From the Introduction.
Thus our Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in man's highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help? This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love. When we face it, something like this seems to result.
We must distinguish two things which might both be called "nearness to God." One is likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. [...] But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is "nearest" to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.
"nearness-of-approach"; that reminds me of how king David, despite committing murder and adultery, is still a man after God's own heart, because even though he's imperfect, he seeks not to be like God but to be near Him, and he values what God values :)
ReplyDeleteSo when we pray about our walk with God, we shouldn't ask for us to be more like Him? Perhaps it's better to pray for His desires to be our desires...
Well, I'm not sure Lewis captured the whole picture here. Jesus was so many things that God is not: poor, humble, in submission, etc. There are some senses in which that revealed God to be humble, you could say, but in any case, Jesus displayed for us what a proper Need-love for God looked like. So maybe it's better for us to want to be more like Jesus.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see. Thanks for the insight!
ReplyDelete