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May 11 - June 7, 2024
What does the Church think of Christ? The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: that Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”— he was God.
Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves.
What we in fact believe is not necessarily the theory we most desire or admire. It is the thing that, consciously or unconsciously, we take for granted and act on.
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things. That is the thundering assertion with which we start; that the great fundamental quality that makes God, and us with him, what we are is creative activity.
Our worst trouble today is our feeble hold on creation. To sit down and let ourselves be spoon-fed with the ready-made is to lose our grip on our only true life and our only real selves.
When one really cares, the self is forgotten, and the sacrifice becomes only a part of the activity.
The Greek word is pneuma, breath: “I believe in the breath of life.” And indeed, when we are asked, “What do you value more than life?” the answer can only be, “Life—the right kind of life, the creative and god-like life.”
Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.
The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things.
To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
That is to say, that past, existing only in the mind of the maker, produces a true and measurable effect upon the written part of the book, precisely as though it had, in fact, “taken place” within the work of art itself.
The error of the Middle Ages, on the whole, was to use analogical, metaphorical, poetical techniques for the investigation of scientific questions. But increasingly, since the seventeenth century, we have tended to the opposite error—that of using the quantitative methods of science for the investigation of poetic truth.
Nothing is more intoxicating than a sense of power: the demagogue who can sway crowds, the journalist who can push up the sales of his paper to the two-million mark, the playwright who can plunge an audience into an orgy of facile emotion, the parliamentary candidate who is carried to the top of the poll on a flood of meaningless rhetoric, the ranting preacher, the advertising salesman of material or spiritual commodities, are all playing perilously and irresponsibly with the power of words, and are equally dangerous whether they are cynically unscrupulous or (as frequently happens) have
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if Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?
The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ were only man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.
It will perhaps be better to say, “altogether God and altogether man”—God and man at the same time, in every respect and completely; God from eternity to eternity and from the womb to the grave, a man also from the womb to the grave and now.
At the risk of appearing quite insolently obvious, I shall say that if the Church is to make any impression on the modern mind she will have to preach Christ and the cross.
As Lord David Cecil has said: “The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us, we still talk of the present ‘return to barbarism.’ But barbarism is not behind us, it is beneath us.”
“Christianity has compelled the mind of man, not because it is the most cheering view of human existence, but because it is truest to the facts.”
Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners—that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right—we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that can be imagined.
As T. S. Eliot says: “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God, and the consequence is an inevitable doom.”
The fallacy is that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure.
The attempts to abolish wars and wickedness by the moral law is doomed to failure because of the fact of sinfulness.
There is only one real law—the law of the universe; it may be fulfilled either by way of judgment or by the way of grace, but it must be fulfilled one way or the other. If men will not understand the meaning of judgment, they will never come to understand the meaning of grace. If they hear not Moses or the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
A man may be greedy and selfish; spiteful, cruel, jealous, and unjust; violent and brutal; grasping, unscrupulous, and a liar; stubborn and arrogant; stupid, morose, and dead to every noble instinct—and still we are ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man. I am reminded of a young man who once said to me with perfect simplicity: “I did not know there were seven deadly sins; please tell me the names of the other six.”
I am therefore the more concerned about a highly unpleasant spirit of vindictiveness that is being commended to us at this moment, camouflaged as righteous wrath and a warlike spirit.
That system as we know it thrives upon waste and rubbish heaps.
It was left for the present age to endow covetousness with glamor on a big scale and to give it a title that it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swash-buckling, piratical sin, going about with its had cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jackboots. Its war cries are “Business Efficiency!” “Free Competition!” “Get Out or Get Under!” and “There’s Always Room at the Top!”
And so we—this is important—when we blame the mess that the economical world has got into, do we always lay the blame on wicked financiers, wicked profiteers, wicked capitalists, wicked employers, wicked bankers—or do we sometimes ask ourselves how far we have contributed to make the mess?
Just as the sin of gluttony thrives on our little greeds, so the sin of covetousness thrives on our little acts of avarice—on the stupid and irresponsible small shareholder, for example, who is out to get money for nothing.
We may argue eloquently that honesty is the best policy. Unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty. We may say that the best art should be recompensed at the highest rate, and no doubt it should; but if the artist lets his work be influenced by considerations of marketing, he will discover that what he is producing is not art. And we may say, with some justice, that an irreligious nation cannot prosper; but if a nation tries to cultivate religion for the sake of regaining prosperity, the resulting brand of religion will be
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If avarice is the sin of the haves against the have-nots, envy is the sin of the have-nots against the haves.
The sixth deadly sin is named by the Church acedia or sloth. In the world it calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair.
There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest. But the head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of superbia or pride.
The name under which pride walks the world at this moment is the perfectibility of man, or the doctrine of progress; and its specialty is the making of blueprints for utopia and establishing the kingdom of man on earth.
the devilish strategy of pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong.
Whenever we say, whether in the personal, political, or social sphere, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul we are committing the sin of pride; and the higher the goal at which we aim, the more far reaching will be the subsequent disaster.
If we say that the denial of God was the cause of our present disasters, well and good; it is of the essence of pride to suppose that we can do without God.
The Church asserts that there is a Mind which made the universe, that He made it because He is the sort of Mind that takes pleasure in creation, and that if we want to know what the Mind of the Creator is, we must look at Christ.
That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.
Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves. But the way in which the work is done is governed by no sanction except the good of the work itself; and religion has no direct connection with that, except to insist that the workman should be free to do his work well
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How do we say that God creates, and how does this compare with the act of creation by an artist? To begin with, of course, we say that God created the universe “out of nothing”— he was bound by no conditions of any kind. Here there can be no comparison; the human artist is in the universe and bound by its conditions. He can create only within that framework and out of that material that the universe supplies.
The great thing, I am sure, is not to be nervous about God—not to try and shut out the Lord Immanuel from any sphere of truth. Art is not he—we must not substitute art for God; yet this also is he for it is one of his images and therefore reveals his nature. Here we see in a mirror darkly—we behold only the images; elsewhere we shall see face to face, in the place where image and reality are one.
In The Devil to Pay, I tried to make this point; and I remember being soundly rapped over the knuckles by a newspaper critic, who said in effect that after a great deal of unintelligible pother, I had worked up to the statement that God was light, which did not seem to be very novel or profound. Novel, it certainly is not; it is scarcely the business of Christian writers to introduce novelties into the fundamental Christian doctrines. But profundity is another matter; Christian theology is profound, and since I did not invent it, I may have the right to say so.
As A. D. Lindsay puts it in The Two Moralities: In the morality of my station and duties (i.e., of the moral code) the station presents us with the duty, and we say yes or no, “I will” or “I will not.” We choose between obeying or disobeying a given command. In the morality of challenge or grace, the situation says, “Here is a mess, a crying evil, a need! What can you do about it?” We are asked not to say “Yes” or “No” or “I will” or “I will not,” but to be inventive, to create, to discover something new. The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfill the plain
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All human achievements can be looked on as problems solved—particularly in retrospect, because, if the work has been well done, the result will then appear inevitable. It seems as though this was the only right way, predestined and inevitable from the start. So it is the right way, in the sense that it is the way that agrees with the maker’s father-idea. But there was no inevitability about the idea itself.
