The Reformers' Gospel

The 'gospel', to which everything else we do should point, is easy to misrepresent in summary. It is said that the divine law damns us not for our refusal, but for our inability to obey it, or again that in God's sight the deed is good because of the man and not the man because of the deed. This is in reality the obstinate fact which meets us long before we venture into the realm of theology; the fact that morality or duty (or The Law) never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others. It is shocking, but it is undeniable. We do not wish either to be, or to live among, people who are clean or honest or kind as a matter of duty: we want to be, and to associate with, people who like being clean and honest and kind. The suspicion that an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty can subtly poisons it. In philosophical language, the ethical category is self-destructive; morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself. in theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the gospel is to deliver us from morality. Thus the 'Puritan' of modern imagination—the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it—is precisely the enemy which historical Protestantism arose and smote. What really matters is not to obey moral rules but to be a creature of a certain kind. The wrong kind of creature is damned (here, as we know; hereafter, as we believe) not for what it does but for what it is. And we cannot change our own nature by any moral efforts.

Another way of putting it would be to say that the Reformers, as regards the natural condition of humanity, are psychological determinists. Action necessarily obeys the strongest impulse—the greatest appetite overcomes the less. That the profit should be located in another world makes, as Tyndale clearly sees, no difference. Whether the man is seeking heaven of a hundred pounds he can still but seek himself. Of freedom in the true sense—of spontaneity or disinterestedness—Nature knows nothing. And yet, by a terrible paradox, such disinterestedness is precisely what the moral law demands. The law requires not only that we should do thus and so but that we should do it with a free, a willing, a lusty, and a loving heart. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbors. it demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what merely moral men never understand. The first step is to see the law as it really is, and despair.

After the thunder of the law comes the rain of the gospel. Though Nature knows nothing of disinterestedness, Supernature does. There is one Will in existence which is really good of itself, and that Will can join us to itself so that we share its goodness. The transition comes by the gift of faith which immediately and almost by definition passes into love—by the redemption which God performed to win his enemy, to overcome him with love, that he might see Love and love anew. The essence of the change is that we now have power to love that which before we could not but hate. The fretting voice of the law is not the Will of the Beloved, already in principle (if not at every moment) our own will. Deeds are not the cause of salvation, but they are its inseparable symptom. We are 'loosed from the law'—by fulfilling it. Deeds are the fruits of love and love is the fruit of faith. So we utterly deny the medieval distinction between religion and secular life. God's literal sense is spiritual. Wiping shoes, washing dishes, nay, our humblest natural functions are all equally 'good works', and the ascetic life wins no higher room in heaven than a whore of the stews if she repent. Pain and hardship sent by God or self-inflicted may be needed to tame the flesh. They have no other value.

—C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, summarized from pp 187–191.