Evolution and Christianity »

I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true. That is where you and I differ. Thinking as I do, I can’t help regarding your advice (that I henceforth include arguments against Evolution in all my Christian apologetics) as a temptation to fight [...]

God’s Love »

Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. . . . .
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested,” [...]

Simple Evil and Complex Good »

A cruel man oppresses his neighbour, and so does simple evil. But in doing such evil, he is used by God, without his own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good–so that the first man serves God as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, [...]

The Power of Obedience »

The content of our obedience–the thing we are commanded to do–will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely [...]

The Danger of Apparent Self-Sufficiency »

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in [...]

Divine Humility »

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it “unmindful of His [...]

Sin’s Blindness »

Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. . . .We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know [...]