On these Blogger pages we explore TOPICS in our desire to respond to Jesus' call to walk with Him in our world as his missionary disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring to humanity the Good News of the Father's love manifested and given in Jesus, the Divine Mercy. G.S.
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VIRILITER AGE – ACT MANFULLY (Ps 27:14) http://viriliterage.tumblr.com/
Why God Is Not Vain to Seek Praise (27) C. S. Lewis’s Most Important Discovery
By Sam Storms Nov
8, 2006 Series:
Reflections
Since the
western world is captivated, at least for now, by C. S. Lewis, and given the
fact that tomorrow (December 9, 2005) the film version of “The Lion, The Witch,
and the Wardrobe” is being released nationwide, I thought it might be good to
say something about what I consider to be Lewis’s greatest theological
discovery. I can’t say whether Lewis would rank it number one, but I suspect he
might.
Lewis was
extremely puzzled, even agitated, by the recurring demand by Christians that we
all “praise God”. That was bad enough. What made it even worse is that God
himself called for praise of God himself. This was almost
more than Lewis could stomach. What kind of “God” is it who incessantly demands
that his people tell him how great he is?
Lewis
describes his struggle and how he worked through it in an extraordinary passage
from the essay, “The Problem of Praise in the Psalms” (found in Reflections
on the Psalms [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958], pp. 90-98).
Although I’m not widely read in Lewis, of what I have read this is undoubtedly
the most important thing he ever wrote. To keep my comments distinct from those
of Lewis, mine are in brackets preceded by my name.
"[Lewis]
We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue,
intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round
every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand.
Thus a picture, at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and His
worshippers, threatened to appear in my mind. The Psalms were especially
troublesome in this way – ‘Praise the Lord,’ ‘O praise the Lord with me,’
‘Praise Him.’ … Worse still was the statement put into God’s own mouth, ‘whoso
offereth me thanks and praise, he honoureth me’ (50:23). It was hideously like
saying, ‘What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.’ … It was
extremely distressing. It made one think what one least wanted to think.
Gratitude to God, reverence to Him, obedience to Him, I thought I could
understand; not this perpetual eulogy… .”
[Storms:
I suspect this strikes us as problematic, as it did Lewis, because we want to
think that God is pre-eminently concerned with us, not himself. We want a God
who is man-centered, not God-centered. Worse still, we can’t fathom how God
could possibly love us the way we think he should if he is so unapologetically
obsessed with the praise and glory of his own name. How can God love ME if all
his infinite energy is expended in the love of HIMSELF? Part of Lewis’s
problem, as he himself confesses, was that he did not see that …]
“[Lewis]
it is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to
men. It is not of course the only way. But for many people at many times the
‘fair beauty of the Lord’ is revealed chiefly or only while they worship Him
together. Even in Judaism the essence of the sacrifice was not really that men
gave bulls and goats to God, but that by their so doing God gave Himself to
men; in the central act of our own worship of course this is far clearer –
there it is manifestly, even physically, God who gives and we who receive. The
miserable idea that God should in any sense need, or crave for, our worship
like a vain woman wanting compliments, or a vain author presenting his new
books to people who never met or heard him, is implicitly answered by the
words, ‘If I be hungry I will not tell thee' (50:12). Even if such
an absurd Deity could be conceived, He would hardly come to us, the
lowest of rational creatures, to gratify His appetite. I don’t want my dog to
bark approval of my books.”
[Storms:
Lewis is addressing, somewhat indirectly, the question: How, or better yet, Why
do you worship a God who needs nothing? If God is altogether self-sufficient
and cannot be served by human hands as if he needed anything (Acts 17:24-25;
Romans 11:33-36), least of all glory, why does he command our worship and
praise of him? Lewis continues.]
“[Lewis]
But the most obvious fact about praise – whether of God or anything – strangely
escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of
honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into
praise unless … shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately
brought in to check it. The world rings with praise – lovers praising their
mistresses [Romeo praising Juliet and vice versa], readers their favourite
poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game –
praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries,
historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles,
even sometimes politicians or scholars… . Except where intolerably adverse
circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible… .
I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they
value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she
lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?’ The Psalmists in
telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of
what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of
God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable,
what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else
we value.”
[Storms:
What Lewis is touching on here is how the love of God for sinners like you and
me is ultimately made manifest. God desires our greatest good. But what greater
good is there in the universe than God himself? So, if God is truly to love us,
he must give us himself. But merely giving us of himself is only the first step
in the expression of his affection for sinners. He must work to elicit from our
hearts rapturous praise and superlative delight because, as Lewis said, “all
enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.” That’s the way God made us. We
can’t help but praise and rejoice in what we most enjoy. The enjoyment itself
is stunted and hindered if it is never expressed in joyful celebration. Here’s
how Lewis explained it.]
“[Lewis]
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not
merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.
It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how
beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is
frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone
how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain
valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the
people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a
good joke and find no one to share it with… .
If it
were possible for a created soul fully … to ‘appreciate’, that is to love and
delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to
give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme
beatitude… . To see what the doctrine really means, we must suppose ourselves
to be in perfect love with God – drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that
delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable,
hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in
effortless and perfect expression, our joy is no more separable from the praise
in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives
is separable from the brightness it sheds. The Scotch catechism says that man’s
chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know
that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us
to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”
[Storms:
If you can, go back and read it again. It’s not the sort of statement one can
fully digest at one sitting. Permit me to summarize.
God’s
pursuit of my praise of him is not weak self-seeking but the epitome of
self-giving love! If my satisfaction in him is incomplete until expressed in praise
of him for satisfying me with himself (note well: with HIMSELF, not his gifts
or blessings, but the intrinsic beauty and splendor of God as God), then God’s
effort to elicit my worship (what Lewis before thought was inexcusable
selfishness) is both the most loving thing he could possibly do for me and the
most glorifying thing he could possibly do for himself. For in my gladness in
him (not his gifts) is his glory in me.
If that
was hard to digest, try this.
If God is
to love my wife, Ann, optimally, he must bestow or impart the best gift he has,
the greatest prize, the most precious treasure, the most exalted and worthy
thing within his power to give. That gift, of course, is himself. Nothing in
the universe is as beautiful and captivating and satisfying as God!
So, if
God loves her he will give himself to her and then work in her soul to awaken
her to his beauty and all-sufficiency. In other words, he will strive by all
manner and means to intensify and expand and enlarge her joy in him. All of
which is to say, and I owe this thought to John Piper, that God’s love for Ann
is seen not in him making much of her, but in him graciously enabling her to
enjoy making much of him forever.
So, God
comes to Ann and says: “Here I am in all my glory: incomparable, infinite,
immeasurable, unsurpassed. See me! Be satisfied with me! Enjoy me! Celebrate
who I am! Experience the height and depth and width and breadth of savoring and
relishing me!”
Does that
sound like God pursuing his own glory? Yes. But it also sounds like God loving
my wife perfectly and passionately. The only way it is not real love is
if there is something for Ann better than God: something more beautiful than
God that he can show her, something more pleasing and satisfying than God with
which he can fill her heart, something more glorious and majestic than God with
which she can occupy herself for eternity. But there is no such thing!
Anywhere! Ever!]
AUTHOR Sam Storms
From: http://viriliterage.tumblr.com/
On these Blogger pages we explore TOPICS in our desire to respond to Jesus' call to walk with Him in our world as his missionary disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring to humanity the Good News of the Father's love manifested and given in Jesus, the Divine Mercy. G.S.
© 2006-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2006-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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