The Screwtape Letters – Letters 23-27; 03-21-2021 Letter # 23: Theme: The “Historical Jesus” (Gal. 1:15-16; 2:20; Eph. 3:17; Heb. 4:12 – Word of God is living…) a. Patient’s circle of Christians is growing… Power is the best remaining way to corrupt his spirituality. “spoiled saint, Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician b. “the borderline between theology and politics” c. “Historical Jesus” – distracts from who He is and what He did. “Biography industry” “historical-critical methods; “higher criticism” 1. Mere teacher 2. Conceal the very substantial (not exact) agreement between His teachings and all the great moral teachers. “We make the Sophists; He raises up a Socrates to answer them.” 3. Destroy the devotional life of a “God who is there” to a remote, shadowy historical figure. 4. People won’t be saved by mere biography. Jesus’ biography is incomplete for a reason. Resurrection and Redemption. Humans well aware of sin d. Back to politics: Get humans to treat Christianity as a means to an end… p. 127 A vital Christian faith and life is thus under the necessity of perennially preserving its health against the peril of diseases and corruptions arising out of its own life; and of protecting itself against errors to which non-mythical religions tempt it. Most of its own weaknesses arise when the mythical paradoxes of its faith are resolved; most of the perils from the outside come from the pessimism and dualism of mystical and rational religion. Only a vital Christian faith, renewing its youth in its prophetic origin, is capable of dealing adequately with the moral and social problems of our age; only such a faith can affirm the significance of temporal and mundane existence without capitulating unduly to the relativities of the temporal process. Such a faith alone can point to a source of meaning which transcends all the little universes of value and meaning which “have their day and cease to be” and yet not seek refuge in an eternal world where all history ceases to be significant. Only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations, and yet deal in terms of moral responsibility with the world in which cultures and civilizations engage in struggles of death and life. Reinhold Niebuhr “An Independent Christian Ethic” (1935) Letter #24: Theme: Ignorance and arrogance a. “Spiritual pride” – “the most beautiful of the vices”… (the ardor of the novice) p. 130 b. “We Christians” – social vanity; Luke 18:9-12 (Pharisee’s prayer) c. make Christianity “a mystery religion” – a clique/club Letter #25: Themes: “Same old same old.” – monotony a. The tie that binds… mere Christianity; some fad with “a Christian coloring.” b. The Same Old Thing: Rhythm of life – balancing the temporal with the eternal c. Demand for the infinite – infinite change – the Novelty. Insatiable desire for the new diminishes pleasure and increases desire (p. 137) Heb. 13:5; Phil. 4:10-131 Tim. 6:6-8 d. Desire produces Fashions or Vogues… "'Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.'" -- G.K. Chesterton 1. He wants us to ask very simple questions. 2. p. 139 “Future as a promised land….”

Letter #26: Theme: Unselfishness/charity a. Screwtape again encouraging Wormwood to twist a virtue – Unselfishness to selfishness to arouse bitterness resentment and quarreling. b. Mutual self-sacrifice – “Charity” – love. c. Ever-present search for cracks in the foundation. 1 Pet. 5:8 – prowling like a roaring lion; Father of lies – John 8:44

Letter #27: Theme: Answers a. Wormwood failing by letting Patient focus his prayers on his failings. P. 148 “terrible habit of obedience” b. Lure Patient into a sense of “false spirituality” – that praying for “daily bread” is somehow vulgar c. p. 150… “unbounded Now” – God is outside of Time. “And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.” The problem of free will…. d. Boethius “The Consolation of Philosophy” (524 AD) Book V: divine Providence & free will.( e. “Old books”: We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask; “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944/1970), Eerdman’s Pub.