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Smoke on the Mountain - An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments
This celebrated book, a dynamic and original interpretation of the Ten Commandments, is enhanced by a thoughtful introduction by C. S. Lewis, the author's husband. Lewis described the style and theme of the book and commented, "The flaw in us which Joy Davidman seems to me to expose with most certainty will be to some perhaps an unexpected one: the sin of fear ... quite simply, cowardice."
141 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1953
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About the author
Joy Davidman
18 books65 followersJoy Davidman (born Helen Joy Davidman; 18 April 1915 – 13 July 1960) was an American poet and writer. Often referred to as a child prodigy, she earned a master's degree from Columbia University in English literature in 1935. For her book of poems, Letter to a Comrade, she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award for Poetry in 1939. She was the author of several books, including two novels.
While an atheist and after becoming a member of the American Communist Party, she met and married her first husband and father of her two sons, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1942. After a troubled marriage, and following her conversion to Christianity, they divorced and she left America to travel to England with her sons.
Davidman published her best known work, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in 1954 with a preface by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an influence on her work and conversion and became her second husband after her permanent relocation to England in 1956. She died from secondary bone cancer in 1960.
The relationship that developed between Davidman and Lewis has been featured in a television BBC film, a stage play and a cinema film named Shadowlands. Lewis published A Grief Observed under a pseudonym in 1961, from notebooks he kept after his wife's death revealing his immense grief and a period of questioning God.
While an atheist and after becoming a member of the American Communist Party, she met and married her first husband and father of her two sons, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1942. After a troubled marriage, and following her conversion to Christianity, they divorced and she left America to travel to England with her sons.
Davidman published her best known work, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in 1954 with a preface by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an influence on her work and conversion and became her second husband after her permanent relocation to England in 1956. She died from secondary bone cancer in 1960.
The relationship that developed between Davidman and Lewis has been featured in a television BBC film, a stage play and a cinema film named Shadowlands. Lewis published A Grief Observed under a pseudonym in 1961, from notebooks he kept after his wife's death revealing his immense grief and a period of questioning God.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
July 21, 2013
I found Joy Davidman's review of the Ten Commandments thought provoking and convicting. Unlike many modern Christian authors who mince words trying to "soften" the truth, Davidman doesn't quibble. She is straight forward in writing about the truth. She includes herself in the need to understand and act on truth, which is encouraging to a reader. I most liked the parts she wrote on materialism. Her discussion is so apropos for American Christianity today. So many Christians implore God to save their economic capitalism as if that is what most concerns God. Her critique of this position was spot on.
I wasn't distracted by the dated examples, referencing communism and Marx. Her examples may not be modern, but her points are still valid. So valid, I would recommend this book to any Christian today. She has a lot to say to us today that rings true and if we would listen to her, we would become more Christlike Christians.
I wasn't distracted by the dated examples, referencing communism and Marx. Her examples may not be modern, but her points are still valid. So valid, I would recommend this book to any Christian today. She has a lot to say to us today that rings true and if we would listen to her, we would become more Christlike Christians.
July 7, 2023
After reading Becoming Mrs Lewis (and hating it) I fully expected to not enjoy this book, which is why I put off reading it for so long. In fact, I dreaded reading it...but it far exceeded my expectations - I loved it!
Joy Davidman was a former atheist and communist, who converted to Christianity after reading CS Lewis's books (and you can definitely see Lewis's influence in this book). She went on to develop a years long correspondence with the author, and later married him.
Even if you generally aren't a fan of theological works, I think you'd enjoy this one. Davidman is an engaging writer, and this book is anything but dry. Though it was written 70 years ago, the social matters discussed are still chillingly relevant - the mark of a good book. Her thoughtful commentary on each of the ten commandments sheds light on how to interpret and apply scripture to daily life in a postmodern world. She doesn't mince words: her straightforward approach is refreshing in a time where people so often try to soften the blow by dancing around the Truth.
I have more to say on Joy Davidman - while this book was excellent, she sadly did not always live out the sort of life she encouraged here. But who of us is blameless? This book is great, even though I am still quite uncertain about the woman who captured CS Lewis's heart.
Quotes I loved:
"We are crying out to be rescued from the deadly terrors of the world we have made."
"The house devours the housewife, the office rots the executive with ulcers, the canned entertainments leave us incapable of entertaining ourselves. We feel that if bombs ever destroy our elaborate gadget prison it will mean "the end of civilization" - yet not so long ago Americans faced a wilderness with nothing but their two hands, a long rifle, and an ax. Have our idols done us no harm?"
"Every age has its professional apologists, and ours are working hard to convince us that our worst sins are virtues. A mother forced to take a job needs [daycare] for her baby, admitted - but that does not justify the false comforters who tell us [daycare] is better than a mother."
"We pay in restlessness, in desperate pleasure-seeking, in the lack of moral standards - our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes of our fathers' eating. No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones."
"We do not make a better world by training the fight out of our little boys; we only make a more cowardly one - a world of murderees inviting the murderer."
"Amusements that don't amuse, cosmetics that don't beautify, drugs that do not cure, and education that does not teach - all the hopeless and useless tinsel with which a desperate world tries to bargain for its daily bread...a man is subdued to what he works in. The man making or selling trash eventually realizes it is trash, and loses faith in his work, himself, and his ethics. "
"The denial that truth exists is a good beginning for habitual lying."
"The self is asphyxiating and killing us; the only air we are designed to breathe is God."
"We men are all thieves who have stolen the self which was meant as a part of God and tried to keep it for ourselves alone. But if we give it up again, we might head the words he spoke to a penitent thief once: "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.""
Joy Davidman was a former atheist and communist, who converted to Christianity after reading CS Lewis's books (and you can definitely see Lewis's influence in this book). She went on to develop a years long correspondence with the author, and later married him.
Even if you generally aren't a fan of theological works, I think you'd enjoy this one. Davidman is an engaging writer, and this book is anything but dry. Though it was written 70 years ago, the social matters discussed are still chillingly relevant - the mark of a good book. Her thoughtful commentary on each of the ten commandments sheds light on how to interpret and apply scripture to daily life in a postmodern world. She doesn't mince words: her straightforward approach is refreshing in a time where people so often try to soften the blow by dancing around the Truth.
I have more to say on Joy Davidman - while this book was excellent, she sadly did not always live out the sort of life she encouraged here. But who of us is blameless? This book is great, even though I am still quite uncertain about the woman who captured CS Lewis's heart.
Quotes I loved:
"We are crying out to be rescued from the deadly terrors of the world we have made."
"The house devours the housewife, the office rots the executive with ulcers, the canned entertainments leave us incapable of entertaining ourselves. We feel that if bombs ever destroy our elaborate gadget prison it will mean "the end of civilization" - yet not so long ago Americans faced a wilderness with nothing but their two hands, a long rifle, and an ax. Have our idols done us no harm?"
"Every age has its professional apologists, and ours are working hard to convince us that our worst sins are virtues. A mother forced to take a job needs [daycare] for her baby, admitted - but that does not justify the false comforters who tell us [daycare] is better than a mother."
"We pay in restlessness, in desperate pleasure-seeking, in the lack of moral standards - our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes of our fathers' eating. No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones."
"We do not make a better world by training the fight out of our little boys; we only make a more cowardly one - a world of murderees inviting the murderer."
"Amusements that don't amuse, cosmetics that don't beautify, drugs that do not cure, and education that does not teach - all the hopeless and useless tinsel with which a desperate world tries to bargain for its daily bread...a man is subdued to what he works in. The man making or selling trash eventually realizes it is trash, and loses faith in his work, himself, and his ethics. "
"The denial that truth exists is a good beginning for habitual lying."
"The self is asphyxiating and killing us; the only air we are designed to breathe is God."
"We men are all thieves who have stolen the self which was meant as a part of God and tried to keep it for ourselves alone. But if we give it up again, we might head the words he spoke to a penitent thief once: "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.""
December 24, 2024
Davidman’s stimulating exposition on each of the Ten Commandments was published in 1953, four years before she married CS Lewis. After reading this book I can understand why he enjoyed her company. According to Lewis’s brother Warny, "For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met ... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun."
While reading Davidman’s writing I was often reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers (who often reminds me of CS Lewis!) and her marvelous essay on the Seven Deadly Sins (in Creed or Chaos?). This is high praise indeed.
Here are a few of the many passages I highlighted:
Re the Puritans:
“And, like all who lack charity, they preferred negative methods; they believed you could make people enjoy God by forbidding them to enjoy anything else.”
[p 53]
Re self-denial:
“There has always existed a dark Eastern religion of despair. Perhaps it first came out of exhausted and overpopulated India, where the Lord Buddha decided long ago that life was a mess. The religion of despair often achieves a stoical and ascetic nobility, very impressive to those who are impressed by dramatic gestures. Yet it is the very opposite of the true gospel. The Christian gives up his own desires for the love of others; the Eastern ascetic renounces the world because he thinks himself too good for it.
“Pride aping love - it is the devil's best trick. Self-mutilation has masqueraded as Christianity; Manichaeism (the notion that the devil created matter) has masqueraded as Christianity; neurotic hatred of life has masqueraded as Christianity. To this day we find men who call themselves Christians maintaining that anything a human being enjoys by nature must be labeled evil.
“Why do we so make war upon the gifts of God? We may guess at our own motives: the despair that hates other men's hope, the lovelessness that would deny other men love, the plain vulgar envy and malice that can't bear to see other men happy. For self-denial, there is a philosophical justification—only when duty is unpleasant can we be sure that we're doing it for its own sake and not out of selfishness. Yet to this chilly righteousness the Christian may answer in the words of Augustine: ‘Have charity and do what you like.’ And for ‘others—denial’—for robbing other people of harmless pleasures—there is no justification at all. One fact must be faced honestly by all true Christians: an impulse to spoil others' fun comes straight from the devil.”
[p 56]
Re the enjoyment of God’s gifts:
“Christianity is everywhere paradoxical, everywhere too difficult for simple black-and-white thinking; but nowhere more so than in its doctrine of worldly goods. For they are good things—and yet we must not long for them. They are to be enjoyed—and yet we must not make that enjoyment our goal.”
[p 121]
While reading Davidman’s writing I was often reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers (who often reminds me of CS Lewis!) and her marvelous essay on the Seven Deadly Sins (in Creed or Chaos?). This is high praise indeed.
Here are a few of the many passages I highlighted:
Re the Puritans:
“And, like all who lack charity, they preferred negative methods; they believed you could make people enjoy God by forbidding them to enjoy anything else.”
[p 53]
Re self-denial:
“There has always existed a dark Eastern religion of despair. Perhaps it first came out of exhausted and overpopulated India, where the Lord Buddha decided long ago that life was a mess. The religion of despair often achieves a stoical and ascetic nobility, very impressive to those who are impressed by dramatic gestures. Yet it is the very opposite of the true gospel. The Christian gives up his own desires for the love of others; the Eastern ascetic renounces the world because he thinks himself too good for it.
“Pride aping love - it is the devil's best trick. Self-mutilation has masqueraded as Christianity; Manichaeism (the notion that the devil created matter) has masqueraded as Christianity; neurotic hatred of life has masqueraded as Christianity. To this day we find men who call themselves Christians maintaining that anything a human being enjoys by nature must be labeled evil.
“Why do we so make war upon the gifts of God? We may guess at our own motives: the despair that hates other men's hope, the lovelessness that would deny other men love, the plain vulgar envy and malice that can't bear to see other men happy. For self-denial, there is a philosophical justification—only when duty is unpleasant can we be sure that we're doing it for its own sake and not out of selfishness. Yet to this chilly righteousness the Christian may answer in the words of Augustine: ‘Have charity and do what you like.’ And for ‘others—denial’—for robbing other people of harmless pleasures—there is no justification at all. One fact must be faced honestly by all true Christians: an impulse to spoil others' fun comes straight from the devil.”
[p 56]
Re the enjoyment of God’s gifts:
“Christianity is everywhere paradoxical, everywhere too difficult for simple black-and-white thinking; but nowhere more so than in its doctrine of worldly goods. For they are good things—and yet we must not long for them. They are to be enjoyed—and yet we must not make that enjoyment our goal.”
[p 121]
August 30, 2020
Joy Davidman’s Smoke on the Mountain is a journey to the summit with Moses to flesh out the meaning of the words inscribed in tablets of stone millenia ago. To read this booklet is to recognize the presence of God burning in [your] mind as Moses recognized him in the burning bush.” In a culture whose highest ambition is to be safe, Davidman defines the sin of fear as “a rejection of the present and a desperate attempt to play God by getting control of the future.” And the antidote to fear is “Courage himself, God the Lion, stands beside us to help us live by it. Whatever we desire, whatever we love, whatever we find worth suffering for, will be Dead Sea fruit in our mouths unless we remember that God came first.”
Davidman defines, “An idol is only an inanimate object that can do no harm...So is a gun. But a man can do great harm with it...If we are to be saved, it will not be by wood, however well carved and polished; nor by machines, however efficient; nor by social planning, however ingenious. If we are to be saved, it must be by the one power that is built into a man at his beginning and that he does not have to make with his hands--the power of the Holy Spirit, which is God.”
She describes the Sabbath as a weekly return to Eden. “How do you make a day holy? By seeing that it is holy already; and behaving accordingly...Every man wants God in his heart far more than he can ever want anything else; that is, every man wants peace and love, answers to his questions, and the keys of heaven. When a church gives these, its doors overflow.”
I was particularly struck by Davidman’s reinterpretation of the fifth commandment. “To clan society, therefore, a man is not so much himself as the son of his father...at the climax of history, he is Jesus who calls himself the Son of Man.” I am no longer Jennifer Erickson--patricarchically related to my white, European, Swedish clansmen; in the family of our Heavenly Father, all are “members of yourself in the eternal body of mankind.”
I was also convicted by Davidman’s redefinition of the eighth commandment. “The thief is not only he who steals my purse, but also he who steals my trade; and he who underpays me, and he who overcharges me; and he who taxes me for his own advantage instead of mine; and he who sells me trash instead of honest goods...We men are all thieves who have stolen the self which was meant as a part of God and tried to keep it for ourselves alone.”
“If we start confessing our habitual lies, shall we ever be done? There are the lies of gossip, public and private, which make haters out of us; the lies of advertising and salesmanship, which make money out of us; the lies of politicians, who make power out of us. And the lies of the sort of journalist who manufactures a daily omniscience out of the teletype machine and the Encyclopaedia Britannica! And the lies of a professional patriot who assures us that our cause is so just that it doesn’t matter what injustice we commit in its name!” However, “the most fundamental of lies – that we lie to ourselves about ourselves… The Christian is the only man who does not go around all the time feeling guilty. For him, sin is a burden he can lay down...It is the unfortunate creature who denies the existence of sin in general, and his own in particular, who must go on carrying it forever.”
Davidman asserts, “The Tenth Commandment is unique; its predecessors deal with specific actions, but this alone forbids a state of mind.” How many times do I “ask the Lord, not for heaven, but for a way of keeping the automobiles and the television sets?...Seeing God face-to-face is our goal; the pleasures of life, and even life itself, are the means to it. Therefore the milk and honey and corn and wine and soft chairs and fine houses and swift automobiles – all those pleasant things! – exist primarily as a kind of currency of love; a means whereby men can exchange love with one another and thus become capable of the love of God” we can give away.
“What, then, must we pray for? Nothing that we have not been told over and over again; nothing but ‘Thy will be done’ even if his will is that we lose all…Our best wisdom may indeed ask God to save our way of life, but his wisdom might conceivably conclude that our way of life is too rich for our blood, what we need is a purge. At the moment we are still often seeking God not for himself but so that we can hire him as a night watchman to mammon.” In the end the antidote to covetousness “is to want God so much that we can’t be bothered with inordinate wants for anything else.”
How often do we slight the value of Christianity “as the passport to heaven in favor of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling earth...Only the Almighty can untangle the snarl of this world...The world itself, seen clearly, exists primarily… as a hothouse to nurse our growing spirits along until they’re strong enough for the unimaginable outdoors we call heaven.”
July 10, 2019
After reading her famous husband CS Lewis’s horrifyingly vivid but beautiful account of his grief after her death, I was intrigued by Davidman and read her book of poetry. It was pretty good, so here I am reading what’s arguably her most famous book, which is essentially an analysis of the Ten Commandments aka the Decalogue.
Disclaimer: I was raised Catholic, then settled into agnosticism, and these days I’m some weird hybrid of a lot of things, but would probably describe myself as a strict non-scripturist with distinct Reform Jewish leanings. So in short, I’m kind of the exact opposite of Joy Davidman, a Jewish girl who converted to Catholicism and really, really loves the Bible. Like. Really. It’s kind of alarming.
To quote every reality show ever, Joy Davidman is not here to make friends. She’s here to beat you into submission, and by God, she wants you to LIKE IT.
Christianity, Davidman acknowledges, looks like old-people stuffiness to young people. “Get off my lawn!” “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” Where is the joy in that, Davidman wonders? God is the source of all joy, “of fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.” But it��s hard to see that, sometimes, especially when you think about the Ten Commandments, which is a grumpy little list of “shoulds” and “should nots.”
And for that reason, lots of Christian pastors are/were trying to “bring God up to date”—make him hip. I don’t know what this meant in 1953, but in 2019, it means things like painfully bad Christian rock music in churches and bumper stickers that say things like “high on Jesus.”
Davidman thinks this is all a load of bull. “When your child swallows poison, you don’t sit around thinking of ways to adapt his constitution to a poisonous diet. You give him an emetic.” Yes, the Ten Commandments are pretty severe, Davidman agrees. But so is getting crucified, so we should suck it up. Nay—we should find joy in the severity.
Davidman, obviously, is a lot of fun at parties.
————THE COMMANDMENTS————
1, 2, & 3. I’m God, no other gods please, I’m the best one, I know words, I have the best words.
Davidman thinks that today, it’s no longer pagan gods vs. Judeo-Christian God; it’s God vs. ourselves. Our political beliefs, like feminism and atheism and pacifism and communism, are our new gods. Well-intentioned at first, they replace our religion with their zeal.
“The greatest false gods: sex, the state, science, and society.” Wow, yeah, she really went there. Allllrighty then.
4) Sunday = Funday.
Davidman thinks the joy of devotion has been replaced by a “dull sense of duty”—people don’t work on the sabbath, but they can’t really be said to “keep it holy” either—they aren’t joyous in their celebration. It’s the memory of being forced to go to church on Sundays, Davidman says, that creates so many atheists (“modern infidels” is a real phrase she uses).
5) Be nice to your parents.
Davidman laments the fact that the elderly are no longer cared for in the home, that mothers have to take jobs and outsource child care, that it’s normal to hate your in-laws, that teenagers are expected to be hostile to their parents.
Post-Industrial Revolution, “we no longer need our families— we are therefore free to love them with complete unselfishness,” Davidman points out (in one of her few good points)—but we squander this golden opportunity to show ourselves at our most decent.
On the other hand, Davidman points out, the same is true for the parents; if we want our children to honor us, we should act with honor, give them something to honor and to love freely.
6. Don’t murder anyone.
Davidman’s actually pretty flexible on this point. She’s definitely not a pacifist, and doesn’t want you to think Jesus was one, either. She’s very into the whole smiting-of-the-wicked concept. Fire and brimstone get this lady wet.
So don't worry, we can kill people, Davidman assures us, as long as it’s the infidels; we just have to feel a little bad about it afterwards. But mostly good. They needed smiting, after all.
7. Keep it in your pants.
Davidman uses this space to prattle on about how terrible it is that marriage has become secularized and that there’s even a legal (rather than religious) concept of marriage. Next.
8. Love your neighbor.
This was probably the most bizarre section. Davidman very doggedly insists that loving other people is purely a means to an end.
People today, she laments, have it reversed: they love God as means to the end—the end being loving other people—which opens them to “attack” by atheists, who ask, “Why not bypass God altogether and love our fellow men directly?” (Why, indeed?). Davidman’s response: idealists who try to love other people directly soon making the shocking discovery that people are not as lovable as God is. If you try to love them without God’s help, you’ll fail (will you though? I can't help but feel bad for CS Lewis here. Did he know his wife only loved him as a means to an end?).
9 & 10. But don’t love your neighbor too much.
We’ve always been bad people, we are bad people now, we will always be bad people. This is more or less Davidman’s theory of everything. “An evil and adulterous generation, no doubt. But then, was there ever any other kind?”
That’s cheerful. Joy Davidman has the most inapt name of all time.
————CONCLUSIONS————
Davidman is incredibly well-educated. The wit, the sharpness, the swiftly casual references to obscurities of ancient history—it’s impressive. I won’t pretend it’s not.
She’s also fanatical, anti-science, self-hating, and has a very bizarre concept of compassion.
She self-contradicts a lot (for instance, she hates communists, but also seems to hate capitalism—“our society, in some aspects, is a vast confidence game”).
And, honestly, she just has the most unpleasant opinions. Remind me why I read this again?
Oh yeah. That pleasant book of poetry. I feel so misled.
Disclaimer: I was raised Catholic, then settled into agnosticism, and these days I’m some weird hybrid of a lot of things, but would probably describe myself as a strict non-scripturist with distinct Reform Jewish leanings. So in short, I’m kind of the exact opposite of Joy Davidman, a Jewish girl who converted to Catholicism and really, really loves the Bible. Like. Really. It’s kind of alarming.
To quote every reality show ever, Joy Davidman is not here to make friends. She’s here to beat you into submission, and by God, she wants you to LIKE IT.
Christianity, Davidman acknowledges, looks like old-people stuffiness to young people. “Get off my lawn!” “Don’t do this and don’t do that.” Where is the joy in that, Davidman wonders? God is the source of all joy, “of fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.” But it��s hard to see that, sometimes, especially when you think about the Ten Commandments, which is a grumpy little list of “shoulds” and “should nots.”
And for that reason, lots of Christian pastors are/were trying to “bring God up to date”—make him hip. I don’t know what this meant in 1953, but in 2019, it means things like painfully bad Christian rock music in churches and bumper stickers that say things like “high on Jesus.”
Davidman thinks this is all a load of bull. “When your child swallows poison, you don’t sit around thinking of ways to adapt his constitution to a poisonous diet. You give him an emetic.” Yes, the Ten Commandments are pretty severe, Davidman agrees. But so is getting crucified, so we should suck it up. Nay—we should find joy in the severity.
Davidman, obviously, is a lot of fun at parties.
————THE COMMANDMENTS————
1, 2, & 3. I’m God, no other gods please, I’m the best one, I know words, I have the best words.
Davidman thinks that today, it’s no longer pagan gods vs. Judeo-Christian God; it’s God vs. ourselves. Our political beliefs, like feminism and atheism and pacifism and communism, are our new gods. Well-intentioned at first, they replace our religion with their zeal.
“The greatest false gods: sex, the state, science, and society.” Wow, yeah, she really went there. Allllrighty then.
4) Sunday = Funday.
Davidman thinks the joy of devotion has been replaced by a “dull sense of duty”—people don’t work on the sabbath, but they can’t really be said to “keep it holy” either—they aren’t joyous in their celebration. It’s the memory of being forced to go to church on Sundays, Davidman says, that creates so many atheists (“modern infidels” is a real phrase she uses).
5) Be nice to your parents.
Davidman laments the fact that the elderly are no longer cared for in the home, that mothers have to take jobs and outsource child care, that it’s normal to hate your in-laws, that teenagers are expected to be hostile to their parents.
Post-Industrial Revolution, “we no longer need our families— we are therefore free to love them with complete unselfishness,” Davidman points out (in one of her few good points)—but we squander this golden opportunity to show ourselves at our most decent.
On the other hand, Davidman points out, the same is true for the parents; if we want our children to honor us, we should act with honor, give them something to honor and to love freely.
6. Don’t murder anyone.
Davidman’s actually pretty flexible on this point. She’s definitely not a pacifist, and doesn’t want you to think Jesus was one, either. She’s very into the whole smiting-of-the-wicked concept. Fire and brimstone get this lady wet.
So don't worry, we can kill people, Davidman assures us, as long as it’s the infidels; we just have to feel a little bad about it afterwards. But mostly good. They needed smiting, after all.
7. Keep it in your pants.
Davidman uses this space to prattle on about how terrible it is that marriage has become secularized and that there’s even a legal (rather than religious) concept of marriage. Next.
8. Love your neighbor.
This was probably the most bizarre section. Davidman very doggedly insists that loving other people is purely a means to an end.
People today, she laments, have it reversed: they love God as means to the end—the end being loving other people—which opens them to “attack” by atheists, who ask, “Why not bypass God altogether and love our fellow men directly?” (Why, indeed?). Davidman’s response: idealists who try to love other people directly soon making the shocking discovery that people are not as lovable as God is. If you try to love them without God’s help, you’ll fail (will you though? I can't help but feel bad for CS Lewis here. Did he know his wife only loved him as a means to an end?).
9 & 10. But don’t love your neighbor too much.
We’ve always been bad people, we are bad people now, we will always be bad people. This is more or less Davidman’s theory of everything. “An evil and adulterous generation, no doubt. But then, was there ever any other kind?”
That’s cheerful. Joy Davidman has the most inapt name of all time.
————CONCLUSIONS————
Davidman is incredibly well-educated. The wit, the sharpness, the swiftly casual references to obscurities of ancient history—it’s impressive. I won’t pretend it’s not.
She’s also fanatical, anti-science, self-hating, and has a very bizarre concept of compassion.
She self-contradicts a lot (for instance, she hates communists, but also seems to hate capitalism—“our society, in some aspects, is a vast confidence game”).
And, honestly, she just has the most unpleasant opinions. Remind me why I read this again?
Oh yeah. That pleasant book of poetry. I feel so misled.
December 18, 2024
Wow, this book could’ve been written yesterday as it is still so true about our world today.
October 5, 2018
ENGLISH: Interesting. I liked more Joy's book about the Ten Commandments than C.S.Lewis's introduction, as he is one of my favorite authors. By the way, the information in Goodreads about this book is wrong, C.S.Lewis was not the author's husband when he wrote this introduction. Two years later they were married nominally, before the Administration, and four years later really, before God. This is a quotable quote from this book that I have selected as a sample. It is from chapter 11:
The good news out of Nazareth was never reassuring news by this world's standards; reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil.
SPANISH: Es curioso que me gustara más el libro de Joy sobre los Diez Mandamientos que la introducción de C.S.Lewis, que es uno de mis autores favoritos. Por cierto, la información que tiene Goodreads sobre este libro está equivocada, porque C.S.Lewis no era el marido de la autora cuando escribió esta introducción. Dos años más tarde se casaron nominalmente, ante la Administración Pública, y cuatro años más tarde se casaron de verdad, ante Dios. Adjunto una cita de este libro que he seleccionado como muestra. Es del capítulo 11:
La buena noticia de Nazareth nunca fue una noticia tranquilizadora según los estándares de este mundo; las noticias tranquilizadoras suelen venir del diablo.
The good news out of Nazareth was never reassuring news by this world's standards; reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil.
SPANISH: Es curioso que me gustara más el libro de Joy sobre los Diez Mandamientos que la introducción de C.S.Lewis, que es uno de mis autores favoritos. Por cierto, la información que tiene Goodreads sobre este libro está equivocada, porque C.S.Lewis no era el marido de la autora cuando escribió esta introducción. Dos años más tarde se casaron nominalmente, ante la Administración Pública, y cuatro años más tarde se casaron de verdad, ante Dios. Adjunto una cita de este libro que he seleccionado como muestra. Es del capítulo 11:
La buena noticia de Nazareth nunca fue una noticia tranquilizadora según los estándares de este mundo; las noticias tranquilizadoras suelen venir del diablo.
January 15, 2024
Romans and the Psalms are pretty important. The Gospels, Major Prophets, a few Epistles, maybe a dozen more books from the Hebrew Bible, all deeply valuable. After that, what is the next book a Christian should read? With all due respect for the whole of Scripture, I’m taking Smoke on the Mountain over Jude and Philemon! Quite simply, Joy Davidman has written such a clear description of Biblical guidance for discipleship and a defense of the very relevance of the Bible for modern living, that anyone interested in faith—-any religion, any commitment, any complaints—-must read this classic.
Few passages of Scripture are more famous, or infamous, than the Ten Commandments. Their content and purpose, however, are so often distorted, misunderstood or ignored, that they can seem little more than a relic of Christendom, some awkward artifact that may have mattered in some society, somewhere, but not today. Coveting? Sabbath? Seriously! From believers overwhelmed by contemporary culture, or the good intentions of finger-wagging preachers, and even from secular critics of pietistic religion, the Commandments have become a cultural parody, a shallow and outmoded list, and no more than a list, of God’s arbitrary rules. Then comes this interpretation…
With near perfect writing—-sharp, scholarly, but not pedantic—-and stunning theological insight, Smoke reveals the Law as God’s holy gift rather than dour demands. Davidman uses clever stories, biting social criticism, and the lens of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to turn the Commandments back from our “dull denial” to its original, positive “thrilling affirmation.” (15) And how thrilling it is! This is the sort of book that can compel one reader to devour it in one sitting, and another to pause and to reflect at nearly every page (excepting some saccharine moments in the last chapter). Her analysis is packed with truth, the sort of truth that we know so deeply in our hearts that we never can or do put words to it. Every chapter is an ‘Aha!’ moment, one surprising application of the Bible to modern life after another, after another, for ten fascinating Commandments.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Smoke is how modern it is at all. Though published in 1953, the social ills that Davidman address, especially materialistic greed, seem nearly identical to today’s problems. Change “Negro” to “homosexual”, and maybe strengthen her soft feminism, and the book will speak as well to college students now, as it did to her and her husband’s students back in the mis-perceived golden age of Western Christianity. (She married CS Lewis in 1957.) And yet, this is no post-modern or sneaky contemporary manipulation of Scripture. As Davidman explains, “Mustn’t the churches adapt Christianity to suit the ideas of our time? No, they must not. Our ideas are killing us spiritually.” (20)
This analysis of the Commandments uses close enough textual and exegetical care. Davidman’s real skill, however, is placing each Commandment in simultaneous contexts of the ancient Hebrew world, 1st century Palestine, and our own day. Often enough our situation demands a special interpretation, but usually our shared human nature receives the same message. For instance, “The frightened men of Christ’s day, groaning under the intolerable social security of the Roman peace, turned to their law and found only a tangle of gobbledygook. Like us, they could obey it blindly or reject it blindly; but they could not possibly make sense of it.” (16) So, how did Christ, and how should we, make sense of the ‘gobbledygook’ that grew up around ten simple commands? To review Davidman’s answer, let us use her voice as often as possible. It is just too good for me to summarize!
1) The polytheistic contexts of the Ancient Hebrew people and 1st century Palestine are not quite the same as our secularized world: “With some of us, the question is not One against many, but One against none.” (23) But we do have false gods, those of sex, state, technology, culture and even ethics. We obey our desires and beliefs, addictions, influences and values with barely a second thought. Even worse, we sanctify our sides, calling down God’s blessing before ever acknowledging God’s place before the issue at hand. So, let us remember, “Today the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ must include, ‘Thou shalt have me’.” (23)
2) “What shape is your idol?” (31) Lexus-shaped, or organic-shaped, or self-shaped? At some point long ago people worshiped impotent objects, rationalizing, “if Mumbo Jumbo is so hard to please, what a very great Mumbo Jumbo he must be!” (34) Jesus’ contemporaries understood that “The rigid Hebrew rule kept you from ornamenting your furniture, but it never kept you from worshiping your furniture.” (34) Plenty of us have can follow this for furniture or luxury, but rarely do preachers go the full measure to condemn the American dream that so destroys souls. Perhaps Davidman’s central interpretation of the Ten Commandments for today is this: “Idolatry’s other name is materialism.” (35) An attack like this against capitalism was dangerous for Davidman, a former member of the Communist Party writing amidst McCarthyism. For us, resisting hyper-capitalism might be safer but seems just as foreign. The problem is not just that the quality of Western living selfishly steals resources from other people (that’s a matter for #8), but that the whole basis of our comfortable livelihood has become almost sanctified beyond reproach. Almost. “An idol is only an inanimate object that can do no harm… So is a gun… Idolatry lies not in the idol but in the worshiper. It is a psychological attitude that governs his whole life, and a very murderous attitude… If we are to be saved, it will not be by wood, however well carved or polished; nor by machines, however efficient; nor by social planning, however ingenious. If we are to be saved, it must be by the one power that is built into a man at his beginning and that he does not have to make with his hands-—the power of the Holy Spirit, which is God.” (39)
3) In the past believers mistook the power of God for the name of God, and feared misusing or abusing that power through that name. Some Jews won’t write the name, and a few of us still cringe to hear it profaned. More importantly for Davidman, “Today, with two thousand years of additional practice, we have invented many new ways of breaking the Third Commandment. We still misuse God’s power and we still despise it; we call upon God to justify our sins; we commit the ultimate blasphemy of not calling upon God at all.” (44) Mainly, we abuse God’s powerful name in “the sin of believing in one’s righteousness.” (46) Thus, we must take our own care to understand the ironic message of this ‘Shall Not’ command: “Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God in earnest!” (48)
4) Many theologians interpret the Fourth Commandment as more about rest than worship. For her part, Davidman points out: “Question a dozen modern infidels about their childhood, and half of them will trace their atheism to endless, dull, bleak Sundays in a negatively ‘Christian’ household which made a child’s life seem hardly worth living.” (53) And so, with the notable exception of a growth of non-Sunday worship opportunities, we Westerners continue to give up on church. “Sunday is still a holiday to all of us, but for many it has long since ceased to be a holy day.” (51) How do we return to rest and worship for “the sheer fun of it”? (58)
5) In the Hebrew worldview, people valued family and tribe far more than individuality. Today, with American families more and more dysfunctional and expendable, we can wonder, “Were it really true that sons and fathers are natural enemies, how could mankind ever have dreamed of such a thing as the Fatherhood of God?” (65) Why has our whole society turned such a cold shoulder to family, and such a warm reception to individualism? “No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let us be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way.” (66) Interestingly, this is the one place Smoke does not offer any clear advice to interpret the command for modern life. Davidman is almost hopeless, that we can do any more than offer more leisure—-today we call it quality time, and we all know how hard that is to find—and remind us that the best things in life are relationships.
6) One of Jesus’ shocking ideas was to abandon the logic of ‘eye-for-an-eye’, and recognize how spiritually harmful violence is, how easily it spirals physically and emotionally. Davidman is careful (too careful?) to not make him out as a pacifist, but still as a broad interpreter of the Sixth Commandment. For today we must come clean that, “Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our de-natured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must conclude that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.” (78) We must find a better way. Defending one war or protesting one type of health care decision, be it abortion or Obamacare, is not the issue. At the root, “We are aware… that we often do things for mammon’s sake and pretend we are doing them for God.” (81)
7) In ancient times, “The adultery forbidden in the Seventh Commandment originally meant any infringement of the man’s rights-—and, possibly, nothing more.” (87) How refreshing, then, that “Every statement our Lord made about sexuality works to protect women and to awaken men to their own responsibilities.” (89) So, a faithful reading will greatly expand to cover our approach any sexual politics. This by no means weakens the fact that “the command is there and is perfectly clear as far as it goes.” (88) Can the Church teach better and provide better examples of marriage? Or, would CS Lewis’ suggestion be helpful, to organize civil unions alongside church-sanctioned marriage (93), for hetero- Christians, mind you?
8) Most folks think the Eighth Commandment is one of the clear ones. Instead, Davidman points out that changing attitudes of ownership and property have confused our understanding of ‘stealing’. Consider the current issue with downloading/stealing digital content. Or more generally, “Our society tends to denounce force, particularly when used by the poor, and extenuate fraud, particularly when employed by the rich.” (98) Need or greed? Christians should read their Bible: “the Old Testament, in The Psalms and The Proverbs and the Prophets, condemns the dishonest rich far more strongly than the desperate poor.” (99) So, what is stealing all about? Davidman’s interpretation is that, “property is neither sin nor inalienable right, but a loan, a trust from God.” (99) And yet the Church is so slow to follow this sort of attitude. Whether from naughty pastors, the evil proponents of the current wealth divide, or all of us who slide into the lap of sanctified comfort, no Commandment has been more systematically broken, and defended, than simple #8.
9) Perhaps the most straightforward command can still be generalized. We do not witness merely by not lying, or telling the whole truth, not even by evangelizing well. True witness encompasses our whole being. “The Hebrews began to feel that there was something a little smelly about all tampering with the truth. And when Christ came, his fiercest wrath was for the hypocrite… Let us make note of the hypocrite; we shall meet him again, every last one of us, any time we care to look into the mirror.” (108) All of us slip into false living, and “No doubt we often bewilder ourselves successfully about our motives… For the only way to get rid of a sin is to admit it.” (112-113)
10) Less true now than even five years ago, Davidman is still correct that, “To some extent we have realized the dream” (117) of riches and opportunity. “Yet there is one indispensible condition of paradise lacking. We are not happy in the place. Nor, for that matter, can we honestly maintain that we are completely just and peaceful and loving it.” (118) Raping our planet and fighting our neighbor for every dollar seems vital for happiness, but who is really happy with the Rat Race? “In the nineteenth century, some pious money-makers argued that wealth was God’s reward of their virtue, and that therefore a poor man had no right to be angry. But today our materialist reformers seem to argue that wealth is virtue”. (123-124) Instead, we are called to trust God, and to pray that ‘Thy will be done’. To that goal, Christians, we are in a sorry state. To hold out hope, however, “It is a poor sort of faith that imagines Christ defeated by anything men can do. Make no mistake: he has already survived everything we can do to him.” (135) Then again, to grace, our call is repentance. “The good news out of Nazareth was never reassuring news by this world’s standards; reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil. For a long time we have been trying to make the best of both worlds, to accept Christianity as an ideal and materialism as a practice, and in consequence we have reached a spiritual bankruptcy”. (139)
Moses gave the Ten Commandments to a landless group of runaway slaves. Somehow, in God’s wisdom, those words reach across the centuries and cultures to apply sharply to our over-stuffed context. Davidman concludes: “Christianity, if we ever embrace it not for our own worldly advantage but through surrender to God, will not only enable us to obey the Ten Commandments but enable us to enjoy it; not only save this transitory world for the few perplexed years we spend in it, but bring us out of this noise and darkness and helplessness and terror that we call the world into the full Light: Light we remember from our childhood dreams, and from glimpses through music and art and the ecstasy of first love; Light we have known through a brief glow in our few moments of really selfless charity; Light which, in our secret hearts, we desire more than money and sex and power and the pride of self. We men are all thieves who have stolen the self which was meant as a part of God and tried to keep it for ourselves alone. But if we give it up again, we might hear the words he spoke to a penitent thief once: Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’” (139)
Few passages of Scripture are more famous, or infamous, than the Ten Commandments. Their content and purpose, however, are so often distorted, misunderstood or ignored, that they can seem little more than a relic of Christendom, some awkward artifact that may have mattered in some society, somewhere, but not today. Coveting? Sabbath? Seriously! From believers overwhelmed by contemporary culture, or the good intentions of finger-wagging preachers, and even from secular critics of pietistic religion, the Commandments have become a cultural parody, a shallow and outmoded list, and no more than a list, of God’s arbitrary rules. Then comes this interpretation…
With near perfect writing—-sharp, scholarly, but not pedantic—-and stunning theological insight, Smoke reveals the Law as God’s holy gift rather than dour demands. Davidman uses clever stories, biting social criticism, and the lens of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to turn the Commandments back from our “dull denial” to its original, positive “thrilling affirmation.” (15) And how thrilling it is! This is the sort of book that can compel one reader to devour it in one sitting, and another to pause and to reflect at nearly every page (excepting some saccharine moments in the last chapter). Her analysis is packed with truth, the sort of truth that we know so deeply in our hearts that we never can or do put words to it. Every chapter is an ‘Aha!’ moment, one surprising application of the Bible to modern life after another, after another, for ten fascinating Commandments.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Smoke is how modern it is at all. Though published in 1953, the social ills that Davidman address, especially materialistic greed, seem nearly identical to today’s problems. Change “Negro” to “homosexual”, and maybe strengthen her soft feminism, and the book will speak as well to college students now, as it did to her and her husband’s students back in the mis-perceived golden age of Western Christianity. (She married CS Lewis in 1957.) And yet, this is no post-modern or sneaky contemporary manipulation of Scripture. As Davidman explains, “Mustn’t the churches adapt Christianity to suit the ideas of our time? No, they must not. Our ideas are killing us spiritually.” (20)
This analysis of the Commandments uses close enough textual and exegetical care. Davidman’s real skill, however, is placing each Commandment in simultaneous contexts of the ancient Hebrew world, 1st century Palestine, and our own day. Often enough our situation demands a special interpretation, but usually our shared human nature receives the same message. For instance, “The frightened men of Christ’s day, groaning under the intolerable social security of the Roman peace, turned to their law and found only a tangle of gobbledygook. Like us, they could obey it blindly or reject it blindly; but they could not possibly make sense of it.” (16) So, how did Christ, and how should we, make sense of the ‘gobbledygook’ that grew up around ten simple commands? To review Davidman’s answer, let us use her voice as often as possible. It is just too good for me to summarize!
1) The polytheistic contexts of the Ancient Hebrew people and 1st century Palestine are not quite the same as our secularized world: “With some of us, the question is not One against many, but One against none.” (23) But we do have false gods, those of sex, state, technology, culture and even ethics. We obey our desires and beliefs, addictions, influences and values with barely a second thought. Even worse, we sanctify our sides, calling down God’s blessing before ever acknowledging God’s place before the issue at hand. So, let us remember, “Today the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ must include, ‘Thou shalt have me’.” (23)
2) “What shape is your idol?” (31) Lexus-shaped, or organic-shaped, or self-shaped? At some point long ago people worshiped impotent objects, rationalizing, “if Mumbo Jumbo is so hard to please, what a very great Mumbo Jumbo he must be!” (34) Jesus’ contemporaries understood that “The rigid Hebrew rule kept you from ornamenting your furniture, but it never kept you from worshiping your furniture.” (34) Plenty of us have can follow this for furniture or luxury, but rarely do preachers go the full measure to condemn the American dream that so destroys souls. Perhaps Davidman’s central interpretation of the Ten Commandments for today is this: “Idolatry’s other name is materialism.” (35) An attack like this against capitalism was dangerous for Davidman, a former member of the Communist Party writing amidst McCarthyism. For us, resisting hyper-capitalism might be safer but seems just as foreign. The problem is not just that the quality of Western living selfishly steals resources from other people (that’s a matter for #8), but that the whole basis of our comfortable livelihood has become almost sanctified beyond reproach. Almost. “An idol is only an inanimate object that can do no harm… So is a gun… Idolatry lies not in the idol but in the worshiper. It is a psychological attitude that governs his whole life, and a very murderous attitude… If we are to be saved, it will not be by wood, however well carved or polished; nor by machines, however efficient; nor by social planning, however ingenious. If we are to be saved, it must be by the one power that is built into a man at his beginning and that he does not have to make with his hands-—the power of the Holy Spirit, which is God.” (39)
3) In the past believers mistook the power of God for the name of God, and feared misusing or abusing that power through that name. Some Jews won’t write the name, and a few of us still cringe to hear it profaned. More importantly for Davidman, “Today, with two thousand years of additional practice, we have invented many new ways of breaking the Third Commandment. We still misuse God’s power and we still despise it; we call upon God to justify our sins; we commit the ultimate blasphemy of not calling upon God at all.” (44) Mainly, we abuse God’s powerful name in “the sin of believing in one’s righteousness.” (46) Thus, we must take our own care to understand the ironic message of this ‘Shall Not’ command: “Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God in earnest!” (48)
4) Many theologians interpret the Fourth Commandment as more about rest than worship. For her part, Davidman points out: “Question a dozen modern infidels about their childhood, and half of them will trace their atheism to endless, dull, bleak Sundays in a negatively ‘Christian’ household which made a child’s life seem hardly worth living.” (53) And so, with the notable exception of a growth of non-Sunday worship opportunities, we Westerners continue to give up on church. “Sunday is still a holiday to all of us, but for many it has long since ceased to be a holy day.” (51) How do we return to rest and worship for “the sheer fun of it”? (58)
5) In the Hebrew worldview, people valued family and tribe far more than individuality. Today, with American families more and more dysfunctional and expendable, we can wonder, “Were it really true that sons and fathers are natural enemies, how could mankind ever have dreamed of such a thing as the Fatherhood of God?” (65) Why has our whole society turned such a cold shoulder to family, and such a warm reception to individualism? “No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let us be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way.” (66) Interestingly, this is the one place Smoke does not offer any clear advice to interpret the command for modern life. Davidman is almost hopeless, that we can do any more than offer more leisure—-today we call it quality time, and we all know how hard that is to find—and remind us that the best things in life are relationships.
6) One of Jesus’ shocking ideas was to abandon the logic of ‘eye-for-an-eye’, and recognize how spiritually harmful violence is, how easily it spirals physically and emotionally. Davidman is careful (too careful?) to not make him out as a pacifist, but still as a broad interpreter of the Sixth Commandment. For today we must come clean that, “Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our de-natured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must conclude that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.” (78) We must find a better way. Defending one war or protesting one type of health care decision, be it abortion or Obamacare, is not the issue. At the root, “We are aware… that we often do things for mammon’s sake and pretend we are doing them for God.” (81)
7) In ancient times, “The adultery forbidden in the Seventh Commandment originally meant any infringement of the man’s rights-—and, possibly, nothing more.” (87) How refreshing, then, that “Every statement our Lord made about sexuality works to protect women and to awaken men to their own responsibilities.” (89) So, a faithful reading will greatly expand to cover our approach any sexual politics. This by no means weakens the fact that “the command is there and is perfectly clear as far as it goes.” (88) Can the Church teach better and provide better examples of marriage? Or, would CS Lewis’ suggestion be helpful, to organize civil unions alongside church-sanctioned marriage (93), for hetero- Christians, mind you?
8) Most folks think the Eighth Commandment is one of the clear ones. Instead, Davidman points out that changing attitudes of ownership and property have confused our understanding of ‘stealing’. Consider the current issue with downloading/stealing digital content. Or more generally, “Our society tends to denounce force, particularly when used by the poor, and extenuate fraud, particularly when employed by the rich.” (98) Need or greed? Christians should read their Bible: “the Old Testament, in The Psalms and The Proverbs and the Prophets, condemns the dishonest rich far more strongly than the desperate poor.” (99) So, what is stealing all about? Davidman’s interpretation is that, “property is neither sin nor inalienable right, but a loan, a trust from God.” (99) And yet the Church is so slow to follow this sort of attitude. Whether from naughty pastors, the evil proponents of the current wealth divide, or all of us who slide into the lap of sanctified comfort, no Commandment has been more systematically broken, and defended, than simple #8.
9) Perhaps the most straightforward command can still be generalized. We do not witness merely by not lying, or telling the whole truth, not even by evangelizing well. True witness encompasses our whole being. “The Hebrews began to feel that there was something a little smelly about all tampering with the truth. And when Christ came, his fiercest wrath was for the hypocrite… Let us make note of the hypocrite; we shall meet him again, every last one of us, any time we care to look into the mirror.” (108) All of us slip into false living, and “No doubt we often bewilder ourselves successfully about our motives… For the only way to get rid of a sin is to admit it.” (112-113)
10) Less true now than even five years ago, Davidman is still correct that, “To some extent we have realized the dream” (117) of riches and opportunity. “Yet there is one indispensible condition of paradise lacking. We are not happy in the place. Nor, for that matter, can we honestly maintain that we are completely just and peaceful and loving it.” (118) Raping our planet and fighting our neighbor for every dollar seems vital for happiness, but who is really happy with the Rat Race? “In the nineteenth century, some pious money-makers argued that wealth was God’s reward of their virtue, and that therefore a poor man had no right to be angry. But today our materialist reformers seem to argue that wealth is virtue”. (123-124) Instead, we are called to trust God, and to pray that ‘Thy will be done’. To that goal, Christians, we are in a sorry state. To hold out hope, however, “It is a poor sort of faith that imagines Christ defeated by anything men can do. Make no mistake: he has already survived everything we can do to him.” (135) Then again, to grace, our call is repentance. “The good news out of Nazareth was never reassuring news by this world’s standards; reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil. For a long time we have been trying to make the best of both worlds, to accept Christianity as an ideal and materialism as a practice, and in consequence we have reached a spiritual bankruptcy”. (139)
Moses gave the Ten Commandments to a landless group of runaway slaves. Somehow, in God’s wisdom, those words reach across the centuries and cultures to apply sharply to our over-stuffed context. Davidman concludes: “Christianity, if we ever embrace it not for our own worldly advantage but through surrender to God, will not only enable us to obey the Ten Commandments but enable us to enjoy it; not only save this transitory world for the few perplexed years we spend in it, but bring us out of this noise and darkness and helplessness and terror that we call the world into the full Light: Light we remember from our childhood dreams, and from glimpses through music and art and the ecstasy of first love; Light we have known through a brief glow in our few moments of really selfless charity; Light which, in our secret hearts, we desire more than money and sex and power and the pride of self. We men are all thieves who have stolen the self which was meant as a part of God and tried to keep it for ourselves alone. But if we give it up again, we might hear the words he spoke to a penitent thief once: Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’” (139)
March 23, 2018
Smoke on the Mountain, An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Joy Davidman. Westminster Press, Phil. 1953, 139 pp.
I found this to be an extraordinary book. The author’s insights into the commandments are full of the sharp bite and paradox of the Christian writers of C.S. Lewis’ generation. The chapters towards the end struck me very hard as being contemporary! Ch. VIII (she follows the Protestant numbering of the commandments), “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” hits marvelously on social justice. See p. 99 which is a perfect analog to Trump as Cyrus. Ch. IX, “Jesting Pilate,” wittily goes from her English background on the propaganda misuse of Titus Oates to the normal calumnies of piety, pp. 107 and 109. Much deeper is the notion that truth does not exist, which is the background for habitual lying. P. 111. And finally, Ch. X, “The Moth and the Rust.” The author hits well at the assumption that modernity in its industrial might will satisfy us.
She is thought-provoking…
7 Forward by CS Lewis. Joy Davidman is one who comes to us from the second generation of unbelief; her parents, Jewish in blood, “rationalists” by conviction. This makes her approach extremely interesting to the reclaimed apostates of my own generation; the daring paradoxes of our youth were the stale platitudes of hers. “Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only”; thus she describes the philosophy with which she started life.
15 We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and /16 light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him. Otherwise our Christianity is no better than the cannibal’s [negatives]. We shall try to be negatively good, and make a virtue of misery; plume ourselves on the rejection of delights for which we are too weak, measure our piety by the number of pleasures we prohibit. And others will react against us by rejecting religion altogether, probably announcing with pride that they are choosing “life” instead. Saint Augustine phrased the Christian law as: ”Have charity and do what you like.” The modern materialist often makes it simply: “Do what you like,” and then rushes off to ask his psychoanalyst why he no longer seems to like anything. Whereas he Pharisee, alas, tends to invert Augustine into: “Neither do what you like nor have charity.”
20 “Thou shalt not” is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is “Thou shalt.” To be Christian is to be old? Not a bit of it. To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young.
I GOD COMES FIRST
24 Then, too, we are really not bad enough for undisguised self-worship. We have inherited two thousand years of Cristian tradition; we have inherited, also, that innate moral sense of all mankind which makes even the most corrupt of us yearn vaguely for something better than himself to serve. And so we disguise the beast in the heart as a worthy cause; we borrow some shining virtue from heaven to robe in in, and make it into a false gd. We proclaim that man will find salvation in art or science or education, in ending poverty or ending prejudice, in world government or in no government at all – everywhere but in the knowledge of the One.
They are hybrid creatures, our beast gods. Their strength comes from the true God, their weakness from disguised self-worship. … the really dangerous beasts are those cast in nobler shapes, with benevolent human masks on their faces. We call them by such names as human dignity, world peace, and freedom from want. And we revere them so deeply that we scream with horror when some iconoclast points out that at best they are means, not ends.
For of course such causes are good things – if we see them as angels, messengers of God, means by which we may come 25/ to know him, they are strong angels indeed. But if we make them our sole ends, they may easily become strong fiends. …
Almost all of us, nowadays, are placing one or more of these false gods before God. The atheist gives himself wholly to his worthy cause, often achieving a burning singleness of purpose that makes him seem more religious than the religious; witness the whole-souled devotion for which the churches often envy the Communists. For the churchman is not capable of this evil simplicity. His heart is divided; he wants to worship both God and the beast. He speaks of God and country, God and prosperity, God and peace; forgetting, in the conscious nobility of his goal, that no man can serve two masters; forgetting, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me, or in addition to me.”
II GODS MADE WITH HANDS
36 Unlike Buddhists and Hindus, Christians have usually held that the good things of this life are good indeed, that all enjoyment is a foreshadowing of our ultimate enjoyment of God. Our earthly loves and joys are meant to lead us to Christ, and we may certainly ask the Christ in whom we believe to preserve them for us. Yet this is very different from using Christ without believing in him—from making Christian doctrine into a propaganda weapon, a pep talk to hearten us to go out and fight for good old materialism. We must return to Chris-/37 anity in order to preserve the things we value—but we cannot return to Christianity at all unless the thing we value above all else is Christ. If we are reviving religion only in order to defend our own works, from the American Constitution down to the famous American blueberry [pie, we are in effect asking Christ to save our idols for us.
VIII YOU CAN’T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN
99 While in the camp of mammon we find such enthusiasts for capitalism as the current publication Christian economics, which proclaims, “We stand for free competitive enterprise,” “Profit is essential and Christian,” and even, “The only sure way to make money that I know of is to follow the teachings of Jesus.” And these too find texts to support them. Perhaps the ultimate depth in this view of Jesus as chief executive assistant to mammon was reached by Bruce Barton’s incredible The Man Nobody Knows, which justified its portrayal of our Lord as an American big business leader by quoting on the title page, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
102 Nowadays some reactionaries talk as if Christ had invented capitalism, and some progressives talk as if modern science had invented Government regulation, and both are talking nonsense. Government regulation of the use and tenure of property is exactly as old as government; indeed, we may question whether, without it, any government could exist at all “traditional” laissez-faire capitalism on th other hand is a novelty of the last two centuries and a profoundly revolutionary one, somewhat in the spirit of that revolution by which hell hopes to conquer heaven. The problem that most concerns us, however, is not whether a given system is radical/ 103 or reactionary, but whether it is honest and workable. And perhaps the two adjectives are really one; perhaps a society must be honest in order to be workable.
IX JESTING PILATE
111 “’What is truth? Said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” … perhaps what unsettles the modern mind most is its despair of ever knowing truth amid the conflicting and untrustworthy and very dusty answers we get in our daily life. There are people who believe that not only are there no truths, but there are not even facts—all is a matter of “subjective values.” Whatever the merits of this as philosophy, its practical use is often as a method of evasion and rationalization, a means to the loss of faith and the loss of honor. We have all heard the arguer who, driven into a corner by relentless proof, slips away with an easy, “Oh, well, it’s all in how you think of it, isn’t it?”
X THE MOTH AND THE RUST
119 We have planned for the more abundant life; we have exalted free competition, i.e., the desire to get more of the world’s rewards than our neighbor; we have declared (to quote D.R. Davies’ provocative The Sn of Our Age)that “the consumption of things … The dogma of the new religion is happiness from an insatiable appetite which, no matter how it stuffs its belly, is still psychologically like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse, holding up an empty bowl and begging, “I want some more”? Isn’t it possible that our dram of the good society contained, form the beginning, a hidden violation of the Tenth Commandment—“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”?
126 What, then, must we pray for? Nothing that we have not been told over and over again; nothing but “thy will be done,” even if his will is that we lose al that the last two hundred years have given us. We must pray to face our fear honestly. There is no use pretending that our elaborate technology can’t be destroyed; like all other civilizations, it can.
I found this to be an extraordinary book. The author’s insights into the commandments are full of the sharp bite and paradox of the Christian writers of C.S. Lewis’ generation. The chapters towards the end struck me very hard as being contemporary! Ch. VIII (she follows the Protestant numbering of the commandments), “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” hits marvelously on social justice. See p. 99 which is a perfect analog to Trump as Cyrus. Ch. IX, “Jesting Pilate,” wittily goes from her English background on the propaganda misuse of Titus Oates to the normal calumnies of piety, pp. 107 and 109. Much deeper is the notion that truth does not exist, which is the background for habitual lying. P. 111. And finally, Ch. X, “The Moth and the Rust.” The author hits well at the assumption that modernity in its industrial might will satisfy us.
She is thought-provoking…
7 Forward by CS Lewis. Joy Davidman is one who comes to us from the second generation of unbelief; her parents, Jewish in blood, “rationalists” by conviction. This makes her approach extremely interesting to the reclaimed apostates of my own generation; the daring paradoxes of our youth were the stale platitudes of hers. “Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only”; thus she describes the philosophy with which she started life.
15 We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and /16 light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him. Otherwise our Christianity is no better than the cannibal’s [negatives]. We shall try to be negatively good, and make a virtue of misery; plume ourselves on the rejection of delights for which we are too weak, measure our piety by the number of pleasures we prohibit. And others will react against us by rejecting religion altogether, probably announcing with pride that they are choosing “life” instead. Saint Augustine phrased the Christian law as: ”Have charity and do what you like.” The modern materialist often makes it simply: “Do what you like,” and then rushes off to ask his psychoanalyst why he no longer seems to like anything. Whereas he Pharisee, alas, tends to invert Augustine into: “Neither do what you like nor have charity.”
20 “Thou shalt not” is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is “Thou shalt.” To be Christian is to be old? Not a bit of it. To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young.
I GOD COMES FIRST
24 Then, too, we are really not bad enough for undisguised self-worship. We have inherited two thousand years of Cristian tradition; we have inherited, also, that innate moral sense of all mankind which makes even the most corrupt of us yearn vaguely for something better than himself to serve. And so we disguise the beast in the heart as a worthy cause; we borrow some shining virtue from heaven to robe in in, and make it into a false gd. We proclaim that man will find salvation in art or science or education, in ending poverty or ending prejudice, in world government or in no government at all – everywhere but in the knowledge of the One.
They are hybrid creatures, our beast gods. Their strength comes from the true God, their weakness from disguised self-worship. … the really dangerous beasts are those cast in nobler shapes, with benevolent human masks on their faces. We call them by such names as human dignity, world peace, and freedom from want. And we revere them so deeply that we scream with horror when some iconoclast points out that at best they are means, not ends.
For of course such causes are good things – if we see them as angels, messengers of God, means by which we may come 25/ to know him, they are strong angels indeed. But if we make them our sole ends, they may easily become strong fiends. …
Almost all of us, nowadays, are placing one or more of these false gods before God. The atheist gives himself wholly to his worthy cause, often achieving a burning singleness of purpose that makes him seem more religious than the religious; witness the whole-souled devotion for which the churches often envy the Communists. For the churchman is not capable of this evil simplicity. His heart is divided; he wants to worship both God and the beast. He speaks of God and country, God and prosperity, God and peace; forgetting, in the conscious nobility of his goal, that no man can serve two masters; forgetting, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me, or in addition to me.”
II GODS MADE WITH HANDS
36 Unlike Buddhists and Hindus, Christians have usually held that the good things of this life are good indeed, that all enjoyment is a foreshadowing of our ultimate enjoyment of God. Our earthly loves and joys are meant to lead us to Christ, and we may certainly ask the Christ in whom we believe to preserve them for us. Yet this is very different from using Christ without believing in him—from making Christian doctrine into a propaganda weapon, a pep talk to hearten us to go out and fight for good old materialism. We must return to Chris-/37 anity in order to preserve the things we value—but we cannot return to Christianity at all unless the thing we value above all else is Christ. If we are reviving religion only in order to defend our own works, from the American Constitution down to the famous American blueberry [pie, we are in effect asking Christ to save our idols for us.
VIII YOU CAN’T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN
99 While in the camp of mammon we find such enthusiasts for capitalism as the current publication Christian economics, which proclaims, “We stand for free competitive enterprise,” “Profit is essential and Christian,” and even, “The only sure way to make money that I know of is to follow the teachings of Jesus.” And these too find texts to support them. Perhaps the ultimate depth in this view of Jesus as chief executive assistant to mammon was reached by Bruce Barton’s incredible The Man Nobody Knows, which justified its portrayal of our Lord as an American big business leader by quoting on the title page, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”
102 Nowadays some reactionaries talk as if Christ had invented capitalism, and some progressives talk as if modern science had invented Government regulation, and both are talking nonsense. Government regulation of the use and tenure of property is exactly as old as government; indeed, we may question whether, without it, any government could exist at all “traditional” laissez-faire capitalism on th other hand is a novelty of the last two centuries and a profoundly revolutionary one, somewhat in the spirit of that revolution by which hell hopes to conquer heaven. The problem that most concerns us, however, is not whether a given system is radical/ 103 or reactionary, but whether it is honest and workable. And perhaps the two adjectives are really one; perhaps a society must be honest in order to be workable.
IX JESTING PILATE
111 “’What is truth? Said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” … perhaps what unsettles the modern mind most is its despair of ever knowing truth amid the conflicting and untrustworthy and very dusty answers we get in our daily life. There are people who believe that not only are there no truths, but there are not even facts—all is a matter of “subjective values.” Whatever the merits of this as philosophy, its practical use is often as a method of evasion and rationalization, a means to the loss of faith and the loss of honor. We have all heard the arguer who, driven into a corner by relentless proof, slips away with an easy, “Oh, well, it’s all in how you think of it, isn’t it?”
X THE MOTH AND THE RUST
119 We have planned for the more abundant life; we have exalted free competition, i.e., the desire to get more of the world’s rewards than our neighbor; we have declared (to quote D.R. Davies’ provocative The Sn of Our Age)that “the consumption of things … The dogma of the new religion is happiness from an insatiable appetite which, no matter how it stuffs its belly, is still psychologically like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse, holding up an empty bowl and begging, “I want some more”? Isn’t it possible that our dram of the good society contained, form the beginning, a hidden violation of the Tenth Commandment—“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”?
126 What, then, must we pray for? Nothing that we have not been told over and over again; nothing but “thy will be done,” even if his will is that we lose al that the last two hundred years have given us. We must pray to face our fear honestly. There is no use pretending that our elaborate technology can’t be destroyed; like all other civilizations, it can.
June 17, 2022
Although many know her primarily as the wife of C.S. Lewis--and therefore the subject of his grief in "A Grief Observed"--Joy Davidman was an accomplished writer in her own right, even to the point of winning multiple awards for her writing.
Among her works are two novels, two volumes of poetry, and "Smoke on the Mountain."
Smoke on the Mountain is a concise but thoughtful meditation on the Ten Commandments. Joy came from a Jewish background but became a committed Communist in her youth (her first volume of poetry was titled "Letter to a Comrade") before converting to Christianity . . . after she discovered the writings of C.S. Lewis. So needless to say, she brings a well-rounded perspective with her.
(Lewis writes the foreword to Smoke on the Mountain and confesses to being a bit embarrassed that she quotes him so much in her text -- I counted about half a dozen quotations, mostly from Mere Christianity)
If one of the measures of a great book is how well it speaks across the years, even to a time distant from the one in which it was written, then Smoke on the Mountain certainly passes the test.
"So rapidly does 'the common good,' without God behind it, sink into a mere blown-up projection of each man's private desire! So readily does 'the welfare of society' become a cloak for the seizure of power by an individual or a clique! The religion of Society has in our time become a well-organized worship [ . . . ] And in all this we have the best intentions, as did the Spanish Inquisition. The 'common good,' may become a moloch to which countless individuals are sacrificed, if we forget that all good is in the love of God, and that God comes first."
~Ch. 1, p. 28
I fear her warning about the dangers of cloaking very bad ideas behind very good intentions are no less relevant than they were when she wrote this in 1953.
Joy makes several intriguing points about each of the Ten Commandments that are worth thinking about, but in the end, perhaps the most important thing she does is to bring her argument back to what Jesus said are the two greatest commandments of all: to love God with everything in you and to love your neighbor as yourself. Unless those two priorities are in order, nothing will work like it should.
"It is a poor sort of faith that imagines Christ defeated by anything men can do. Make no mistake: he has already survived everything we can do to him. And as for saving the world, we ought to remember that he has done that too by his method, not ours--the method of opening the door to the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course, God wants us to set our social house in order and to solve our economic problems. But not because he cares about house cleaning and problem-solving; because he cares about us."
~Ch. 11, p. 135
In a time where it is all too easy to despair about anything and everything, there are few reminders more needed than the reminder that all good (whether personal good or the good of society) begins with God . . . and that until we realize this, we will continue to see the same problems happening in our lives and in our world, over and over again.
Among her works are two novels, two volumes of poetry, and "Smoke on the Mountain."
Smoke on the Mountain is a concise but thoughtful meditation on the Ten Commandments. Joy came from a Jewish background but became a committed Communist in her youth (her first volume of poetry was titled "Letter to a Comrade") before converting to Christianity . . . after she discovered the writings of C.S. Lewis. So needless to say, she brings a well-rounded perspective with her.
(Lewis writes the foreword to Smoke on the Mountain and confesses to being a bit embarrassed that she quotes him so much in her text -- I counted about half a dozen quotations, mostly from Mere Christianity)
If one of the measures of a great book is how well it speaks across the years, even to a time distant from the one in which it was written, then Smoke on the Mountain certainly passes the test.
"So rapidly does 'the common good,' without God behind it, sink into a mere blown-up projection of each man's private desire! So readily does 'the welfare of society' become a cloak for the seizure of power by an individual or a clique! The religion of Society has in our time become a well-organized worship [ . . . ] And in all this we have the best intentions, as did the Spanish Inquisition. The 'common good,' may become a moloch to which countless individuals are sacrificed, if we forget that all good is in the love of God, and that God comes first."
~Ch. 1, p. 28
I fear her warning about the dangers of cloaking very bad ideas behind very good intentions are no less relevant than they were when she wrote this in 1953.
Joy makes several intriguing points about each of the Ten Commandments that are worth thinking about, but in the end, perhaps the most important thing she does is to bring her argument back to what Jesus said are the two greatest commandments of all: to love God with everything in you and to love your neighbor as yourself. Unless those two priorities are in order, nothing will work like it should.
"It is a poor sort of faith that imagines Christ defeated by anything men can do. Make no mistake: he has already survived everything we can do to him. And as for saving the world, we ought to remember that he has done that too by his method, not ours--the method of opening the door to the Kingdom of Heaven. Of course, God wants us to set our social house in order and to solve our economic problems. But not because he cares about house cleaning and problem-solving; because he cares about us."
~Ch. 11, p. 135
In a time where it is all too easy to despair about anything and everything, there are few reminders more needed than the reminder that all good (whether personal good or the good of society) begins with God . . . and that until we realize this, we will continue to see the same problems happening in our lives and in our world, over and over again.
January 6, 2021
I should have purchased this book instead of getting from the library. It's incredibly complex and thought-provoking. I won't pick everything apart, but I will say my favorite chapter discussed was "keeping the Sabbath Holy." I agree with some reviewers that there are aspects that didn't age well, but overall I'm really glad I dove in. Honestly, studying Joy Davidman Lewis last year I was concerned these essays would go right over my head. While I can definitely say I was challenged, she never left me in her intellectual dust. ;) I think any Christian is going to both agree and disagree with points she makes, but all the better to keep you on your toes.
October 11, 2022
Good concise read with well-articulated points on what it actually means to follow the Ten Commandments as a Christian
February 6, 2024
An excellent take on what God is doing in the ten commandments. I especially recommend this book to preachers and any CS Lewis nerds who might be intrigued by his introduction.
May 31, 2025
"This is not the law of Moses but a meaningless law of fear. 'Thou shalt not enjoy life' was never Christ's teaching; it is we who have brought our terror and impotence into religion, and then accused religion of bring it to us." - Introduction
"In short, we have accepted the prohibitive Ten Commandments, in the sweat of our brows and the sorrow of our hearts. But the joyous, liberating Commandments of Christ we have yet to learn." - Chapter XI
I really enjoyed this. She is a deeper thinker than most and really elevates the discussion on the Ten Commandments. Most people try to take a modern application from them, which she does as well, but it goes far deeper than just drawing the line from Commandment Seven to pornography or some such.
There are some clunky parts that don't work as well as others, and some of the chapters did not have as great of an impact, but I often walked away meditating on what she had wrote, putting aside distractions to chew on the material a bit more.
"In short, we have accepted the prohibitive Ten Commandments, in the sweat of our brows and the sorrow of our hearts. But the joyous, liberating Commandments of Christ we have yet to learn." - Chapter XI
I really enjoyed this. She is a deeper thinker than most and really elevates the discussion on the Ten Commandments. Most people try to take a modern application from them, which she does as well, but it goes far deeper than just drawing the line from Commandment Seven to pornography or some such.
There are some clunky parts that don't work as well as others, and some of the chapters did not have as great of an impact, but I often walked away meditating on what she had wrote, putting aside distractions to chew on the material a bit more.
Read
February 14, 2013A sweet friend at church loaned me this book, written by Joy Davidman who was to become Joy Lewis, wife of C.S. Lewis.
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An interesting book to read, knowing who Joy would become (Mrs. Lewis). The book is dedicated to C.S. Lewis and she discussed some of the sections she was writing with him via letters. Since her background was as a strident atheist Jew who became a strident atheist Communist, it is no wonder that Joy's writing is very acerbic and sometimes smacks you up the side of the head. I found it hard to pay attention sometimes to her point because I was reeling from the "point" she had just made with some significant force. Her mind is quick and her discussions are well crafted, but it just not the gentlest book that I've ever read. I am on her side of the argument, but I'm not sure that if I weren't already there that she would convince me of changing. In the "speaking the truth in love", she's got the "speaking the truth" down well, but the "in love" portion is lacking.
*********************
An interesting book to read, knowing who Joy would become (Mrs. Lewis). The book is dedicated to C.S. Lewis and she discussed some of the sections she was writing with him via letters. Since her background was as a strident atheist Jew who became a strident atheist Communist, it is no wonder that Joy's writing is very acerbic and sometimes smacks you up the side of the head. I found it hard to pay attention sometimes to her point because I was reeling from the "point" she had just made with some significant force. Her mind is quick and her discussions are well crafted, but it just not the gentlest book that I've ever read. I am on her side of the argument, but I'm not sure that if I weren't already there that she would convince me of changing. In the "speaking the truth in love", she's got the "speaking the truth" down well, but the "in love" portion is lacking.
April 9, 2016
I must admit that I, too, read this book because, I thought, whoever C.S. Lewis (my favourite author) chooses for a wife must be a remarkable woman. Indeed, she was!
This is one of the most raw and yet refreshing books I've read in a while. Like other reviewers, I'm very confused as to why this book is overlooked by the Christian community. It's an excellent short read and ever relevant to our times.
This is one of the most raw and yet refreshing books I've read in a while. Like other reviewers, I'm very confused as to why this book is overlooked by the Christian community. It's an excellent short read and ever relevant to our times.
August 1, 2011
In college, when I studied the works of C.S. Lewis, I stumbled across this book by his wife. She brings a fresh perspective to something that - I fear - too many of us have become complacent ... the law of God.
February 20, 2025
Beautiful and weird.
November 19, 2023
Despite one or two contradictory passages (churches must not “rope man in with a Bingo game” but “a well-organized church festival of sport and music and theatricals” works just fine), this book is almost entirely quotable; just a handful of my favorite quotes:
THE SIN OF FEAR: God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.
-the highest ambition of youth is to be safe.
-"Take therefore no thought for the morrow."...if we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us?
-"Thou shalt not" is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is "Thou shalt." To be Christian is to be old? Not a bit of it. To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young.
I. GOD COMES FIRST: If we will not have the One, the many will come creeping back. The beast in the heart is always the self...We disguise the beast in the heart as a worthy cause.
II. GODS MADE WITH HANDS: regress from polytheism to monism
III. THE WORD WAS WITH GOD: rejecting the word almost always leads to rejecting the reality. For words do have one sort of magic- they have a magical power over the operations of our thinking. When we drop the word "God," we are on the way to losing touch with the truth behind it. There is no virtue in not calling upon Him on the ground that he isn't there to answer. Thus a necessary corollary of the Third Commandment must be: Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God in earnest!
-Does Ch. VIII describe corporate life?..."Thou shalt not steal" - might be rephrased for us as "Thou shalt not try to get something for nothing".
IX. We must understand Pilate to understand ourselves, for he may have represented the very modern view that truth is after all a relative and subjective affair, an agreed-upon convention, a matter of expediency
X. Eastern "nonattachment" does have the advantage of rescuing men from slavery to their appetites and their envies; yet wanting nothing, when carried to extremes, leaves us not wanting help, not wanting love, not wanting God and the name of such self-sufficiency is pride.
XI. virtue is the state of mind in which the love of God can really be enjoyed.
There have always been two kinds of Christianity-man's and Christ's.
Christ never offered us security. He left that to the politicians-Caiaphas probably offered lots of it. Christ told us to expect poverty, humiliation, persecution, and pain, and to know ourselves blessed through accepting them...reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil.
THE SIN OF FEAR: God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him.
-the highest ambition of youth is to be safe.
-"Take therefore no thought for the morrow."...if we should ever grow brave, what on earth would become of us?
-"Thou shalt not" is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is "Thou shalt." To be Christian is to be old? Not a bit of it. To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young.
I. GOD COMES FIRST: If we will not have the One, the many will come creeping back. The beast in the heart is always the self...We disguise the beast in the heart as a worthy cause.
II. GODS MADE WITH HANDS: regress from polytheism to monism
III. THE WORD WAS WITH GOD: rejecting the word almost always leads to rejecting the reality. For words do have one sort of magic- they have a magical power over the operations of our thinking. When we drop the word "God," we are on the way to losing touch with the truth behind it. There is no virtue in not calling upon Him on the ground that he isn't there to answer. Thus a necessary corollary of the Third Commandment must be: Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God in earnest!
-Does Ch. VIII describe corporate life?..."Thou shalt not steal" - might be rephrased for us as "Thou shalt not try to get something for nothing".
IX. We must understand Pilate to understand ourselves, for he may have represented the very modern view that truth is after all a relative and subjective affair, an agreed-upon convention, a matter of expediency
X. Eastern "nonattachment" does have the advantage of rescuing men from slavery to their appetites and their envies; yet wanting nothing, when carried to extremes, leaves us not wanting help, not wanting love, not wanting God and the name of such self-sufficiency is pride.
XI. virtue is the state of mind in which the love of God can really be enjoyed.
There have always been two kinds of Christianity-man's and Christ's.
Christ never offered us security. He left that to the politicians-Caiaphas probably offered lots of it. Christ told us to expect poverty, humiliation, persecution, and pain, and to know ourselves blessed through accepting them...reassuring news has a way of coming from the devil.
November 5, 2020
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended. I'll definitely be revisiting this one in the future. It is a refreshing examination of the Ten Commandments. Following are some quotes that might pique your interest, from the author.
“We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."
"Thou shalt not" is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is "Thou shalt." ...To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young."
"Most ordinary people who lose their faith are not overthrown by philosophical argument; they lose faith because they are disillusioned by the church men they meet. One sanctimonious hypocrite makes a hundred unbelievers."
"A society that destroys the family destroys itself."
"No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let's be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way."
"Begetting and rearing a family are far more real and rewarding than making in spending money."
"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to 'save Western civilization' without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that a Christian could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God’s will, but to enlist God’s assistance in maintaining our 'continually increasing consumption.' And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."
"There is, in the last analysis, only one way to stop covetousness and the destruction of body and soul that spring from covetousness, and that is to want God so much that we can't be bothered with inordinate wants for anything else."
"For the self is asphixating and killing us, the only air we are designed to breathe is God."
"Is it shocking to think of God as a pursuing lover? Then Christianity is shocking
“We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and light and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."
"Thou shalt not" is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom, the new law, is "Thou shalt." ...To be Christian is to be reborn, and free, and unafraid, and immortally young."
"Most ordinary people who lose their faith are not overthrown by philosophical argument; they lose faith because they are disillusioned by the church men they meet. One sanctimonious hypocrite makes a hundred unbelievers."
"A society that destroys the family destroys itself."
"No gain in social efficiency can save a community that offends against the little ones. And let's be honest about it: our modern cities have created a society in which children are in the way."
"Begetting and rearing a family are far more real and rewarding than making in spending money."
"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to 'save Western civilization' without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that a Christian could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God’s will, but to enlist God’s assistance in maintaining our 'continually increasing consumption.' And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."
"There is, in the last analysis, only one way to stop covetousness and the destruction of body and soul that spring from covetousness, and that is to want God so much that we can't be bothered with inordinate wants for anything else."
"For the self is asphixating and killing us, the only air we are designed to breathe is God."
"Is it shocking to think of God as a pursuing lover? Then Christianity is shocking
February 3, 2024
I've been wanting to read some of Joy Davidman's stuff for a while, and this was the first opportunity I had. This is a series of essays on the Ten Commandments, more a work of popular than of scholarly theology. My main quibble with the book was Davidman's view of the Old Testament, which I found rather oddly low for a book on the Ten Commandments; she uses the word "savages" a shocking amount about ancient Israel, and seems to think that the OT represents an imperfect human attempt at reaching towards God, rather than God bestowing his word upon imperfect humans.
Given this, and the many other moments at which I found myself wanting to disagree with Davidman on a surface level, I was surprised by just how substantial and sensible and genuine the book was. Since OT law has long been an interest of mine, and I have a lot of opinions on it already, I probably didn't get as much out of this book as others might, but there were still a lot of thought-provoking comments, and a lot of truth put very pithily. I was particularly impressed with Davidman's very clear view of some of the regnant American sins which I'm afraid many American Christians today seem determined to turn a blind eye towards. I'm sure I couldn't be as clear-eyed about those of my own country.
I'd love to read some of Davidman's poetry and fiction at some point, but this was an interesting introduction to her and her work, the good points and the bad.
Given this, and the many other moments at which I found myself wanting to disagree with Davidman on a surface level, I was surprised by just how substantial and sensible and genuine the book was. Since OT law has long been an interest of mine, and I have a lot of opinions on it already, I probably didn't get as much out of this book as others might, but there were still a lot of thought-provoking comments, and a lot of truth put very pithily. I was particularly impressed with Davidman's very clear view of some of the regnant American sins which I'm afraid many American Christians today seem determined to turn a blind eye towards. I'm sure I couldn't be as clear-eyed about those of my own country.
I'd love to read some of Davidman's poetry and fiction at some point, but this was an interesting introduction to her and her work, the good points and the bad.
August 26, 2022
Joy Davidman is a terrific writer, writing in a practical, down-to-earth manner that is easy to follow along. I particularly enjoyed her personal anecdote at the beginning of the last chapter - a chaper about loving one's neighbors - and when she finally got her typewriter working, the telephone rang and it's a neighbor who was well-established in the community as a nuisance that wanted her to come over. When she returned to writing, she uses the story to show that from a practical point of view, the day was thrown away, and yet, there is a small bright glow deep inside of happiness. That happiness is the love of God we receive when we love our neighbors, and virtue itself really is a reward and a pleasure, and no other reward could be so nice. When we love others, we are able to really love God. All of the chapters in this book, one for each commandment, and the last chapter on Jesus's greatest commandment, are excellent. Every page is bursting with practicality and rooted in Scripture. I would recommend this book to every Christian. Even though it was published in 1953, it is just as practical for the state of American society as it was then.
November 27, 2018
Davidman's insightful look at the Ten Commandments provides a fresh way of looking at the Bible's guide to behavior. Even 50 years later, her commentary hits home. While she certainly makes you evaluate your own behavior and get down off your moral high horse, her main thesis is that the Commandments are meant to be more freeing than limiting. That is, rather than looking at them as a negative set of requirements, we should see the Ten Commandments as a guide for living the joyful life that our loving God has set out for us.
Of course, some of Davidman's references and language are a bit dated, but her points remain relevant.
There is so much here to reflect upon, this is a book to be read, re-read, and digested alone and in conversation.
Of course, some of Davidman's references and language are a bit dated, but her points remain relevant.
There is so much here to reflect upon, this is a book to be read, re-read, and digested alone and in conversation.
July 4, 2018
This book presents a new way of looking at the commandments. After all, how much time do you ponder "compliance" with "Thou shall not kill"? Well, Davidian provides a lot of food for thought on all the commandments. I love her style and the topic is as relevant today as when the book was written.
One side note: I am really annoyed with the cover of this book. I am one of the biggest C.S. Lewis fans you will find but HE DID NOT WRITE THIS BOOK. Since when does the person writing the forward get top billing over the author of the book?
One side note: I am really annoyed with the cover of this book. I am one of the biggest C.S. Lewis fans you will find but HE DID NOT WRITE THIS BOOK. Since when does the person writing the forward get top billing over the author of the book?
December 25, 2019
Another book from my mother's bookshelves. I finished reading it last night. It was surprisingly appropriate Christmas Eve reading. It is a beautiful book, a celebration of God's love for us and for our neighbor. "Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."
Davidman reads the ten commandments as the sermon on the mount stated in the negative but no less positive in intent. Her writing is strong and perceptive and, even though published in 1953, eerily up to date. Some particulars have changed, but human nature not at all.
Highly recommended.
Davidman reads the ten commandments as the sermon on the mount stated in the negative but no less positive in intent. Her writing is strong and perceptive and, even though published in 1953, eerily up to date. Some particulars have changed, but human nature not at all.
Highly recommended.
May 3, 2024
Excellent! I love the author’s writing style— educative, convicting, and humorous, somehow all at the same time! I highly recommend this book for a much deeper understanding of the Ten Commandments as they were given, as well as how they still apply to our lives today. I also enjoyed the final chapter which delved into Jesus’ words in Matthew about loving God and loving neighbor.
November 11, 2018
Joy Davidman was the wife of CS Lewis: she wrote this book giving her interpretation of the Ten Commandments in the 1950's. Joy relates the commandments to the changing culture of the times which makes it fascinating to read now. Many of her opinions and thoughts are true today.
February 9, 2019
Slightly dated, but both convicting and well written. This was a great read especially after finishing Patti Callahan’s Becoming Mrs. Lewis. Get your book darts ready as the quotable lines are aplenty.
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