Anyway, I shall forge ahead and live dangerously and use the word again: the word he chose to address me with -- nasty, along with a very nice email from a reader admonishing me quite lovingly to be more positive, brought to mind a passage from CS Lewis' Mere Christianity which always blesses me from his chapter "Nice People or New Men" so I think I will post it here. I don't think I have posted it before -- at least I cannot find it in the archives. Perhaps it is in something from the old site that I haven't brought over yet. Keep in mind that the entire chapter that this is taken from does expose some of his inclusivist leanings, which I do reject, although I do see the point he may have been trying to make (that the Holy Spirit may be drawing people we do not suspect are interested in Christ).
If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. 'Why drag God into it?' you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped lip by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are 'rich' in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
It is very different for the nasty people--the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following--or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them. They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the 'poor': He blessed them. They are the 'awful set' He goes about with--and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, 'If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.'
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 upbringing 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 scrap-heap 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). (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity pp214-215).
I am one of the nasty people. I am sure of that. Christ help me, for I cannot help myself. I admire people like the guys at CRN.(mis)info, Richard Abanes, etc, who never struggle with those cardinal sins -- feelings of anger or cynicism betrayal or jealousy, especially jealousy for the unpolluted Word of God. I have a lump in my throat as I write that. For whatever that's worth.
Yes, I am nasty sometimes. Probably too often. We laud Martin Luther for being hard hitting and going on for page after page with dripping sarcasm against Erasmus...we totally love how Amos called the women of Bashan COWS who sat around drinking wine and having their husbands wait on them. Or Jeremiah condemning the "prophets" of Israel in his time. Jesus publicly maligning the leaders of the church of his day (e.g. the powerful leaders, not the little guys with small ministries) and calling them NAMES! *gasp* (Jesus used ad hominems?)
But people like Ken Silva, Chris Rosebrough, Ingrid Schlueter, etc, they are not allowed the same margins... even when they don't go anywhere near as far toward being provocative as some of the lauded heroes of the faith.
When a dog barks at an intruder, we don't scold him or chide him for being too noisy or upset or suspicious. And we also wouldn't begrudge him being quiet and content in between calls of alarm would we?
On the contrary,
“All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, yea, all ye beasts in the forest. His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs, which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, everyone for his gain, from his quarter. Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow shall be as this day and much more abundant” – (Is.56:9-12). “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” – (I Pet.5:8).
