Joyless Christianity

I have very slowly, but very surely, been traveling through the book "Heaven- The Hearts Deepest Longing-" by Peter Kreeft. Many quotes from this book have made their way into my journal. Reading in the car one day, I came across this, and felt like shouting 'YES!' ( The rest of my family riding in the car with me probably wouldn't have appreciated that, so I refrained.)

The image of God so often portrayed by the Christian world is one of the 'Jesus- the white fleecy lamb' or the 'grandfather in the sky'. In other words, tame, dull, and passionless. Our God is an awesome God and anything but tame.


"Nietzsche's images of ordinary goodness are shallow, sheepish, and dull. The choice is between excitement without peace and peace without excitement. Can't true goodness, rationality, and peace be interesting? . . . Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien have often been praised as nearly the only modern novelists who can make good more fascinating than evil. (G.K. Chesterton a fourth, at least in 'The Man Who Was Thursday') Williams speaks of 'a terrible good', Tolkien, of 'the peril of light and joy'; and Lewis's Christ figure in the Chronicles of Narnia is Aslan, the great lion who is 'not a tame lion . . . but he's good.'

He goes on to say


"Alan Watts has diagnosed the major cause of the unattractiveness of Christian theology in the twentieth century as not an intellectual or moral failure but an aesthetic one: It's images of God are theologically and morally correct but aesthetically dull and powerless. Teilhard de Chardin also sees 'the heart of the problem' as an image problem: 'Man would seem to have no clear picture of the God he longs to worship.' It is because a joyless person can only imagine a joyless God. Perhaps one reason excitements like gambling, violence, achohol, and promiscuity are often temptations to the ethical and conventionally religious person is that his or her life is full of peace but not joy. It lacks the ingredient that is in joy but not in peace or happiness: passion.
. . . The need to yield to ecstasy- if not to God, to an irrational passion; if not to the mystery of light, then to the mystery of darkness.
. . . If we do not find joy where it is-in a lived love relationship with God-we will likely try to find it where it isn't-in the world."