Giving Our Pride to God

Giving Our Pride to God

“He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.”

- Troilus and Cressida 2.3.152-4, Agamemnon to Ajax

What killed Desdemona on her wedding night? What drove Menelaus to battle Troy for Helen? What shame made Oedipus to smote his eyes, or Clytemnestra kill her husband? Sin has always framed the drama great stories are made of. The Greeks formed a list of the sins of man, which Pope Gregory I revised to the seven deadly sins. His list has been used as the basis of literature (such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy), movies, and philosophical writing. Fascination with sin is something which humans, especially Christians, immerse ourselves in. As summed up by Pope Gregory, the seven deadly sins are extravagance, gluttony, greed, apathy, envy, wrath, and pride. Modern lists add sins such as lust and sloth to these seven. Though focus should be spread over the entirety of this list I feel, for the sake of clarity, that focusing on just one of these sins is more prudent.

During the past month I was enrolled in the “Developing a Christian Mind: C.S. Lewis” course at Calvin College. The purpose of this course was, as can be inferred from the title, to develop a Christian perspective of the world. This was to be done by combining “Engaging God’s World” - a book written for the course by Cornelius Plantinga JR - with a topic of the professor’s choosing; in this case various essays, speeches, and excerpt of C.S Lewis’s works. During the course of this class I was reaffirmed in many beliefs I had already held, chiefly on pride and its place in the church.

While we as Christians often shy away from “pride” in any form, it cannot be denied that God calls us to have some pride in ourselves as human beings and followers of Him. As Plantinga puts it in chapter two of “Engaging God’s World”, “We are not God, but only images of God.”[1] As creatures created in God’s image [2], we are called to have some self-respect, and even take some pride in ourselves as images, or reflections of God in this world such as taking care of our bodies[3] and respecting others as images of God. That is pride that is within the Natural Law, as C.S. Lewis called the over arching moral law God has written on every human heart.

The pride that I’m talking about is the misplaced sense of entitlement that comes with using God and Christianity as some moral high-ground that raises your pedestal above that of the non-believer’s or your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. That following Christ somehow minimizes the amount of sin that has tainted you, and that you somehow shine brighter to God than the person next to you. As Plantinga states, “Worldly people are often better than we expect, and church people are often worse.”[4] Christians are just as guilty of sin as non-believers are. The only difference between a Christian and a non-believer is faith and God’s promise of redemption. In fact, church going people are far more dangerous to a Christian than non-believers. Satan goes to Church more often than anyone else[5], because he knows that that human pride can be bent to serve him, and where better to play with pride than holy ground?

While Plantinga does not spend much time on the consuming subject of pride, C.S. Lewis does. Pride and the Devil walk hand in hand. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis shows sin from the perspective of Screwtape, an old devil, who is teaching his nephew how to control his patient (human man) in the proper fashion. Screwtape explains to his nephew, and to us, that the way of the devil is not quick, or even noticeable. It is an easy, safe, slow decent into Hell. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”[6] Pride acts in much the same way. A compliment here, an accomplishment there, and soon we are riding high on an ego formed by things we think we are the authors of.

Pride is a confusing, wicked vice. C.S Lewis put it best in “Mere Christianity” when he said, “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”[7] It is too easy to say, “I am better than my neighbor”, especially in academia. Credentials create an egotistical fog that blocks common sense. The need to be the best takes over and drives away contentment in the gifts God has provided in order to pursue the illusive prize of perfection. And such pride is to be expected the more specialized a field becomes.

But within the church, there is no judge but God, and none is more important than his brother. There are no ordinary people[8], and as brothers and sisters in Christ it is far more important to love one another than it is to be the best. C.S Lewis, writing on pride within the church in “Mere Christianity” in regards to those Christians obviously eaten up with pride, had this to say:

I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men.[9]

I believe it is more important for us to focus on our own prideful nature as humans than it is to focus on the pride of others, or even the nature of sin among unbelievers, for this reason. Doing God’s work for yourself is doing the work of the Devil. We should strive for true humility ourselves instead of evaluating our brothers and sisters to find them lacking. Taking pleasure in criticizing fellow Christians is allowing the Devil to revel in your own folly.

It is the unfortunate nature of humanity to wrap ourselves in pride and shut out what is good in God. Our egos are ever whispering for us to allow the bubble to grow larger. But C.S. Lewis also shows us what true humility looks like.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.[10]

When true humility wins out, you will not be thinking of yourself. Is not true selflessness the absence of selfishness? The absence of pride is not an absence of self-respect, but rather the absence of an illusion, one that dictates that you are the author of your accomplishment instead of placing God as the author of all.

The only way I can liken C.S. Lewis’s “not thinking about yourself at all” is to selflessness. You are never interested in what could happen to you when you act on behalf of another. The true hero never thinks about how it would serve to push the child out of the way of a speeding car. So too would our actions be in the absence of pride. “How could writing a paper glorify me?” would turn into, “How can writing a paper glorify God and help those who read it?” While most of these thoughts were already present in me before undergoing DCM, I would like to think that being given the time to read C.S. Lewis primarily was a great blessing in furthering my understanding of human nature vs. God’s directive. While no one can boast to know what God’s will for the world truly is, and no one can surpass Him, I would like to think that consciously changing my mindset from “me” to “He” could further His kingdom in our world.

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[1] Plantinga, Engaging God’s World (Wm. B. Ergmans Publishing Co., 2002), 41.

[2] “…Since you have taken off your old self with its practices ¹⁰and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Col. 3:9-10, NIV.

[3] ^“19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;” 1 Cor. 6:19, NIV.

[4] Plantinga, Engaging God’s World (Wm. B. Ergmans Publishing Co., 2002), 60.

[5] Plantinga, Engaging God’s World (Wm. B. Ergmans Publishing Co., 2002), 61.

[6] Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Letter XII

[7] Lewis, Mere Christianity: The Great Sin (Touchstone, 1996).

[8] Lewis, The Weight of Glory. 9.

[9] Lewis, Mere Christianity: The Great Sin (Touchstone, 1996).

[10] Lewis, Mere Christianity: The Great Sin (Touchstone, 1996).

Bibliography

1. Plantinga, Cornelius JR. Engaging God’s World. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Ergmans Publishing Co., 2002.

2. Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. 1st Touchstone Book ed.: Touchstone, 1996.

And

The Weight of Glory. 1st Touchstone Book ed.: Simon & Schuster. 1996.

And

The Screwtape Letters. The MacMillan Company. 1961

3. The Holy Bible: New International Version containing the Old Testament and the New Testament. Zondervan Bible Publishers. 1988.