Once you have made the World an end
Posted by tom | May 4, 2009Last week I had a brief conversation regarding the danger of peacemaking (and more broadly social action or global citizenship) becoming the end of our faith instead of our relationship with God as part of the people of God (i.e., the Church through time and space) rejoicing in the Victory of God lived out in the present and recieving full consummation in New Heavens and the New Earth. Below's a quote from C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters in which a middle management demon counsels his mentee Wormwood on temptation in relationship to this very concern:
Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours – and the more “religious” (on those terms), the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here -- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, NY: New York, Touchstone, 1996, 1961 original edition, Letter IV, p.39.
