"According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride... Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind." (p.100, CS Lewis, Mere Christianity)
"unbelief alone commits sin, and brings forth the flesh and pleasure in bad outward works, as happened to Adam and Eve in paradise...Unbelief is the root, the sap, and the chief power of all sin." (p.100, Martin Luther, "Preface to the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans" in Timothy F Lull Ed, Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings)
So who's right; Lewis or Luther?
I think that Luther is right because, as David Powlison points out, unbelief is the act of erasing God from reality. And as GK Chesterton once observed, when we "cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything". If God is not king then perhaps I am, or perhaps my father is, or my boss, or cancer, or [fill in the blank]. Or perhaps they're all kings, with no one all-powerful or deserving of exclusive worship, but some are more powerful and worthy than others. Either way, whether it is ourselves, other people or any other created thing, all other sins are just trying to fill that imaged god-shaped hole in our heart. And often the thing we fill it with is not something we love, but something we're petrified of because it can take as well as give.
[Incidentally, if you're an economics geek I hope you appreciated the allusion in the title to John Maynard Keynes' oft quoted principle, that apparently he never said.]
