Monday, January 21, 2008
We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world -- and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
That's one of those great quotes from Lewis (like he didn't have others…) which is always good to remember, especially at election times. It disturbs me that Christians can get so hung up about trying to make non-Christians behave the way we ought to be behaving, as if by doing so, they would usher in the kingdom of God, reclaim the country for Christ and make manna rain from heaven.