C. S. Lewis and the Imprecatory Psalms
By
Victor Shepherd
This article was given
as an address at a conference of the C. S. Lewis Society.
As has been the case with
so very many teenagers, it was Mere Christianity that captured me.
The small book spoke of much that I had been exposed to for years, such as
the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, but concerning which I
had remained semi-bewildered. For years I had struggled to understand
matters that I knew to be at the heart of the faith even as the manner in
which these "building blocks" were articulated had left me unsatisfied.
Lewis allowed me to understand and therefore to own without reservation what
theretofore I knew I was supposed to affirm, wanted to, but couldn't quite
endorse as long as mental reservations remained.
Having been won by
Mere Christianity I galloped ahead on assorted Lewis coursers, such as
The Four Loves. Immediately the ambiguities around the word "love"
evaporated. Aristotle had written, "It is a mark of educated people that
they expect the degree of precision which the subject matter allows." Thanks
to Lewis I was gaining an education through his trademark clarity and
precision.
Next I probed his
fantasy, written in an era that didn't use expressions like "spiritual
formation" and "spiritual direction," yet clearly (it is evident now)
unusually helpful in acquainting earnest Christians with the nature and
subtlety of spiritual seduction, the relentless of temptation that is
simultaneously frontal and tangential, as well as the God-appointed means of
recognizing and resisting the encroachments of Screwtape himself.
The last genre of
Lewis's writings to move me was his fiction: 'Til We Have Faces and
Tales of Narnia.
In the course of these literary discoveries I was reading Lewis's work in
philosophy. His The Problem of Pain brought me much help on a topic
that is surely a problem for every thoughtful person. The Abolition of
Man nourished and confirmed my growing suspicion that public education
(my wife, a teacher, regularly brought home Board of Education materials
that were patently sub-Christian and philosophically shallow) had forfeited
a substantive understanding of reality generally and the human specifically.
The Abolition of Man had argued cogently that there is a
long-recognized, trans-cultural recognition of the intractable structures of
the world and no less of the human. In other words, said Lewis, there
forever remains a givenness, a non-plasticity to reality and the human that
can't be violated. All attempts at doing so merely leave human beings
breaking themselves over this intractability, the "Tao," as surely as
attempts at "breaking" the laws of nature find us consistently confirming
those laws. Someone who hurls herself out of an upper storey window doesn't
break or even defy the law of gravity, Lewis pointed out; she merely
confirms it. Abandoning the "Tao", public education had surrendered to
romanticism, substituting "How does it feel (to you)?" for "What is?
and "What is right? My heart ached for him in light of his distress
over Miracles. Less about miracles than about God's transcendence.
Miracles appeared to many of its readers to be a compelling apologetic
- until an Oxford philosopher, herself a Christian, we should note, exposed
unarguably the philosophical errors in the book. Lewis had been depressed
for six months, feeling that he had "let the side down," seemingly feeling
that he had failed the Kingdom if not put it at risk. (He never attempt to
write philosophy again, confining himself to his proper metier, fiction and
fantasy.)
And of course I continued to read his essays,
the handiest reading material for someone who has few protracted periods of
leisure needed to read longer fiction but whose briefer interstices of
leisure permit an item that can be finished quickly.
What had wedded me now to Lewis's writing?
Unquestionably it was his sheer intellectual rigour. On page after page I
knew I was exposed to someone who could think. Most people, Northrop Frye
was later to point out, don't think: they merely reshuffle the bagful of
cliches that they carry around with them and bring forward when they want to
appear the soul of wisdom.
Along with his intellectual rigour I was
thrilled by his verbal exactness. Lewis was aware that some words have a
broad range of meanings, any one of which is Ie mot juste in highly
specific contexts. His awareness of context spared readers a vagueness that
would never have served his purposes as a spokesperson of the gospel. Other
words, of course, highly specific, admit of little "surplus meaning." Lewis
deployed these as deftly as the micro-surgeon knows that a crowbar is no
substitute for a scalpel.
Lewis knew that language determines how much of the God-given universe we
can inhabit. While never quoting the philosopher Martin Heidegger, "Language
is the house of being," Lewis agreed with the concept. Whereas most people
assume that the chief function of language is to name objects ("horse"
denotes a quadruped that eats oats and runs fast), Lewis, like Heidegger and
Orwell, knew that once language has served to denote or refer to objects, it
creates inhabitability within the universe. In short, the person with more
sophisticated, more precise language doesn't have bigger words with which to
show off; she has access to a bigger world. And with his remarkable skill
in assorted languages, Lewis knew that there are some words in other
languages that find no exact equivalent in English. Speaking in his
autobiography. Surprised by Joy, Lewis maintained that no English
word did justice to the nameless longing that haunted him and which he
couldn't identify until the "Hound of Heaven" closed in on him. Sehnsucht,
however, a German word, covered exactly what he had in mind: a longing
profound, intense, relentless, unable to be satisfied by any early good, for
which the English "desire" was too close to consciousness and perchance too
hormonally driven.
And yet as much as I profited from Lewis's fine mind, his skill with
language, and his appreciation of the world and languages of antiquity, I
found myself disturbed more than once by his grasp of the faith from a
perspective whose sightline seemed to me was insufficiently Hebraic. Rooted
philosophically in Greek metaphysics, Lewis's angle of vision, rich in the
wealth of ancient Latin and Greek, seemed to overlook the logic and wisdom
and uniqueness of ancestors in faith older still than Cicero and
Demosthenes; namely, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Zipporah, Elijah and
Jezebel, Hosea and Gomer. Long schooled in the need to read the newer
testament from the angle of vision of older, I was disturbed that Lewis knew
Latin and Greek exquisitely well, not to mention Old English, but appeared
not to know Hebrew at all; disturbed again that Lewis treasured the old
myths, whether Greek or Roman or Norse, but never mentioned Midrash, that
reservoir of Jewish folkloric wisdom which doesn't have the authority of
Scripture or Talmud for Jewish people and yet is treasured to this day. Long
aware that the apostles give us no physical description of Jesus (was he
short or tall? slender or pudgy? brown-haired or black-eyed?), and avoid
doing so just because such considerations have nothing to do with who he is
for his people and for us Gentile Christians who are guests of honour in the
house of Israel, I could never deny that their one exception concerning
physical description was our Lord's circumcision. The apostles knew that his
hair-colour or height has nothing to do with our faith; his being a son of
Israel, on the other hand, everything to do with it. Somewhat
suspicious now concerning this lacuna in Lewis (i.e., an undervaluation of
Jesus's Jewishness and its significance), I began to notice in several
places that Lewis's reading of doctrine or exegesis or Christian duty
appeared skewed in various degrees.
The skew became most apparent for me in his
essay, "Priestesses in the Church?, found in God in the Dock. Arguing
against the ordination of women within the Anglican Church, Lewis pointed
out that in Israel of old all the priests were male. Since the clergy are
the successors to Israel's priests, no woman can be ordained. Lewis had
failed to understand that according to the apostles the clergy, whether
those today or their putative foreparents in the primitive church, are
not the successors to the priests of old; Jesus Christ, the "Great High
Priest," alone is. Lewis had failed to notice that the word "priest," in the
singular, is never used of any sort of individual Christian in the newer
testament. The congregation, or the universal church, is said to be
"priests" collectively, as in ".. .and made us a kingdom, priests to his God
and Father" (Revelation 1:6.) Again, the congregation or church, honouring
and obeying him who is sole Priest now, exercises a priestly ministry in
light of his Priesthood: ".. .you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a
holy nation (1 Peter 2:9.)
At different altars but especially in the
Jerusalem temple the priests of Israel offered propiatiory and expiatory
sacrifices for sin whereby defiled people could gain access to a holy God
and survive. Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is priest and sacrifice and
altar all at once: he is the sacrifice that he as priest offers to the
Father even as he is the venue of such sacrifice. (While we are thinking of
these matters we should understand that it's incorrect to speak of our
church buildings today as "the house of God." God "houses" himself,
tabernacles himself (John 1: 14) in Jesus of Nazareth; our church buildings
are “the house of the people of God”.)
Alerted now, I re-read Lewis's splendid book
on the Psalms, profiting again from his understanding, among other things,
of the nature of praise and the frequency with which the command, "Praise
God" is found in the Psalms. For instance, God commands us to praise him,
but not because God is either pathetically insecure or insufferably arrogant
- apparently the two single largest reasons that people demand praise from
us. Again, those who praise most exemplify the greatest inner health;
whatever we praise we commend to others, even urge upon them. Not to be
overlooked here was Lewis's insight that as someone else comes to praise
what we find praiseworthy, our neighbour's recognition of and praise for the
same thing completed our enjoyment of it.
My having been alerted, however, rendered me
unable to read past one feature of Reflections on the Psalms that
disturbed me. When Lewis spoke of the imprecatory Psalms, those apparent
tirades of scurrilous cursing, as "the refinement of malice" that express a
hatred which is "festering, gloating, undisguised," I knew at once that his
non-immersion in "Yiddishkeit" had betrayed him. To be fair, Lewis doesn't
condemn the people for whom the psalmist speaks. Lewis sincerely brings
forward several considerations that extenuate such people: they had been
exiled to Babylon; their children had been murdered; their spirits were
acidulated through repeated, protracted abuse. However understandable their
imprecations, said Lewis, these curses remain "refinement of malice" and
"undisguised hatred."
In this regard the darkest of the many "black verses" looms in Psalm 137 and
is directed against Israel's enemies: "Happy shall he be who takes your
little ones and dashes them against the rock!" Admittedly, it is no wonder
that people remain perplexed at the Psalms, even put off.
On the one hand the Psalms were the hymnbook or prayer book of our Israelite
ancestors. The Psalms have always been the prayerbook of Christians. The
Psalms are matchless. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life." "The Lord is my
light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my
life; of whom shall I be afraid?" "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the
lands. Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing."
On the other hand there is what many people regard as the underside. "The
righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in
the blood of the wicked." "Do not I hate them that hate thee, 0 Lord? And do
not I loathe them that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect
hatred. I count them my enemies." And then the nadir, already referred to:
"Happy shall he be who takes your little ones (i.e., of the Edomites) and
dashes them against the rock."
Yet the psalmist who wrote, "I hate them with perfect hatred", also wrote in
the next line, "Search me, 0 God, and know my heart! Try me, and know my
thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me...." Whatever he meant by
the so-called black verse he didn't mean what we modern westerners accuse
him of meaning and what Lewis thought he had to excuse.
The Bible is unambiguously transparent: we are not to be hateful toward
enemies. The Book of Leviticus states, "You shall not hate your brother in
your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbour, lest you sin because
of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of
your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself. I AM THE
LORD". Animosity toward one's fellows isn't even permitted in Israel, let
alone encouraged, let alone divinely sanctioned. The Book of Exodus informs
us, "If you meet your enemy's ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it
back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden,
you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it
up." Even the person who hates us we must help; we must never return hatred
for hatred.
Think of the Book of Proverbs. "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to
eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink...." We must be kind even
toward those who are personal enemies! "Do not rejoice when your enemy
falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles - lest the Lord see
it and be displeased...." Plainly there is to be no gloating over the
misfortune of one's enemies, no elation that someone we don't like (because
he doesn't like us) finally "got it in the teeth"; no pleasure that someone
who has made his bed will now have to lie in it. Glee that someone at last
got his comeuppance may be humanly understandable; nevertheless, the older
testament insists that such glee is sin. As Job searches his own heart he
insists that he has not rejoiced at the ruin of an enemy.
To be sure, Jeremiah prays that God will destroy his persecutors twice over.
But what does Jeremiah mean by this in view of the fact that he prefaces
his prayer with these words: "I have not pressed thee (i.e., God) to send
evil, nor have I desired the day of disaster, thou knowest."?
We must be sure to note that in the older testament vengeance is forbidden
the people of God. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." The
text doesn't mean that we can forget about seeking revenge ourselves because
God will do it for us. It means rather that we are not to seek revenge
inasmuch as we are never objective and will always turn tit-for-tat into a
vendetta which worsens every day. It means that what is to befall someone
who wounds us is to be left in God's hands. It doesn't mean that we can
leave the matter in God's hands because God will exact revenge on our behalf
and therefore we can leave the matter of retaliation with him. It means,
rather, we must eave the matter with him so that retaliation, together with
the spiral of violence it begets, won't occur at all.
Did King David contradict all of this as he
pursued those who molested the people of God? In his role as military
commander representing his nation David behaved with the undeflectable
resolve that General Eisenhower did on D-Day.
But no one has ever suggested that Elsenhower's military prowess on behalf
of the allied nations betokened personal cruelty. When faced with personal
enemies King David acted with uncommon generosity. Saul tried to kill David
repeatedly. Twice David had opportunity to rid himself of this threat on
his life; he spared Saul on both occasions. Absalom, David's son, tried to
kill his father, even going so far as recruiting a gang of cutthroats to
help him. David took no action at all against Absalom, and in fact was
heartbroken when Absalom suffered a fatal mishap. Yes, David behaved
unconscionably with respect to Bathsheba and her husband. David also knew he
was wrong in this; so far from pretending that God sanctioned it, he knew he
was judged for it. (And his life thereafter fell apart on account of it.)
Then what do the "black verses" of the older testament mean? What appear
to be dreadful threats and curses are not directed towards one's enemies.
What appear to be threats and curses in fact are prayers. They are
prayers prayed fervently to God; prayers of trust in God; prayers of
confidence that God will act speedily. They are prayers that God will
vindicate his own name. The older testament insists that vindictiveness is
sin; at the same time it cries out to God to vindicate his name, his truth,
his people.
Vindictiveness is nasty retaliation rooted in a mean spirit.
Vindication is clearing someone's name of the slander which surrounds
it. Lewis missed this point entirely when he confused the psalmist's
anguished cry for vindication for a feral lust for vindictiveness.
Vindictiveness is a mean-spirited desire for revenge. Vindication is public
recognition that a good name has been spoken of falsely. In the older
testament what appears to us to be nasty vindictiveness is in fact fervent
prayer that God will vindicate himself, his truth, his people.
What should we do if our child were expelled from school for thieving when
we knew that our child hadn't stolen? We'd stop at nothing to have our
child's name cleared. It's not that we dislike the school principal or board
of education director; there is no personal vindictiveness here. We simply
want our child vindicated; we want our child's name cleared. And if we were
vehement in pursuing this, no one would fault us for it.
What should I do if parents circulate word
that they don't want their children in my wife's grade one class because she
is promiscuous and they think they shouldn't entrust their youngsters to
such a person? I'd do whatever it takes to clear my wife's name and restore
public confidence in her integrity and public trust in her suitability as a
teacher. And if I appear vehement in doing this? Would anyone expect me to
appear placid in the face of slander this monstrous?
The black passages, so-called, in the older testament are the cries of
God's people pleading with God to rout evil; to rout evil so thoroughly that
no doubt will remain that it has been routed. It's not that the psalmist
doesn't like children or takes fiendish pleasure in seeing them thrown on
rocks. (Lewis may excuse the psalmist for the "understandable" savagery,
but he nevertheless imputes such a motive to the writer.) The psalmist knows
that vindictiveness is sin. The psalmist, rather, is crying to God to
vindicate himself as the God who resists evil and supports those victimized
by it. Right now, say the psalmist and other sensitive people from the older
testament, God's truth is falsified, God's way is mocked, God's people are
set upon, God's name is dragged through the mud. In other words, evil seems
to triumph; evil gloats; evil sneers; evil profits from evil and continues
to work more evil. Won't God do something to clear his name and demonstrate
his truth and protect his people? Then evil must be routed; every vestige of
it.
Each Sunday at worship (if not every day) we pray, "Thy kingdom come." Do we
mean it? If we genuinely want the kingdom of God to come fully, then we want
the kingdom of evil to go utterly. "Kingdom of God come fully" means"
kingdom of evil go utterly." But this is highly abstract. The Hebrew mind is
never abstract. The Hebrew mind is always concrete. Where we say, "May the
kingdom of evil go", the Israelite says, "May the cocaine-dealer drop dead!
Happy is the society whose cocaine-dealers drop dead!" We don't have any
personal vindictiveness toward cocaine-dealers. (Most likely we don't even
know any.) Still, we want vindication of the rule of law; we want a just
society; we want callous exploitation eliminated; we want defenceless people
protected.
When I pray, "Thy kingdom come", I am asking God to deal with the wicked man
who gets rich by fleecing the helpless schizophrenic people who are always
coming to see me. I am asking God to deal so thoroughly with this man that
he will never try to fleece defenceless people again. This is precisely what
the psalmist is doing in Psalm 139 when he cries to God, "Your enemies are
my enemies; I hate those who hate you. I hate them with perfect hatred."
(Note: the psalmist cries, "Your enemies are my enemies." He doesn't say,
"My enemies are your enemies." Had he said this, Lewis's point about "sheer
refinement of malice" would gain credibility.) When Jeremiah prays that God
will destroy his persecutors twice over Jeremiah isn't vindictive. He wants
only that God will act so thoroughly, so unmistakably, that the whole world
will know that God opposes persecution, God vindicates those who are
persecuted, and God vindicates himself as the saviour of the victimized.
In light of what the psalmist says and what he is found to mean, is he at
odds with the rest of older testament? Does he appear as resplendently
virtuous alongside other figures who don't quite match his insight and
civility? It might be that his contemporaries or ancestors in faith
characteristically exemplify a nastiness that he, a shining exception, has
managed to avoid. In this regard it is helpful to probe Israel's attitude
with respect to the death penalty, especially the death penalty for moral
offences.
While many Christians today wouldn't defend the death penalty and don't want
to see it retained, we should be clear about something on our own doorstep:
Canada has not abolished the death penalty. Canada has abolished the
death penalty for first degree murder. Canada has retained the death penalty
for treason. Herein Canadians have said two things: murder shouldn't be
punishable by death, treason should. Why Canada has made this
distinction space doesn't permit us to investigate. It's enough a this
point to admit that we shouldn't consider Israel of old barbaric for
classifying some offences as capital when we civilised creatures of
modernity continue to do as much ourselves.
Before we fancy ourselves enlightened compared to ancient Hebrews let me say
something in passing. When the criminal had to be punished in ancient
Israel, it was decreed that he could not be punished in any way that
degraded him. Right now the penalty for first degree murder, in Canada, is
twenty-five years in prison, no parole. Twenty-five years in jail, no hope
of early release: is this degrading or not? Have we made any advance on our
Israelite forebears?
In ancient Israel property offences were not punishable by death. No
property crime was deemed significant enough to entail execution. But
violation of family life was; adultery, for instance. In Canada, adultery
isn't punishable at all. What are we saying about family life?
By way of contrast we should understand that it's a criminal offense to
steal an automobile. The car I drive is twelve years old and has a market
value of about $75. If you steal it, you are going to jail. And if you
seduce my wife? No penalty at all. Which is a greater wound to me: theft of
my car or alienation of my wife? What warps children more: loss of their
dad's vehicle or loss of their mother?
Question: Are property offences exceedingly serious? Canada says yes, Israel
said no. Are violations of family life exceedingly serious? Canada says no,
Israel said yes. Is car theft more destructive humanly than adultery? Canada
says yes, Israel said no.
Let me repeat: we are not defending the death penalty. But before we snicker
at the ancient people of God we must understand that we differ from our
ancestors only in what we deem valuable.
While we are pondering the "black" verses in
the Psalms we should consider similarly "black" deeds depicted elsewhere in
scripture, such as incidents involving extermination, like Elijah's
slaughter of the Baal prophets. Elijah, the prophet of God, confronts the
prophets of Baal. Baal was a fertility deity. Devotees of the fertility
deity worshipped any and all reproductive forces. The temples of Baal
worship featured religious prostitution, male as well as female.
Worshippers came to the sanctuary of Baal and worshiped the fertility deity
by joining themselves to religious prostitutes of both genders.
The Israelite people, never tempted to abandon Yahweh for Baal, still
assumed they could profit from and worship both God and Baal. They didn't
want to give up Yahweh who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and
sustained them throughout wilderness bleakness. But since Baal appeared able
to do something for them too, why not combine Yahweh and Baal? Why not have
one's cake and eat it too? Worship of God, worship of Baal, one-stop
shopping, best of both worlds. The contemporary equivalent is an
"inclusive" church. Nobody excluded. God plus Baal. Truth plus
superstition. Gospel plus ideology. Righteousness plus disobedience. Why
not have it all?
Jesus says we can't be the servant of God and the servant of God's polar
opposite. But many religious spokespersons tell us we can. The banking
scandals involving the Vatican can still be smelled around the world. In the
1930s when Frankie Costello was the biggest mafia gangster in New York City
he sat, by invitation, on the Advisory Board of The Salvation Army. A
prominent Canadian family has given millions to facilitate the worship of
the God of Israel, when this money was made ruthlessly, illegally,
corruptly, even murderously during the prohibition era. During the French
Revolution the church was disestablished in France. Napoleon found he
couldn't control the masses. He told the church authorities he would
re-establish the church if the church authorities promised to keep the
masses docile and subject to his tyranny. The church authorities did just
that.
Hermann Goering, head of Germany's Air Force in World War II and a Nazi
party member (after the war he took the little white pill rather than face
execution) was married in a Lutheran church whose communion table was draped
with the Swastika.
Elijah knew that God was not honoured by all this. Elijah insisted that
Israel desperately needed radical renewal of faith. Elijah knew as well that
radical renewal of faith entailed a radical break with Baal. Let it never be
said of us that we thirst for violence. But may it always be said of us that
we and Elijah are one with respect to this: the church desperately needs
radical renewal of faith; and there can be radical renewal of faith only as
there is a radical break with Baal.
I think Lewis was wrong concerning the
imprecatory Psalms. They are not "the refinement of malice,", a
hatred that is "festering, gloating, undisguised." For as long as I live I
shall cherish in my heart what I have said today about the so-called
sub-Christian passages in it. In addition, I shall remember that Jesus my
Lord was raised on the Psalms - all of them - and died quoting them.
I shall remember that when the people reminded Jesus that Elijah was
supposed to come back, Jesus replied, "He has come back; John the
Baptist is he, and I endorse John's ministry one hundred percent." I shall
remember that Jesus maintained that his own coming meant not that the older
testament has been abolished, but that it has been fulfilled. Fulfilled, it
perdures.
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