, in the deepest parts of our soul, was written an identity long ago that is more us than we have ever known; deep inside is the true us, the one that is now being filled again with the perfection of sons and daughters through Jesus Christ.

Screwtape would rather that men blindly give in to passions/desires/sin. God would desire that men willingly and gladly follow. They are replicas, but only because they are distinct.

The Reality of Suffering

I had one of those streams of thought this morning during that period of time where you're awake but you're not really awake that led me to this post. I read an intriguing article last week about a cocktail bar in Philadelphia and it's mysterious owner. That was the first thought. The second was about the person who posted the link. The third thought was about what I'd say if we talked. The fourth was that my worldview and this particular blogger's are polar opposites–he an atheist, me a Christian. The fifth was, your worldview is only good if it works in the reality of your life. And that's the point of this post.

Christianity is a "meta-narrative". It doesn't just explain that there is a savior, but it also explains why one was necessary to begin with. It doesn't settle at just explaining your particular situation, but it actually provides an all-encompassing, overarching view as to why things are the way that they are. This is the point that is missed by many people, I think, as they easily write off Christianity as just another crutch or religious expression or whatever. Everyone consciously or unconsciously understands the world within the framework of some meta-narrative, even when they don't know what it is or they can't explain it.

The key to the meta-narrative is it's consistency. I heard the story (one of many) of a person who, after a particularly devastating storm in which many people were left homeless, didn't feel like it was his obligation to help anyone because he had already helped so many people already, and really he was super busy. Somewhat ironically, if you asked him what the most important thing about humanity was, this person would almost certainly say "helping others". His actions demonstrated, however, that while he may have thought this was true in the moment, it wasn't actually his meta-narrative. For him to believe that sometimes he needed to help others, but other times he didn't, meant that there was no consistency in his "helping others". The only consistency was that helping others was totally random. In other words, his actual meta-narrative was "chaos" or "randomness". Such is the reality of much of the post-modern, relativistic world.

The consistency of the meta-narrative is what gives it "legs" when it comes into contact with the reality of our every day lives. It can speak to the particular realities that I find myself in. If a meta-narrative can't satisfactorily explain the common, every day life that you live, if it has no traction in reality, then I see no value in it. It strikes me that this is quite similar to the scientific method of testing: develop a hypothesis, test the hypothesis. If it doesn't work, find a new hypothesis. Obviously that's a simplistic view of both the scientific method and the means of testing a meta-narrative, but it serves the point. Much of the time the way that we know that what we believe about the world actually makes any sense is when we are confronted with a confusing or difficult situation in our lives and realize that we actually have an explanation. 

Hence, the reality of suffering as per the title of this post. Over the past few weeks and months the reality of suffering in peoples' lives has become clear and present for me. In times past it was suffering or evil itself that was used as a denial of God's existence. Philosophers have stopped drawing from that well, however, as the shortcomings of the argument have become evident. For one, you can't even define evil unless you can define good, and "ultimate evil", or evil that is always evil, only exists if there is a corresponding "ultimate good". Using the argument of suffering and evil to deny God, then, leaves you in a bit of a predicament. If there is no God, then there is no ultimate evil. If no evil, then suffering is totally random and as a result, it is totally meaningless. And that leads to the second problem with this line of thought.

There is more to us as humans than just our material being. Somehow, we love, we have emotion, we have a will, we have a spirit, we have an internal light; there is something that gets snuffed out at death and it is more than just our material ceasing to function. I've seen skeptics claim that death is like a "light switch being flipped off", but why the analogy to light? If the body is just material, then it is more like shutting your car off than it is the disappearance of light, yet anyone who has ever been at someones bedside when they passed knows that there is an indefinable "snuffing" that goes out; something more than just material decay has taken place. All of this is just to point out that if all we are trying to define is the material reality of suffering, that is, accept that it happens and deal with it as a reality of our physical being, it leaves a gaping hole in our understanding. Namely, whether or not life has any meaning at all.

To remove God from the equation of evil and suffering is to ultimately remove any meaning from our lives, whatsoever. No one denies that the reality of evil and suffering in light of a sovereign and loving God is a difficult truth to rectify in our minds; if you watch a friend go through suffering or tragedy and you act like you understand why it is happening to them, you are not an intellectual, you are a jerk. The Christian, however, has a view towards suffering that not only explains it's existence, but it also allows for the possibility of meaning within it and hopes for it's complete eradication. Thus, there is more to it than simply "suffering for sufferings sake". There is meaning not just in my suffering, but in my very existence. There is no such explanation of suffering if God is removed, other than just to say that it's all random. And if it's all random, then you are just a pawn in a deterministic universe; you literally do not matter.

Thus we come back to whether or not your meta-narrative can speak to your situation, right now, "boots on the ground". The Christian endures suffering because even when it doesn't seem to have any reasonable explanation of why it would happen to me, there is still the possibility of meaning in it. We do not enjoy suffering, like some sort of spiritual masochists, but we can wrap our minds around the reality of it's existence. And then, even when the world is closing in, we can cling to a God who is bigger than the world. We are loved, even when life sucks. There is hope, even when it's dark. And then the promise of the good news of Jesus: someday, suffering will be eradicated once and for all.