Worshipping the Law While Denying Its Spirit
The English scholar C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia fantasy series, but it’s one of his works of popular theology, The Screwtape Letters, that weighs heavily on my mind these days.
Screwtape is written as a set of letters from a senior demon to an ordinary tempter, who is seeking to reap a human soul for his master below.
In Letter VII, Screwtape, the senior demon, reveals hell’s long-term strategy for the modern world: to produce people who do not believe in God but do believe, in some vague way, in magic: “If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then the end of the war [against God] will be in sight.”
That image—of
