Screwtape's New Deal

Yesterday the family and I trekked to Chattanooga to the gorgeous Tivoli Theater to watch Max McLean perform in "The Screwtape Letters." He did an admirable job of bringing C.S. Lewis's devil to life. Screwtape, the experienced temptor, advises an apprentice devil on techniques to bring a young Christian back into the pathway of the damned.

I read the book first when I was a teenager, and it make a lasting impression on me. Since then I've seen exactly how accurate Lewis's take on tempation has been. The enemy has literally tried every one in the book on me personally, especially the tempation to pride.

Watching Screwtape come to life made me ponder, from whence come temptations? Are they of external origin, or internal? The Biblical answer is yes, or both, because both are presented to us. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, but James tells us we are led astray by our own evil desires (check James 1:13-14). Satan is not just a fairy-tale personification of badness, but a genuine, pernicious force. His influence on us comes by exploiting those persisting propensities to evil that remain within despite our new birth.

Lewis would need to add a new technique to Screwtape's bag of tricks if he were writing today. The magazines of pulp science, Discover in particular, make much these days of the technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. This probing technique shows activity inside the cranium as thoughts flash here and there. A lustful thought, a racy picture causes flashes in one area, hatred in another. From this, we are told that our brains are built to perform these functions, and they're just manifestations of evolutionary biology. Thus, persistent pridefulness is actually good for us. I'm the best hunter in the forest.... I'll bring down that mastodon and feed the tribe single-handedly. We're just poor creatures who must follow the pathways of our neurons, and thus we're not really responsible for the destruction our sin produces.

To really understand what's going on, we have to go back. The problem is not our neural pathways, the problem is sin. Sin, brought forward through the ages from our original parents, has corrupted our bodies and brain, such that sin, which should immediately cause pain, instead causes pleasure. This aberration is, thankfully, subject to divine intervention in our lives today. A Christian's goal is to one day find that his thoughts are so controlled by the will of our Heavenly Father that even the remembrance of sin causes immediate recoil. Then Screwtape and his minions will be defeated.