We have an enemy. That enemy is Satan. He will use just about anything/anyone to confuse the people of God. One of the things that he is using today that is reaping a huge bounty and creating confusion within the Body of Christ, it is FEAR! It is important that we understand who the characters are in this book.
Screwtape Characters
The devil is the author of “The Screwtape Letters.” Screwtape is a tempter that has been assigned to his nephew Wormwood> The task? To offer advice to Wormwood about how to win the soul of an unnamed British man. Screwtape will use words of endearment to cajole Wormwood to carry out his task. Screwtape has won many souls for Hell. He is an ambassador within Hell’s corporate structure. Although Screwtape has been successful in tempting others to become sinful people destined for hell, he is angry and critical of Hell’s bureaucracy and of course of Wormwood. He repeatedly reprimands Wormwood for making mistakes with the Patient. When Wormwood fails to win the Patient for Hell, Screwtape gives him a verbal tongue lashing.
Below is today’s excerpt from The Screw Tape Letters.
Screwtape shows Wormwood how to transform a minor trespass into a major sin:
Success here depends on confusing him. If you try to make him explicitly and professedly proud of being a Christian, you will probably fail; the Enemy’s warnings are too well known. If, on the other hand, you let the idea of ‘we Christians’ drop out altogether and merely make him complacent about ‘his set’, you will produce not true spiritual pride but mere social vanity which, by comparison, is a trumpery, puny little sin. What you want is to keep a sly self-congratulation mixing with all his thoughts and never allow him to raise the question ‘What, precisely, am I congratulating myself about?’ The idea of belonging to an inner ring, of being in a secret, is very sweet to him. Play on that nerve. Teach him, using the influence of this girl when she is silliest, to adopt an air of amusement at the things the unbelievers say. Some theories which he may meet in modern Christian circles may here prove helpful; theories, I mean, that place the hope of society in some inner ring of ‘clerks’, some trained minority of theocrats. It is no affair of yours whether those theories are true or false; the great thing is to make Christianity a mystery religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates.
Lewis 1996, 132
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters
You Are Not the Only One 