Screwtape And Wormwood

Screwtape and Wormwood

Everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. Philippians 3:8-9

Most Americans my age know the significance of November 22, 1963, in our country’s history, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But across the ocean at The Kilns in Oxford, another influential man also died. C. S. Lewis, recently retired as professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, died from renal failure. During his life and even today, however, he was more than noticed because of the timeless nature of his works, including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Screwtape Letters.

I have read The Screwtape Letters more than once. This series of fictional letters written by an elder devil, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, is classic mentoring (of the evil kind), as Screwtape encourages the younger devil to be even “worse” than he is. Through Lewis’s skillful hand, Screwtape touches on some of the ways that Wormwood can pull his human charge away from growing in a relationship with Christ by touching on all-too-common aspects of human nature.

For instance, he tells Wormwood to prevent his charge from looking inward to evaluate how he can be a better person. Rather, Wormwood must get his human target to concentrate on the hypocrisy that he can see in the person seated just down the pew from him every Sunday morning, forgetting that he is just as dependent on God’s grace as the “hypocrite” is. From there, Wormwood’s charge could easily fall into faulty comparisons of “I’m not as bad as he is” or “at least I haven’t done that,” rather than comparing himself to the gold standard of Christ, before whom we all fall short.

One point that especially struck me is when Lewis writes about the numbing of passion. He understands that the Christian life is not something to ease into but rather something that God wants us to jump headlong into. That idea causes the elder devil to instruct his nephew to “talk to him [his charge] about ‘moderation in all things.’ If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul.”^a

Are you committed to following Christ as passionately as Paul did, discarding the things that might hinder your faith and relationship with Jesus from growing? It might be a good practice to pick up and reread The Screwtape Letters once a year as a reminder of how easily it can happen.

Uncommon Key > God wants all of you, not you in moderation. Think of a way you have been trying to be “moderate” in your faith and what you can do to change.

^a C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 1942), 46.