Joy Davidman on Materialism
For my Christian friends...
For many contemporaries, God has dwindled into a noble abstraction, a tendency of history, a goal of evolution; has thinned out into a concept useful for organising world peace - a good thing as an idea. But not the Word made flesh, who died for us and rose again from the dead. Not a Personality that a man can feel any love for. And not, certainly, the enternal Lover who took the initiative and fell in love with us.
Is is shocking to think of God as a pursuing lover? Then Christianity is shocking. If we accept the supernatural only as something too weak and passive to interfere with the natural, we had best call ourselves materialists and be done with it - we shall gain in honesty what we lose in respectability. Here's a test to tell if your faith is anything more than faith-and-water. Suppose that tonight the Holy Spirit lifts you high into space, speaks a message to your conscience, then invisibly tucks you back into your safe little bed again. Will you consider the possibility that this experience is genuine? Or will you conclude at once that you must be crazy, and start yelling for a psychiatrist?
And here is a more practical test - since, in all probability, very few of us will be lifted from our beds tonight. Do you think that Christianity is primarily valuable as a means of solving our 'real' problem - i.e., how to build a permenantly healthy, wealthy, and wise society in this world? If you do, you're at least half a materialist, and someday the Marxists may be calling you comrade.
So strong is the materialist climate of opinion that even convinced Christians sometimes feel compelled to defend Christianity against the charge of 'otherworldliness' - to slight the value as the passport to heaven in favour of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling Earth. Yet we must not blame our earthiness entirely upon Western scientific progress, as if materialism has waited for Edison to invent it. By no means. The Rome of Lucretius, the Athens of Epicurus - even the Israel of Ecclesiastes - were hardly without their ancient materialist philosophers. Devotion to the prince of this world is one of the ancient temptations, and perhaps our remote ancestors had no sooner invented the slingshot than they reared back on their hind legs and proclaimed that their technical progress had now enabled them to do without religion. The choice before us today is just what is always was - whether to be worldly or otherworldly; whether to live for the unloving self or to live for the love of God.
- Joy Davidman
For many contemporaries, God has dwindled into a noble abstraction, a tendency of history, a goal of evolution; has thinned out into a concept useful for organising world peace - a good thing as an idea. But not the Word made flesh, who died for us and rose again from the dead. Not a Personality that a man can feel any love for. And not, certainly, the enternal Lover who took the initiative and fell in love with us.
Is is shocking to think of God as a pursuing lover? Then Christianity is shocking. If we accept the supernatural only as something too weak and passive to interfere with the natural, we had best call ourselves materialists and be done with it - we shall gain in honesty what we lose in respectability. Here's a test to tell if your faith is anything more than faith-and-water. Suppose that tonight the Holy Spirit lifts you high into space, speaks a message to your conscience, then invisibly tucks you back into your safe little bed again. Will you consider the possibility that this experience is genuine? Or will you conclude at once that you must be crazy, and start yelling for a psychiatrist?
And here is a more practical test - since, in all probability, very few of us will be lifted from our beds tonight. Do you think that Christianity is primarily valuable as a means of solving our 'real' problem - i.e., how to build a permenantly healthy, wealthy, and wise society in this world? If you do, you're at least half a materialist, and someday the Marxists may be calling you comrade.
So strong is the materialist climate of opinion that even convinced Christians sometimes feel compelled to defend Christianity against the charge of 'otherworldliness' - to slight the value as the passport to heaven in favour of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling Earth. Yet we must not blame our earthiness entirely upon Western scientific progress, as if materialism has waited for Edison to invent it. By no means. The Rome of Lucretius, the Athens of Epicurus - even the Israel of Ecclesiastes - were hardly without their ancient materialist philosophers. Devotion to the prince of this world is one of the ancient temptations, and perhaps our remote ancestors had no sooner invented the slingshot than they reared back on their hind legs and proclaimed that their technical progress had now enabled them to do without religion. The choice before us today is just what is always was - whether to be worldly or otherworldly; whether to live for the unloving self or to live for the love of God.
- Joy Davidman