November 5, 2006
Surrender
C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain:
But when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns.
Via R. Aharon Lichtenstein, Being Frum and Being Good: On the Relationship Between Religion and Morality
Comments
see ritva on kiddushin 31a - 'gadol metzuvah ve-oseh'.
ritva must've read lewis, too :-)