eatloaf two nights in a row. Wearing last year's Easter dress -- again. Still using those towels you got as wedding presents. Does any of this sound familiar? It's the Same Old Things, the Same Old Faces, the Same Old Places. We may as well face it. Routine is a part of the way God made the world. More than that, because it is part of God's design, it is something to rejoice in and to give thanks for. So what's our problem with it? The problem is this -- fallen men, who worship the creature rather than the Creator, are forever misplacing their expectations. What do I mean? Fallen men expect satisfaction and contentment to flow from the Things, Faces, and Places around them. When nothing of the sort occurs, they conclude that a change of surroundings is necessary. They will do anything but turn around and worship the Creator. Well God be praised, He doesn't sit around and wait for us to figure it out -- He graciously and effectually turns us around and sets us on the road to maturity. And one obstacle in the pursuit of Christlike maturity is the idea that contentment is to be found in our physical, personal, or intellectual surroundings instead of in our Sovereign. That particular deceit is as old as the Garden of Eden.
These are interesting observations, but what historical relevance do they have? I mean, why are you writing about them here? Because this particular deceit is "as old as the hills" we can expect that individual believers in all ages have battled it, and we should be able to profit from their example. There is another reason for discussing it here. The lack of a biblical contentment to which I've referred is not only sinful in itself, it also opens the door to a great many other sins. C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, quite literally played the Devil's Advocate in order to illustrate how individuals and groups fall for what he calls "the horror of the Same Old Thing," and what often happens when they do. In the excerpt which follows a senior devil instructs his protege in this subtle deceit, and explains some of what results from this error when indulged.
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart -- an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. Now, just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing, we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than, perhaps, they have ever been, "lowbrow" and "highbrow" artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.
Lewis illustrates the lust for novelty with a reference to the progressive degeneration of the Arts community. (Did anyone else think of Mapplethorpe and his ilk after reading the last bit of the Lewis quote?) But it would be a big mistake to think that the Horror of the Same Old Thing only lives in studios, getting fat on NEA grants. It is also very comfortable in the pastor's study. Lewis refers to it as "an endless source of heresies in religion." And we would not have to look very far to see examples of this in our own history. For example? Okay, since you asked, here is my short list of theological novelty items from the last 250 years of American church history: the invitation system in evangelism, the parachurch movement, independent Bible colleges, the higher, deeper, victorious life movement, the Rapture, the Second Blessing, the Lordship decision, dispensationalism, and the charismatic movement. And this is why I refer to them as novelty items: in each case the founder or founders of the movement or notion grew discontented with the status quo and went looking for something new, something more, something different. Like the married man who went to a prostitute to restore his sexual creativity, these frustrated Christians asked the wrong questions and got the wrong answers. And in some cases, their answers have afflicted us for decades. In Credendas to come we will take a closer look at the roots and fruit of some of these landmarks of American church history. May God sweep them from our landscape, deliver His people from the Horror of the Same Old Thing, and open our eyes to one of the joys of the Gospel. Satisfaction.
