“For you cannot judge any artefact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs.” ~ C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, “Christianity and Culture.”

We make poor judgments all the time, and the frequent error in our judgments is an error of purpose: we judge things not by their use, but by their abuse. We reject church authority, hierarchy, and discipline because we judge them to be abused. We reject living holy lives because we know of no one who is holy. We reject evangelism because some have been dominating in their evangelistic methods. We reject education because some ‘educated’ people have claimed to lose their faith. We reject scripture because some have misquoted it.

The point is this: we must always judge matters by their use, not their abuse. Scripture remains good, despite its abusers. Church authority and hierarchy are goods, despite their excesses. Education is good, despite those who became fools through its means. Evangelism remains good, despite the faulty methods of a few. Marriage, holiness, purity, and right conduct–all these remain good, despite individual Christian neglect in any of those fields. And the truth remains: we must always strive to judge a thing by its proper use. To do otherwise is to do violence to the thing itself, and to unerringly confuse both ourselves, and those who look on.