The following quote from “Screwtape Letters,” by C S Lewis, convicted me about how we can unintentionally rationalize hatred of others–as long as we say we hate on someone else’s behalf. How many times do we justify anger and objectification of our opponent because they appear unjust to someone, or something, we are protecting? We in the West appear to be a nation of idealists–and yet, it’s a stepping stone to the Hell of conflict that is not the less selfish, because it panders to our insecurities.
Hatred we can manage…If conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words, let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
This is a hard. It is challenging (to me - especially if I’m on the receiving end I suppose) to tease apart the difference between anger and hatred. And unless it be truly righteous anger - perhaps there is no difference. In Matthew 5 Jesus practically draws a straight line between anger and murder. And the author didn’t even record so much as a qualification - such as at least … except for ‘righteous anger’.
But if one thinks about this … in the mind of the infuriated … there is no such thing as unrighteous anger. Ever. Do we ever think about that? The fact that we can never ever identify any unrighteous anger in ourselves while we’re in the heat of it should tell us something pretty significant about that spiritual state.
that’s a really good point–in James 1:20, “The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” I have to meditate on that. I have really been like Moses sometimes, striking the rock out of pride, when I respond to my close friends and family who are conspiracy theorists. Everything seems to rest on the moment and the pain we are discussing. I lose perspective–as Lewis described his point for the “patient,” in “Screwtape”–he was in the War, and
The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion, and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels.
Heaven knows I am on the supposedly “right” side only because I was born there–had it been otherwise, I, too, would have been afraid and suspicious.
May He give us the strength to see things from His perspective of love.
Reading Kierkegaard has been fascinating. He is both a severe and a sensitive teacher, and he was radically frustrated with the state of the church in his time and place. Imagine! Here we are again. But his work is thoroughly Christian as well. His reputation among my tribe — “American evangelicals” (as if that were something homogeous) — is that he is “dangerous.” “Read Kierkegaard, and you are going to lose your faith.” Hmmm. Not so sure about that. So far, he’s an encouragement.
It is said that in learning to obey one learns to rule, but what is even more certain is that by being obedient oneself one can teach obedience. So it is with the lily and the bird. They have no power
with which to compel the learner, they have only the compulsion of their own obedience. The lily and the bird are “the obedient teachers.” Is this not a strange way of speaking? In other cases, “obedient” is of course the word one uses of the learner; it is required of him that he be obedient; but here it is the teacher himself who is obedient! And in what does he give instruction? In obedience. And how does he give instruction? By obedience. If you were able to be obedient in the same way as the lily and the bird, you would also be able to teach obedience by obedience. But since neither you nor I are obedient in that way, let us from the lily and the bird learn:
obedience.
Out there with the lily and the bird there is silence, we said. But this silence—or what we strove to learn from it, to become silent—is the first condition for truly being able to obey. When everything around you is solemn silence, as it is out there, and when there is silence within you, then you perceive—and you perceive it with the emphasis of the infinite—the truth of this: You shall love the Lord your God and serve him alone. And you perceive that it is “you,” you who shall love God in this way, you alone in the whole world, you who are indeed alone, surrounded by the solemn silence: alone in such a way that every doubt, every objection, every excuse, every evasion, and every question—in short, every voice—is reduced to silence within you: every voice, that is, every voice other than that of God, which around you and within you speaks to you through the silence. Were there never silence around you and within you in this way, then you would never have learned and never will learn obedience. But if you have learned silence, then it will surely be possible to learn obedience.
Pay attention, then, to nature, which surrounds you. In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience.
Søren Kierkegaard, “Discourse II. “No one can serve two masters, for he must either hate the one and love the other, or hold fast to one and despise the other.” The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air : Three Christian Discourses (trans. Bruce Kirmmse) Voicedream edition, 62%.
So rings the perennial cry of him who really means, “you are in danger of shedding so many of the trappings that we’ve bundled into the faith for you, turning it into a huge, packaged deal.”
Does Kierkegaard say that faith is ultimately irrational? That there is no factual evidence for God? There is evidence in silence and obedience, but not factual evidence for God.
All I can say is that Kierkegaard was not a rationalist but a critic of rationalism. So it sounds like something he might say. I am pretty sure he would not say that Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son Isaac was a rational decision.
But… maybe he would call it super-rational (or… transcendental) rather than irrational.
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
I dislike the Lewis quote exactly because of that, that it effectively denies what Paul said, that we are to call him ‘Abba, Father’ (and no, I do not think Abba means ‘Daddy’), just as Jesus did in Gethsemane.
The two do not conflict: We call Him ‘Abba, Father!’ not because those words – especially as we have them in our minds – are utterly correct, but because they are better for this than any other words we might have.
It’s a lament shared by other down the centuries and in modern terms falls under the heading “the problem of language”, that it is not possible for human words to describe the divine, not just by failing but by containing false concepts.
In Orthodox terms it’s the flip side of why we must do theology: on the one hand, theology, being in human language and using human contents, can at the very, very best only describe God dimly, while on the other hand if we do not make the attempt we shall never get out of ignorance.
My grandma (and both my parents) were. Only my mom remains–but I sometimes wondered, especially when my grandma passed away, if she didn’t keep up her praying–and maybe even did it better, being in Heaven!
