It has come to the attention of the staff here at Everyone’s Entitled to Joe’s Opinion that some of you are actually out there holding prayer meetings at gas stations and praying for cheaper gas.

I appreciate the intent, and I hope to God that He decides to answer your prayers.

But come on.

We live in one of the most ridonkulously wealthy places on the face of the earth.  The average American ranks among the wealthiest 5 percent of people in the entire world.  Even the homeless guy living under the bridge is still in the top 10 to 15 percent of world wealth.

There are people and places in the world that can’t even fathom the level of wealth that we have here in America.  If I were to post pictures of my neighborhood here on my blog and they were to come and see it, it would completely and totally blow their minds.  Most of these people probably don’t even have a computer that can access my blog, or even know what a computer is.

There are even people right here in America who live in a level of need that we can’t begin to fathom.  As I said earlier, there is the homeless guy under the bridge.  There is also the single mom trying desperately to make ends meet, the laid-off worker struggling to get by, the school in the poorer part of town where most of the children don’t even have shoes or basic school supplies.

And then there are fabulously wealthy upper-middle class Americans who believe that their lifestyle is a blessing from God that it is their prerogative to enjoy and flaunt.  Any threat to that lifestyle is perceived as a Satanic attack.

The average American (that would be most of us, who rank in the top 5 percent of world wealth, whether we care to admit it or not) is inconvenienced by $4-a-gallon gas because he/she has made significant lifestyle decisions based on the assumption that gas is cheap and will always be cheap.  An entire culture of suburbia has grown up to support those lifestyle decisions and is driven by the assumption that gas is cheap and will always be cheap.

So how does it look when huddles of middle to upper class Americans are gathered around gas pumps all around the country praying against this latest Satanic attack against the American life that God has blessed, while the needs of the homeless guy under the bridge, the struggling single mom, or the children at the poor school are not considered worthy of even batting an eyelash?  (Heads up:  Probably not very good.)

Maybe this is an act of judgment by God against America.  If it is, I certainly can’t say that we don’t deserve it.  My hope is that this whole thing will ultimately turn us into a people who are at least a little bit more concerned with the real needs of those around them who are not as fortunate.  Because I just don’t see God calling off the dogs of higher gas prices so that we middle-to-upper-class Americans can get back to going on about our business while remaining completely oblivious to the needs of others in our midst.

George Carlin is dead, and it seems as if evangelical Protestant-dom can’t get enough of trashing him for his foul language and his atheist views.  It seems as if our capacity to engage with others outside of our worldview is limited to:  “He is not a good role model.”  “He is damned and is now in Hell; what else is there to say about him?”  “He got it all wrong on the only thing that matters; we don’t need to have anything to do with anything else that he might have to say.”  It is as if all of existence and all of humanity are divided into two categories:  those who are with us, and those who are of the world–who need to be condemned and exposed as bad role models.

This is unfortunate.  When the sum total of all that you can say about another human being is “He’s not a Christian, therefore he’s damned and on the way to Hell”, that comes awfully close to the way in which certain power groups dehumanize those whom they wish to oppress.  There are numerous examples of this from history.  Medieval Christians to Jews:  “Their people crucified Jesus.”  White Americans to African-Americans:  “They’re the descendants of people who were cursed in the Bible and that’s why their skin is dark.”  You can look at history yourself and find other examples of this.  If we as evangelicals continue to go down this road, it opens us up to some terrible possibilities.

By the way, here is a CNN writeup of what other comedians had to say about George Carlin.

And here is his “Stuff” routine, which is one of his most popular.  For those of you who have never heard of George Carlin, here is a good place to start:

We are in the middle of the last chapter of Mere Christianity, which is entitled “The New Men”.  In this chapter, Lewis likens the process of going from being creatures made by God to being sons of God to the next step in the process of evolution.  But there are some key differences between this step and any previous step in evolution.  Namely, it is induced by something outside of nature (Jesus) coming into nature.  Also, it does not involve sexual reproduction, it is strictly voluntary, it is not transmitted by heredity, it is happening at a much faster rate than any previous evolutionary change, and the stakes are much higher.

But if this next step is to become like Christ, then doesn’t that mean that all men who have taken this step are exactly alike?  Not at all, says Lewis.  Lewis uses light and salt as illustrations, presumably because Jesus used light and salt as illustrations to describe the Kingdom of God.  If you have people who spent their entire lives inside a cave and described to them what light is like and how it shines on all things, they would probably imagine that it makes all things look alike.  But we know that light really shows us what things truly look like and how they are different from each other.  In the same way, if you give a taste of salt to someone who has never tasted it and then explain that we use it on all our foods, he would probably imagine that the salt causes everything to taste alike.  But we know that salt really brings out the different flavors of all the different foods.  (This is only true to a certain point.  Add too much salt to any food and it will kill the other flavors, but you can never add too much Christ to a person.)

Thus it is only by surrendering to Christ and becoming like Him that we truly become ourselves.  There is an awful lot that we like to think of as being truly us, that can easily be explained away by means of circumstances outside us.  Lewis gives this example:

Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage.  Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals.  I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe:  most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained.  It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

At the beginning of this section Lewis said that there were personalities in God.  Now Lewis finishes by saying that there is no personality anywhere outside of God–because so much of what we consider to be our own personality can be explained away by natural causes.  You will not have a real self until you give yourself up to Him.  But you must not do so for the purpose of gaining a real self; this must be a blind and complete surrender.  Other areas of life work the same way; you will not make a good impression with other people if you are always worried about making a good impression.  Writers and artists who worry about trying to be original will not be original.

The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.  Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.  Lose your life and you will save it.  Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end:  submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.  Keep back nothing.  Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.  Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

And that brings us to the end of Mere Christianity.  Some concluding thoughts about the book as a whole:

First of all, you need to read this book.  Beg, borrow, or steal a copy if you do not have one, and then read it.  If you have read it already, read it again.  Hopefully what I have written here in these posts will be helpful to you in getting more out of Lewis’s writing as you read it.  But it is not a substitute for you actually reading the book; nor was it intended to be.

This is probably not the most intuitive way in which to organize a synopsis of the Christian faith, to start with right and wrong and then move to God, Jesus Christ, Christian behavior, and close it out with the Trinity and other difficult theological stuff.  But countless people have found Lewis’s work to be a very effective presentation of Christian apologetics and the Christian faith.  If you think you can do better, then by all means go for it, but I think you will be very hard pressed to top Lewis’s work.

Lewis says a lot of things that will probably shock you or offend you if you approach it from a traditional evangelical standpoint.  There is enough in Mere Christianity to offend every constituency within evangelical Protestant-dom, if that is what you are looking for.  But Lewis does not care to jump into the team sport culture that pervades much of evangelical Protestant-dom; he is too concerned with “mere Christianity” to get involved with any of our theological bickering.  Allow me to close with a paragraph from the final chapter which speaks to the divisions within the church, and specifically to the team-sport atmosphere in evangelical Protestant-dom:

Never forget that we are all still “the early Christians.”  The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy:  we are still teething.  The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite.  It thinks we are dying of old age.  But it has thought that so often before!  Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without or corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements.  But every time the world has been disappointed.  Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion.  The Man came to life again.  In a sense–and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them–that has been happening ever since.  They keep on killing the thing that He started:  and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, thy suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place.  No wonder they hate us.

Well this is it folks.  We have finally reached the end of Mere Christianity.  In the previous chapter Lewis considered the question of whether or not Christians ought to be expected to be nicer than non-Christians.  He came out saying that the true question is whether a Christian is nicer than he or she was before becoming a Christian, and even at that, that is not the point.  Jesus did not come to earth and die in order to make us nicer people, He came to make us into new men.

And that is what Lewis focuses on in this final chapter of Mere Christianity.  All of you young-earth creationists out there beware, because in this chapter Lewis shows quite clearly that he is not in your camp.  (I read this book right after I became a Christian, and I think the reason this did not raise any red flags for me was that I did not yet know enough to know that I wasn’t supposed to believe in evolution.)

Lewis uses evolution as an illustration to describe the process of our becoming “new men”.  Go back to the time of the dinosaurs.  Assuming that you could talk to dinosaurs and find out their thoughts on where the direction of evolution was going, you would probably find them thinking–assuming that they think about such things at all–that the next step in evolution would produce bigger, badder, stronger, faster dinosaurs with stronger armor and bigger teeth.  None of them would even suspect that the next step in evolution would produce relatively small, physically weak, armorless creatures who gain mastery of the entire world through the superior strength of their mind.  But that is exactly what happened.  The stream of evolution took a completely different turn, and here we are.

Now go a step further.  Look at the science fiction books and movies that we are producing and have produced for the last fifty years or so.  From that you can see that we think the next step in evolution will produce creatures like ourselves, but different in physical appearance and with much stronger cognitive and intellectual capacity.  But what if the stream of evolution once again takes a different turn?  What kind of creatures will represent the next step in the evolutionary process?

It’s already happening, says Lewis.

Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared.  And it is really new.  It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men:  it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction–a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God.  The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago.  In a sense, the change is not “Evolution” at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events but something coming into nature from the outside.

There are other ways in which this change is different from evolution.

–It is not carried on by sexual reproduction.  Sex was not always the primary means by which organisms reproduced; plants and single-celled organisms reproduce by strictly nonsexual means.  In light of this, does it come as any surprise that there would be a time in the future when sex is no longer the primary channel of development?

–It is strictly voluntary.  Up to this point, evolution has been a thing that just happens to organisms; they had no say in it.  But this is voluntary, not in the sense that we had any part in designing or determining what this new state of being would be like, but in the sense that it is offered to us and we have the choice to accept it or refuse it.

–It is not transmitted by means of heredity.  Christ is the first instance of this species of New Men, but he is more than just a specimen of the species–he is the species.  He brought His kind of life into our universe, and He transmits it not through heredity but through “good infection”.

–It is happening at a much different rate of speed.  Christianity has been in existence for two thousand years.  Compared to the time that it has taken for man to develop, that is lightning speed.

–The stakes are higher.  If an organism refused to make any of the previous evolutionary changes (assuming that it had any power to do so), the worst that could have happened was that it would have lost its earthly life.  But if we refuse to take this step, we miss out on a prize of infinitely greater value.

Well, we are not yet finished with this chapter, but I had better stop here or else you will be completely and totally exhausted out of your minds trying to work your way through this.

Watch that last step, y’all!!!!!  It’s a lulu!!!!!

Or, as Tweety Bird would say it, “Watch dat wast step!!!  It’s a wuwu!!!”

Well folks, our good friend James Dobson has gone and done it again.  As Obama tries to reach out to evangelical voters, Dobson has accused him of distorting Biblical understanding and pushing for a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution.

Let’s look at some of the comments by Obama that have drawn so much ire.

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

That seems to me like a perfectly legitimate question to ask.  Many people outside of evangelical Protestant-dom have the perception that we are all about trying to hijack the government of America and turn it into a repressive theocracy.  That is the perception which people on the outside have of us, whether we like it or not.  And given the things which the conservative Christian political activists who are getting the most media face time are saying, I don’t think this perception is too far off the mark.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is okay and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”

“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said.

The truth is that the Bible says an awful lot of things which are very difficult for us or which make little if any sense to us.  If we were to take everything that the Bible says at face value, we would have to dismantle an awful lot of American culture.  So we have constructed an interpretation of the Bible that makes it safe for us, by which anything that challenges us out of our materialistic American suburban lifestyle really doesn’t have anything to say to us.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament. “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said. Added Minnery: “… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

That may be true, but at the same time are we as American evangelicals dragging biblical understanding through the gutter by seeking to ignore or tone down the parts of the Bible that challenge our materialistic suburban ways?

Those of you who have been tracking with me for any length of time know my views on the Catholic Church:  I believe that there is much in the Catholic faith that is worthy of respect and admiration, but I am content to admire from a distance.  Today we are going to talk about one of the reasons why I am content to admire from a distance.

One word:  Mary.

Some of you who have been tracking with me for a really long time will remember a series that I did a few years back about my view of Catholicism.  In Part 3 of this series, I made the point that there are several aspects of Catholic belief that run contrary to the teaching of Scripture, and I detailed some of these.  I made the point that recent Church pronouncements on Mary rival the Mormons for creativity.

And then I found this little piece from Scott Hahn in which Mary is likened to the Ark of the Covenant.  Read it, if you will.  Be warned, though:  it is a very long read.  But then, it’s summer right now; what else are you going to do while you’re kicking back at the pool or beach?

There is very little in the way of direct Scriptural evidence to support the doctrines of Mary that have been made into dogma in recent years, but Hahn does a masterful job of pulling out a little bit of Scripture and making it seem to do the trick.

It’s as if the Catholic Church is saying, “Do you really want to be part of the One True Church?  Do you REALLY REALLY want it?  How badly do you want it?  Because if you want it bad enough, you WILL find a way to wrap your mind around all this and make it work.”

I think it would be more honest for the Catholic Church, in response to the question of why we have to believe all this stuff about Mary, to simply say “The Church teaches it” and leave it at that, rather than to send Scott Hahn out on some exegetical adventure to try and find a way to show that all of this is really connected to Scripture after all.

Walker Percy was a Louisiana author whose career spanned over three decades and whose interests included philosophy and language.  He is best known for his 1961 novel The Moviegoer.

The Message in the Bottle is a collection of essays spanning the full length of Walker Percy’s writing career.  They all hang together around the question of why, despite all of the prosperity and technology of modern times, people are increasingly sad and unfulfilled.  Percy postulates that the answer has to do with the fundamental difference between man and all of the other animals on the face of the earth–language.

Percy claims that there is a huge problem with the way in which linguists study, define, and understand human language.  The problem is this:  Human language is typically understood in terms of stimulus and response.  In the animal kingdom, the scent of deer tells the tiger that dinner is nearby and the scent of tiger tells the deer that he’d better get out of there.  Or when bees do a certain dance it tells the other bees that nectar is nearby.  What this looks like in terms of human language is that when two fishermen are out fishing and one says “Shark here”, it is simply a stimulus telling the fishermen that they need to get away.

But the linguists have got it all wrong, because human language is in fact way more sophisticated than that.  Words are symbols, and in any linguistic transaction there are four elements:  the word, the thing which the word represents, the person who says that this word represents this thing, and at least one other person who accepts this connection.  In keeping with the example of the fishermen, the behaviorist view of language may explain their behavior when the shark is coming, but it completely fails to explain what happens later that night when they are sitting in front of the fire and telling fishing stories.

Percy starts off by taking the point of view of a Martian attempting to study human language, making the observation that people have all sorts of theories about the formal and factual aspects of language but understand nothing about what language actually is.  He then discusses Helen Keller and that fateful summer day when she and her tutor went out to fetch water, and she made the connection in her mind that the stuff which was flowing over her hand was water.  In other words, “water” to her was no longer just a command to go and fetch water, “water” was now the name by which the actual stuff was known.

The next several essays all deal with various facets of language:  metaphor, poetry, the distinction between “science” and “news”, culture and the scientific method, and traveling as a way to attempt to find meaning in life.  He closes out the book with a final essay in which he attempts to offer his own crude model to explain the essence of language.  (I could try to explain it here, but it would require going into a great deal of detail and complication.  You need to read the book.)

At any rate, if you want to read the musings of one of the finest Southern authors of our day on the subject of language and the difference that it makes to our ability to find happiness and fulfillment in life, then I strongly recommend this book.  It may be tough to wrap your mind around everything that he says, but it will be worth the effort.

We are now only two chapters away from the end of Mere Christianity.  We are in the section called “Beyond Personality”, in which Lewis discusses what a God who is beyond personality looks like and how we as humans can engage with a God who is beyond personality and experience that life which is beyond personality.  Along the way, Lewis answers a number of common questions and objections, and in this chapter Lewis tackles the question:  “If Christianity is true why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians?”

What lies behind this question?  There are two possibilities, one reasonable and the other not so reasonable.  The first is that if Christianity is real then there is an expectation that it ought to be able to change lives, and that we ought to be able to see at least some evidence of this in the behavior of people who identify themselves as Christians.  Indeed, Jesus Himself told us that we would know whether or not someone is truly a Christian by their fruit–that is, by the difference that it makes upon their outward behavior.  If being a Christian has truly made no difference upon the outward behavior of one who identifies himself as such, then there is reason to doubt whether or not he is really a Christian at all.

The second, which is not so reasonable, is the idea that the world is clearly divided into two camps:  people who are 100 percent Christian, and people who are 100 percent non-Christian.  And the people in the Christian camp are without fail going to be nicer than the people in the non-Christian camp.  Many non-Christians hold this expectation, and love to cite examples of Christian misbehavior as evidence to discredit Christianity.  Many evangelicals are among the worst offenders of those who hold this expectation.  They love to say that people are either in or out, saved or not saved, that there is no such thing as “almost saved”.  (I wrote about this in an earlier post.)  And they love to say that Christians are morally superior people (because of the power of God) who can keep the commandments and live moral lives better than people who do not believe.  (I also wrote about this earlier.)

But this expectation is unreasonable, for several reasons.  First, very few people are 100 percent Christian or 100 percent non-Christian.  The vast majority of us are somewhere in between.  Many people in church who call themselves Christian are actually in a process of slowly and gradually drifting away in their hearts.  At the same time there are many non-Christians who are in a process of slowly being drawn to Christ, even though they may not know it or be willing to admit it yet.  (This is why it is totally wrong to say that almost saved is totally lost.)  Also there are many people in other religions who are drawn to the parts of their religion which are consistent with Christianity while deemphasizing the rest, even though they may still profess to believe the rest as well.

Second, it is simply not fair to compare Christians as a whole with non-Christians as a whole, or even to compare an individual Christian with an individual non-Christian.  The question to ask is not whether such-and-such Christian is nicer than such-and-such non-Christian, but whether such-and-such Christian is nicer than he or she would have been if he or she never became a Christian.  Temperament is just a natural part of our disposition which has nothing whatsoever to do with anything we do.  In other words, some people are naturally nice and others are naturally not nice.  If a person is naturally not nice, then it’s a miracle if they are able to be nice at all.  If a person is naturally nice, then there’s no telling how much nicer they might be able to be if they let God have His way.  Think of it like factories:  one factory may be so outdated and decrepit that it’s a wonder that it produces anything at all, while another may be so advanced and up-to-date that it’s a wonder it doesn’t produce much more than it does.  If God has His way, both factories will be placed under new management which will maximize the productivity of each, and eventually the one with outdated equipment will have all its machinery replaced and brought up to standard.

Third, this is problematic because it may lead people to think Christianity is something which only not-nice people need, and which nice people do not need.  The problem with this is that human temperament is not due to any choices which we make.  God can just as easily create a nice person, or change a not-so-nice person into a nice person.  But both the nice person and the not-so-nice person have wills, which they must surrender to God but are perfectly free to choose not to.  Many nice people fall into the trap of thinking that their niceness is their own, and that they don’t need God to help them to be nice.  But this is a trap, because like all other things in nature, their niceness is temporary.  And it is only if they freely offer it to God that they have a chance to see it become permanent.

Making people nice does not cause them to be redeemed, though being redeemed may cause people to become nicer.  A world full of nice people is not automatically saved; in fact it may be much harder to save than a world full of not-so-nice people.  Because the not-so-nice people have no illusions about the whole thing.  After any serious attempt to be nice they realize that they can’t pull it off no matter how hard they try, and thus their only two options are to turn to Christ or to despair completely.  For this reason, one should not be surprised to see the world of Christianity filled with not-so-nice people:  they are the ones who know they need Christ, while the nice people do not think they need Him at all.

There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us.  If you are a nice person–if virtue comes easily to you–beware!  Much is expected from those to whom much is given.  If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel:  and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous.  The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.

But if you are a poor creature–poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels–saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion–nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends–do not despair.  He knows all about it.  You are one of the poor whom He blessed.  He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive.  Keep on.  Do what you can.  One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrapheap and give you a new one.  And then you may astonish us all–not least yourself:  for you have learned your driving in a hard school.  (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.)

But it is important to not dwell too long on this question.  God came to produce new men, not better men of the old kind.  It is easy to try to discredit Christianity by comparing some Christian who is not nice with a nice person who is not a Christian.  But this is only evading the issue.

What can you ever really know of other people’s souls–of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?  One soul in the whole creation you do know:  and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.  If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.  You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.  What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

In the previous chapter Lewis asked the question “Is Christianity hard or easy?”  He said that Christianity is all about surrendering everything inside of us to Christ, and this is hard.  But in the long run it is a whole lot easier than this business which most of us are trying to pull off–to indulge our natural, selfish, sinful desires and still turn out as good people.  In this chapter Lewis considers the command “Be perfect” (or “Be ye perfect” in the old King James).

Most of us shy away from this because it seems an impossible order.  And it is, for us as humans acting on our own strength.  If the whole Christian life depended upon our being perfect, our position would be hopeless.  But Christ is there to help us.

And that is the only help He will give us.  He will not help us to simply become better people; the only help He will give us is to become perfect.  This may–and in all probability it will–be a long, arduous, and painful process, but that is exactly what we are in for and nothing less.

Lewis likens this to when he was growing up and he would have a toothache.  He would not tell his mother about it unless it was serious.  Not because he doubted that she would give him medicine for it.  She would–but then she would take him to the dentist.  And once those dentists start digging around in your mouth they start doing things to all sorts of other teeth that have nothing to do with the tooth that is actually hurting.  (Some of you can probably relate to this.)  This is because the dentist is not concerned with simply stopping the pain; instead he wants to fix your mouth so that everything will be right.

Many people shrink back from perfection because they think it is a conceited thing to aspire to.  Shouldn’t it be enough to aspire to be an ordinary, decent person, and for that to be the extent of what you desire for God to transform you into?  Not so, says Lewis.  The mistake here is that it doesn’t matter what kind of creatures we want to be; what matters is what God wants us to be and what He created us to be.  God is the artist and we are simply His work.  He knows what He intends to make us into.  To shrink back from this is not humility, it is laziness and cowardice.

The other side of this is that while God is not satisfied with anything less than perfection in us, He is pleased when we make our first feeble attempts to move in that direction.  Lewis cites George MacDonald’s illustration that every father is pleased when his baby boy takes his first faltering steps when learning how to walk, but satisfied with nothing less than the steady, solid walk of a man.  “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

Lewis ties both these ideas together like this:

On the one hand we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us even through the next twenty-four hours as “decent” people.  If He does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin.  On the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what He is determined to produce in every one of us in the end.  The job will not be completed in this life:  but He means to get us as far as possible before death.

(Here Lewis tips his hand as to the fact that he believes in purgatory.  For those of you who don’t know, purgatory is part of Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox, I think, but I’m not fully certain about that) belief.  It is a place where most people who are ultimately bound for Heaven go immediately after death, where the soul undergoes a process of purification and formation into the image of Christ prior to entry into Heaven.  Granted there is little if anything in the Bible to support the concept of purgatory, but then the Bible says very little about what happens to the soul from the time immediately after death to the time that Christ returns at the end to judge all things.  The upshot is that Catholics believe that everyone goes to Heaven or Hell after death, but some who are going to Heaven take longer to get there.)

Lewis then borrows another illustration from George MacDonald to reiterate what the spiritual transformation process is like.  It is like an old house that is bought and repaired.  At first the owner does things that make sense, like fixing the plumbing and stopping up the leaks in the roof.  This is fine with the house, because those repairs needed to be made anyway.  But then things start to get crazy.  The owner builds out a couple of new wings, adds new floors and balconies and courtyards, runs up towers and turrets.  The house does not understand what is going on.  It was fine to remain just as a simple cottage.  But the owner wanted to turn it into a palace.

Lewis ties it all together at the end like this:

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas.  Nor is it a command to do the impossible.  He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.  He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and He is going to make good His words.  If we let Him–for we can prevent Him, if we choose–He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.  The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for.  Nothing less.  He meant what He said.