Christianity is Shocking

Good Morning. I am posting an article from my birthday present from my dear wife. I am 26 today for those who need to know and yes I feel old. Vanessa is due in 10 days so I will be a Dad. Everyone knows Dads are old. Well, anyhow, enjoy this excerpt.

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 organizing 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 eternal Lover who took the initiative and fell in love with us.

Is it 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...

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 its value as the passport to heaven in favor of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling earth. Yet we must blame our earthliness entirely upon Western scientific progress, as if materialism had waited for Edison to invent it. By no means. The Rome of Lucretius, the Athens of Epicurus–even the Isreal of Ecclesiastes–were hardly without their 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 it always was–whether to be worldly or otherworldly; whether to live for the unloving self or to live the love God.

Joy Davidman (1915-1960)–Poet, author, and the wife of C.S. Lewis.