“The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of mere ‘understanding.’ Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism.”
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XXV.
Wisdom calls us not to “balance,” which is compromise, but to fullness, which is well-proportioned theology and ministry according to Scripture. Whatever our present enthusiasm is – it’s probably a good thing, but just one aspect of the larger fullness of God’s Word. All we need to do, to get off-track and even prepare the next generation either to take our incompleteness into actual heresy or to react against us with a pendulum swing toward some opposite eccentricity — all we need to do is keep repeating today’s focus of enthusiasm, today’s big theme, today’s fashionable idea.
Wise leaders are constantly going back to the Bible and rediscovering the biblical message in its full magnitude, centered in the mighty Christ who is bigger than all our present categories.
