Wormwood's Wisdom

Many years have passed since the infamous Screwtape Letters. After Wormwood was able to calm his uncle and avoid being devoured, he slowly advanced up the ranks. Eventually he moved into a different role where he organized mass attacks on Christianity as a whole. In his farewell memo he seeks to pass on the particulars of his most successful strike. 

As I am quickly approaching retirement it is my aim to document what is perhaps the most effective campaign I was able to employ against the Enemy's book. Of course there have been many great attacks on the Enemy's book over the years. Anything we can do to weaken their perverse love for that evil text will vastly improve our efforts. 

I am reminded of the many we led astray by focusing our attacks on convincing certain "scholars" to deny the reliability of the Enemy's book. We bolstered the platform of men like Bart Ehrman which enabled us to turn many away from even reading the book. Many children who grew up in vaguely Christian homes read Ehrman's work in college which proved an easy victor over the flannel graph stories from Sunday school and the pious pep talks of their youth pastors. 

However, despite the successes of that attack there were still huge portions of the Enemy's people who would never read or listen to someone like an Ehrman. They had been raised with far too much reverence to ever read something by someone who denied the validity of the Enemy's book. Reading someone like Bart Ehrman would have caused them to worry they might be committing apostasy. 

One day while pondering the Enemy's pious paideia I happened upon an aspersing epiphany. A campaign designed to discredit the book would never work, but would it be possible to bolster their devotion to the book so much that they would stop reading it the right way? 

The plan was to strengthen belief in the so-called "inspiration" and "infallibility" of the Enemy's book so that they began to think of it as a sterile book. I longed for them to read it like a mathematics text in primary school.

At first glance this may seem a worthless impression to leave - would not a heightened view of the so-called inspiration and infallibility yield even more time spent focusing on the Enemy's book? Would they not spend even more time reading it and memorizing it and talking about it? Many told me this was surely a fool's errand. 

However, the genius of the campaign was that once all the facts were memorized they were treated as mere facts and nothing more. Instead of reading the book as the Enemy's revelation of himself and his glory and his plan of salvation they read it as a self help book which gave them a list of things to do and not to do. Instead of reading it as the single grand story of redemption where every page drives the wise reader back to the Son's incarnation and life and death for his people, they treated it like any good math text and began trying to unlock numeric codes and dates.  

By making them so intensely aware of the infallibility and inspiration of the book they abandoned the idea that the message of the book had been communicated through different genres of literature. In fact, we were able to make many people disavow an entire literary genre - apocalyptic. 

The idea that it was necessary to learn how to read John's Apocalypse became ludicrous to them. No math book requires learning about the genre of math books, so clearly that was not necessary for the Enemy's book. The result was that the Apocalypse was read like any other math or science text - as a book full of numbers for the reader to count and dates for the reader to use to predict their escape from planet earth.

A secondary benefit of this campaign was one that even I had not foreseen. When the Enemy's book was believed to be a book of mere facts for remembering and mere morals for behaving - it became boring. How many times can one read of Adam and Even as mere facts to be memorized and continue to care? Removed from their role in the overarching narrative, Adam and Eve become two people who are too familiar to care about upon a third and fourth read through the book. 

The Enemy's people became bored with the Word because facts are not intrinsically beautiful things. A brilliant poem or well-crafted story is one that is rehearsed and enjoyed for the sheer beauty of it, but there is nothing beautiful about a multiplication table. Once the table is learned there is no need to continue reviewing it. So too, when the Enemy's book is seen as a collection of maxims for memorizing it was no longer cherished but merely endured as a necessary exercise. 

In other words, we were able to get the Enemy's people to become so confident in his book that they mostly missed the central purpose of the book! They became so comfortable with the book that instead of seeing it as a window through which they are able to gaze upon the God who is there - they made it all about themselves. One wag even came up with an acronym: the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. I only wish I could claim credit for that little gem myself, because it has done wonders for our cause.