Posted on 08/06/2004 12:14:07 PM PDT by Zack Nguyen
My Dear Wormwood:
I have just returned from our weekly meeting of the Infernal Lowerarchy* where before my peers I was utterly humiliated to report that that educator “patient” of yours has registered for a conference on Christian education. For hell’s sake, how could you let that happen? He was supposed to go on a cruise that week. You are on the verge of letting that man slip through your scaly fingers. At that gathering, they plan on addressing things we have been working assiduously to establish in the Western consciousness for centuries, things like privatization, compartmentalization, and various Endarkenment — excuse me, I mean Enlightenment — assumptions. Even worse, they plan on discussing worldview thinking and teaching! They want to show the connections between the central elements of the — uh, ugh — I can barely make myself say it — “biblical” story and their stupid little educational responsibilities. They may, hell forbid, discover how the Enemy’s word establishes a lucid vision for teaching and learning, not to mention student change and cultural transformation. This cannot happen!
As you might imagine, our Father below* is not pleased with these developments. He fears that the fragmented version of faith and life that we have successfully imparted to them through multiple avenues, including their own well-deceived seminaries and churches, may be undermined, not only in your patient, but also in others who attend this gathering. Consequently, he has told me to take immediate action, or else the consequences will be unusually severe for both you and me.
You know very well that from the time of our cosmic takeover, our fiendish Father has inspired us with a shrewd vision of disintegration. The Enemy, who has a slight advantage over us as the Creator of the universe, has stamped His triune nature on the world He has made. All things reflect the unity and diversity of His own miserable character, and He wants those loathsome little replicas of Himself* to apprehend His creation as a “uni-verse” with its proper distinctions and overarching integrity. Our goal, however, has been to undermine this coherent vision of reality, with pitchfork and tail. We have aspired in all things everywhere to put asunder that which the Enemy has joined together, to halve the whole, to fragment and divide, to exacerbate the diversity and destroy the unity.
Various unconscious human recruits have served us admirably in promoting our lies. Slubgob* is famous throughout our kingdom for prompting both Plato’s forms/world distinction and the dualism of the Gnostics and Manicheans, not to mention his success in infecting the thought of that sexually repressed, neurotic Bishop of Hippo with a residual neo-platonism. Triptweeze* caused these wonderful divisions to endure throughout the Middle Ages, with only a slight scare when Aristotle’s philosophy revived and was embraced by that Dumb-Ox Dominican who fortunately segregated nature and grace and elevated the latter over the former. Descartes and Kant contributed unwittingly to our covert cause to divide and conquer through their respective mind/matter and noumena/phenomena distinctions. The rise of idolized science (how we love to twist the Adversary’s gifts), especially in its evolutionary form (Zozezas’s work on Darwinshould be noted here), has undermined the notion of creation itself (next to redemption there is no more important doctrine for us to destroy), and made it certain that facts and values are forever severed. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, who by then required very little coaxing from us, took things the rest of the way home. How excited we were when the latter of this triumvirate — our favorite infidel — announced to the world that God was dead!
But our crowning achievement has been in the churches. Under the well-intended influence of their hoodwinked leaders, they actually believe our lies are the truth! They think they came out of the Bible. The silly little Christians have confused creation with sin, and now they can hardly wait to evacuate the planet and head off to heaven where they think they really belong! How joyfully they sing, “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.” They promote heaven over earth, the spiritual over the physical, grace over nature, the soul over the body, the eternal over the temporal, faith over reason and so on. They see everything as essentially sacred or secular. They think that Christianity is its own distinct realm of life rather than a way of life for every realm. They separate their faith from the bulk of their lives, and set Christ in opposition to their cultures. How proud they are of their resulting super-spirituality, nicely ensconced in their cozy, well-fortified Christian ghettos. They have bought into our vision of disintegration. They are compartmentalists, par excellence.
As a result — and how delicious this is — they look down on all vocations except church-related vocations. They have denied the goodness and value of the Enemy’s creation. They despise their own bodies. They have abandoned cultural life and essentially turned it over to our control. They have seriously diminished the scope of human experience. Their mental framework enables them to find all the support they need for these false perspectives in the way they misread the Bible. We have caused them to twist passages like Matthew 6:33, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, and Colossians 3:1-2 to serve our deceptive ends. In short, we have been able to enthrone a good, solid resounding lie at the center of their lives.*
To be sure, my dear Wormwood, we must maintain this compartmentalization, not only in the Christians’ churches, but also in their schools. After all, next to the church and the family (our prime targets of subversion), their educational institutions are most influential in shaping their young. We got off to a slow start in education and took some early losses when their schools first began — cursed be Luther, Calvin and those Puritans! But, thanks to our Department of Miseducation, Chairman Glubose* in particular, we have successfully recaptured them and are effectively using them for our own purposes. We have rendered these believers bona fide anti-intellectuals and pragmatists. We have convinced them of the alleged uselessness of academics. They are utterly blind to the reality that ideas are fleshed out in real life and have serious consequences. They never suspected that something as abstruse as “post-structuralism” could have any social influence, much less through such an unlikely outlet as MTV. We have also convinced these fools, like most of the world, that education is an objective, scientific, worldview-neutral enterprise. Hopefully their aversion to the life of the mind will keep them from recognizing that all aspects of scholarship, teaching and learning are grounded in a diversity of metaphysical assumptions, and nowadays especially in the prejudices of naturalism. This kind of blindness makes education one of our most powerful weapons in destroying the tender faith of unsuspecting students. We already have their teachers in bondage to this falsehood.
Above all, we must keep the Christian convictions of students and teachers alike quarantined — compartmentalized, if you will — from the real business of education. We will allow our Christian patients to be students and teachers, but we cannot and must not allow them to be truly Christian students or truly Christian teachers. They must pursue their respective tasks of learning and teaching just like their non-Christian counterparts. They must remain oblivious to the fact that their educational work is proceeding on the basis of non-Christian presuppositions and is performed in service to the idols of the age. We must never let them recognize their essential spiritual infidelity in their academic work. We must never let them develop an integrated Christian perspective on their studies. Their Christianity and their educational pursuits must be kept in two separate spheres. Dualism must rule their lives. They must function daily as practical agnostics and atheists. Otherwise, our victories in this domain may soon end.
This is why I am so shocked that you, Wormwood, of all tempters, would allow your patient to attend this ridiculous conference. You know good and well that what they are teaching is diametrically opposed to what you and I believe. They will constantly be quoting Kuyper, that nuisance from the Netherlands, and that funny looking fellow, Schaeffer, with the knickers and goatee, and others like them because they believed that Christianity embraced the whole of life. They are right, of course, and you will remember that though we hurled our fiercest attacks at these perpetual irritants, somehow they escaped our evil traps. Now we must seek to suppress their malevolent influence as effectively as possible.
So, regarding your patient, I suggest you employ weapons of mass distraction to trip him up, say with the beauty of his surroundings or with anxieties about matters back home or with sexual preoccupations or with silly things, like shoes that squeak or double chins or odd clothes or funny hair or voices out of tune.* That should keep him from profiting from this meeting, the one thing we can’t allow. In any case, report back to me when the conference ends, and I expect to hear of significant success. Or else.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
David Naugle is professor of Philosophy at Dallas Baptist University where he has served for 14 years. In addition to teaching and working with students, he maintains an active schedule of writing and speaking.
Note:
*Indicates words or phrases original with Lewis
Bump
BUMP
BTTT - read later...
We have caused them to twist passages like Matthew 6:33, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, and Colossians 3:1-2 to serve our deceptive ends.
Here are the above verses:
Matthew 6:33 "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."It would be great if all Christians read Colossians 3:1-17 and Romans 12 before they post.2 Corinthians 4:16-18 "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
Colossians 3:1-2 "Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. "
I found this man's take very interesting. We are called to put to death the sin in our lives. We are not called to avoid the physical world. Some Christians, especially evangelicals, act as if God's sovereignty ends at their heart, and that the world is so evil that Christians should expect only failure.
The line is a fine one, and I don't claim to have it solidly drawn.
FYI - if you know of others who may be interested in this thread, please ping them.
BTTT>>>
I'm not sure what you mean here. What do you mean by ends at their heart and expect only failure? I'm sorry - it's just been a long week or month or whatever it's been and I can't quite follow you here.
Later
BTTT
FYI
The end of 'Christianity lite' is nearIt's a good read, IMO.He ends the above article with:
So consider this the last Merry Christmas in the age of Christianity lite. The new century will see a new Christianity which in fact is the old one. And a very different Christmas. Less sugary, but far more real. And it's about time.
bttt
Wow, I'd totally forgotten about this thread. Glad you enjoyed it!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.