LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
Human Wickedness
Following the reasoning of C. S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain, we understand that love can cause pain to its object -that is, to the loved person-, but only if that object needs some change to become fully worthy of being loved.
Now, why do we men need to change so much? The Christian answer is so well known that it hardly needs to be said: man is essentially sinful. But to make this truth really come alive in the mind of man today is very difficult. Why?
There are two main causes. The first: in the last hundred years we have been almost exclusively concentrated on benevolence or mercy, and it seems to us that we are essentially 'humanitarians'. The second is the effect of psychoanalysis, which has said that the feeling of shame is dangerous and harmful. It has been held that we should not be ashamed of such things as unchastity, untruthfulness and envy, and so we have fallen into shamelessness.
It is therefore essential for Christianity to recover the old sense of sin. Christ takes it for granted that men are evil. As long as we do not feel this to be true, we will not understand his teachings. When someone attempts to become a Christian without this prior awareness of sin, it is almost certain that the result will be a certain resentment against God as someone who is always inexplicably angry.
The instant that a man feels true guilt, he can rationalize his shameful condition in the sight of men, and especially in the sight of God. When we merely say that we are bad, God's "wrath" seems a fierce doctrine; but as soon as we perceive our badness, that wrath appears as inevitable - even as a corollary of God's goodness.
Our natural evil manifests itself in many ways: thinking that, since outwardly we appear decent, inwardly we are also decent, and that we are in no way less than others; that we are part of an unjust social system, and that we share collective faults, thus neglecting our individual corruption; that the mere passage of time erases sins; that, since all men are evil, my particular evil must be quite excusable; that Christianity has been reduced too much to a matter of morality; that we are not responsible for our evil, since it is an inevitable legacy of our ancestors, or is a result of our finitude.
We need to see that we are creatures whose character must be, in certain respects, a horror to God, just as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. The holier a person is, the more fully conscious he is of that fact. When saints say that they are vile we must believe it: they are recording a truth with scientific precision. So, then, man's character evidently needs to be changed. How can it be changed? It is here that we begin to explain the pain.