When Mark asked that I fill the pulpit and discuss C. S, Lewis I was pleased to do so because I encountered C.S. Lewis three times, the first time about the time he died. Lewis’ death was missed by most Americans because it happened at the same time President Kennedy was assassinated, and his passing was virtually overlooked by most, certainly it was by my junior high school self. But I met C.S. Lewis, first, about that time, maybe a few years earlier, as the author of the children’s stories called the Chronicles of Narnia. I read the books as a youth and my son read them thirty years later; they have recently been made into movies and a new generation is enjoying Lewis’ imagination. But these are not benign books, I had grown up in the church, my parents were and are strong but unquestioning Christians; there are elements of Baptist doctrine not in the fantasy world of C.S. Lewis and not all the Christology I had been taught could be seen in Aslan. My parents had not read the Chronicles and so instead of becoming what I now believe to be Lewis’ intention, part of my growth, the stories became, with evolutionary biology and college preparatory physics, part of my questioning.
My questioning led me to abandon church attendance when I arrived at Duke University, I do not believe I abandoned my faith but my appreciation for church given the hypocrisy of church in the South vis a vis the Civil Rights’ movement was at a low ebb. But I found that while I could not live with the church as I knew it, I could not live without the church as Christ wanted it to be. During this quest two things were of great importance, the Baptist Student Union and its chaplain and members and Professor William Walker, a physicist who, given the news this week, could be said to be spending his life looking for the God particle and found God instead. In the early 1970s he and his new wife, also a Duke Professor, were helping science students with the supposed conflict between science and faith; he did so by introducing me to C.S. Lewis, and his classic Christian apologetic, Mere Christianity.
My third encounter with Professor Lewis was about a decade ago when Bill Wehunt and the Christian education committee introduced the idea of reading the most influential books of the twentieth century as a congregational project. In 2000, the magazine Christianity Today took a poll on the century’s most influential books:
Christianity Today asked more than 100 of its contributors and church leaders to nominate the ten best religious books of the twentieth century. By best books, we meant those that not only were important when first published, but also have enduring significance for the Christian faith and church. We have included books which do not always prompt agreement, but which are important for evangelical Christians to read and contend with. A few “period” pieces also made the list of 90. By far, C. S. Lewis was the most popular author and Mere Christianity the book nominated most often. Indeed, we could have included even more Lewis works, but finally we had to say: “Enough is enough; give some other authors a chance.”
They described Mere Christianity as “the best case for the essentials of orthodox Christianity in print” and I would add, ever written. I had been using it as a touchstone in difficult times for thirty years and had recommended it to others on numerous occasions. This introduction led to the C.S. Lewis Institute over in Springfield and a broader awareness of Lewis’ impact on Christianity in the western world. I discovered, not surprisingly, that my encounter with Lewis was not exceptional, the Institute website records the testimony of
Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
Director of the National Institutes of Health & Former Director of the Human Genome ProjectFor decades, children and adults have been captivated by the Narnia stories. Yet many do not realize that the author, Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis, was a prodigious intellect, a renowned Oxford scholar and an expert in Renaissance literature. He was also the 20th century’s most articulate proponent of the rationality of Christian faith.
As a medical student at the age of 27, I had a PhD, a young family, and a promising career in research. I was also an atheist. Realizing that I had never really considered the evidence for or against the existence of God, and that a scientist really ought to do so, I set about to shore up my non-belief by learning more about the tenets of various faiths. I approached this task assuming that religion was all superstitious nonsense, and that advances in science no longer made belief in God tenable. But a copy of C.S. Lewis little book “Mere Christianity” found its way into my life — and my schoolboy arguments against the plausibility of God were quickly reduced to rubble. You see, Lewis had travelled the same path, setting out to disprove God and converting himself by accident — so he seemed to be able to read my mind. I also learned that the historical evidence for Christ’s existence was surprisingly strong, and after studying the New Testament I had to agree with Lewis that a man who made such unequivocal claims to be the Son of God could not just be dismissed as a wise teacher — He was either who He said he was, or He was insane or evil. After a year of struggling with the evidence, I ultimately concluded that life without belief in Christ was no longer possible, and I took the leap into a life of faith.
Since that day, faith in Christ has been the rock upon which I stand. I find no conflict between my belief in God and my trust in science to teach us about how the natural world works. In fact, I find my experience as a scientist only strengthens my faith, by giving me glimpses of God’s wondrous creation.
Lewis’ writing has touched millions, many in the same way he touch both Francis Collins and me – he dealt with the problem of modernity and the attempt to rationalize the world based on the power & progress of the human intellect. This problem has not gone away, in fact, in this post modern age, it is in some ways even worse; Lewis can remain, if we use him as such, what one biographer has called him, the “Apostle to the Skeptics” or as I prefer, a missionary to modernity because that will allow us to join him as journey men and women, using his insights in our own telling.
As those of you who have known me for a while have been expecting, there now comes a history lesson. For those who don’t know me – I am a history professor and think it is important to know the context and the story. Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, James Clark Maxwell published field theory and Louis Pasteur the germ theory in the years which followed. Equally important Essays & Reviews was published in London just four months after Darwin’s Origin; a collection of seven essays, it represented the past half century of higher criticism in German theological colleges and the progress of science in the various European universities. The book and the seven essayists were condemned as harshly as Darwin by the Victorian Church. These intellectual changes, coupled with the continued progress of the Industrial Revolution, now spread from England to Germany and the United States and the urbanization which accompanied industrialization, led to an increasing rationalism and belief in the power of man. The extremists in Social Gospel movement in US cities of the era is an example of a hubris which led them to want to improve conditions so Christ would come again – the magazine Christian Century was their organ and in it they claimed they were bringing in the end times by their good works. The balloon gave way to airplane and Jules Vern and others believed man would soon explore the depths of the sea and the far reaches of space. This is the Modern Era a conception of society shaped by faith in the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism. The disaster of World War One would reintroduce skepticism and shift the modern art and music from triumphal enthusiasm to include an increasing lack of realism reflecting ambivalence and anxiety. Into this modern world was born Clive Staples Lewis, November 29th, 1898.
He was born in Belfast, Ireland (before the independence of the country) to Albert James Lewis and Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis, he had a brother Warren, three years his senior. His family was Anglican, his maternal great grandfather had been a Bishop, his grandfather was a clergyman. His father’s family was laymen but wrote and taught in the church. His father was a lawyer, a gifted story teller, and a strong Unionist & Royalist. While confirmed in the Anglican Communion, Lewis later said he had already abandoned his childhood faith and lied to keep peace with his father. Lewis’ mother died when he was ten, and the father attempted to raise the boys with the aid of governesses, but soon decided to send Warren and then Jack, as C.S. Lewis was known to family and friends, to boarding school. Lewis’ antipathy toward his father grew steadily at school into a quiet hatred.
Lewis has not been well served by biographers (most are devoted disciples) and he clearly misrepresented the truth on many important issues in his autobiographical writings. The most experienced and only independent biographer is A.N. Wilson, but he read much into missing evidence in his 1990 C.S. Lewis: A Biography. During his schooling in England Lewis evidenced an increasing affection for “Northernness” e.g. Wagner’s music and Norse mythology. It was during this time that he clearly abandoned his childhood Christian faith. In April 1914, Lewis met Arthur Greeves (1895-1966), of whom he said, in 1933, “After my brother, my oldest and most intimate friend.” It is from surviving correspondence with Greeves that most of the insight into Lewis of the teens and twenties comes down to us but Greeves redacted the correspondence to remove that which he thought might be too private and potentially publically embarrassing. From the text surrounding the redactions and knowledge of the English public school system of the era, Wilson concludes Lewis was exposed to and strongly influenced by sadistic & masochistic behavior in this period. By his own accounts he was certainly repeated beaten severely by school officials and other students. His father removed him from school and placed him under the private tuition of W. T. Kirkpatrick, one of his father’s tutors and oldest friend, and here Lewis’ extensive literary and philosophical studies (Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian) all blossomed.
In 1916 Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and from April until September, Lewis was a student at Oxford. He enlisted in the British army, his brother had been in France since World War I started in 1914, and was billeted in Keble College, Oxford, for officer’s training. His roommate was Edward known as “Paddy” Moore, and he and Jack promised to look out for one another’s family if anything happened. Jack was commissioned an officer in the infantry and reached the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his 19th birthday. On April 15, 1918, Lewis was wounded during the Battle of Arras. He recuperated and was discharged in December 1918. His former roommate and friend, Paddy Moore, was killed in battle and buried in the field just south of Peronne, France. From January, 1919 until June, 1924, he resumed his studies at University College, Oxford, where he received a First in Honour Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature) in 1920, a First in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1922, and a First in English in 1923. Lewis had some scholarships but continued to be supported by his father and separated from his brother who was posted to the Far East in the post war Army.
During the summer of his return to University, Paddy Moore’s mother, Mrs. Janie King Moore, who was separated from her husband, and her daughter, Maureen, moved to Oxford, renting a house. Lewis lived with the Moores from June 1921 onward and Wilson believes was involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with Mrs. Moore. The contemporary evidence, especially memories of Maureen and the letters to Arthur Greeves, strongly suggest he was in an adulterous relationship with Janie Moore. His brother wrote to him disapprovingly concerning his not further specified relationship with Mrs. Moore and feared it would cause their father distress. In October, 1924, Lewis began his teaching career at Oxford, where he would remain for the next thirty years. He, and his brother Warren, after he retired from the Army in 1932, lived with Mrs. Moore until she moved to a nursing home in 1950. Albert Lewis died in 1929, having seen both sons established in careers but separated from him.
Shortly after his father’s death, Lewis began his walk back to faith, with the acknowledgement that God did exist. The convoluted path of C.S. Lewis’s faith journey is almost impossible to reconstruct, he certainly drifted from his childhood faith in his teens. The horrors of both the English public school culture and the First World War did nothing but drive him further from God. The study of science, particularly Freud and Darwin, and the contemporary discussions in the university about physics led him to a realistic positivism but his study of literature kept him engaged with human ambiguity; his writings in this era reflect the use of the religious metaphors of a language shaped by the Scriptures. Finally his study of language and culture across time and place convinced him that natural law exists and therefore must have an author.
As Lewis himself would argue in Mere Christianity, there exists a notion of right and wrong that is universal, the Law of Nature. All cultures everywhere agree that this Law of Nature exists, but differ on certain details. One example Lewis uses is marriage. Some cultures allow a single man to marry multiple women, but under the Law of Nature, no one man can have an unlimited number of women whom he desires. Another argument in favor of the Law of Nature involves how very strange a culture would be if it went against the Law. Lewis suggests that a culture valuing cowardliness over courage would be very strange, as would one overtly rewarding lying and cheating. Lewis brings up our sense of guilt when we break the Law of Nature and how we try to rationalize the guilt away. As Lewis notes (p.19) “Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson,…” This sense of fair, of right and wrong, is not explained by any science, it is not an instinct, in confers no selective Darwinian advantage. It can only be explained by having an author.
For two years Lewis grappled with what it meant to man, especially to Jack Lewis, to acknowledge that there was a God. He discussed it with Christian friends, like J.R.R. Tolkien, who was busy compiling his own fantasy world of Hobbits, elves and rings, because the essentially human had to be defined. He studied metaphor and allegory, a professional interest to a literary scholar, to understand how to represent the inexplicable. Then one day in September of 1931, after a particularly vigorous discussion with Tolkien the night before, he became a Christian during a motorcycle trip to the zoo with his brother, as he told it later: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, when we reached the zoo I did.” Whether it is on a road to Damascus or in a motorcycle side car on the way to the Wipesnade Zoo, if you reach out to Jesus he will answer. Lewis told Arthur Greeves of his acceptance of Christ and commented he needed to become celibate unless married. He clearly took his conversion seriously and began to change some things. Evangelical biographers are bothered by his continuing habit of port wine and English beer, as well as by his pipe (now housed in the Wheaton College Library with the soon to be famous wardrobe). Catholic biographers are distressed by his later decision to marry because it conveys worldliness he should have been beyond. He was still loud and boisterous, a bully in University affairs and savage and cutting to his students. There is no indication he saw any need to modify these behaviors.
In 1933 he published an allegory of his own journey to faith, The Pilgrim’s Regress in which the pilgrim “Christian John” struggles with human philosophical systems in his effort ot reach an enchanted island. He also began weekly Pub meetings with a group of convivial friends, mostly members of the Oxford community, they called themselves the “Inklings” and would sharpen Lewis’ theology and thought. His fondness for allegory led him to try his hand at science fiction and in 1938 he published the first of his space-trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet . In this story, Ransom is kidnapped by a mad scientist named Dr. Weston who takes him to Mars as a sacrifice to the native Martians, later books will take Ransom to Venus and then into combat with Weston, an increasingly Satanic figure, on earth.
I think the pattern is established and we would have gotten Mere Christianity anyway at some point but the actual events which precipitated the writing were the needs of the British people in the darkest days of World War Two. In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, the English people faced enormous hardships and they had some moments of personal failure; Lewis, having given thought to Christian living, undertook a weekly letter to the Manchester Guardian, in which a senior devil, Screwtape, counseled his nephew, Wormwood, on how best to tempt humans. A huge success, these letters prompted the editors of the BBC to ask Lewis to give a series of four radio talks on the nature of Christianity in August of 1941. Here, for the first time, he formally brought together his scholarship around Natural Law and the existence of God, England was on the right side of the natural order of things. The talks were extraordinarily successful and he published a modified version and was asked to do another series by BBC. Lewis dealt with the issue of Christ, particularly the increasingly common desire to see him as a great human teacher, pointing out that is an option Jesus himself denied us – to claim what Jesus clearly claimed, the man was a lunatic or supernatural. He grapples with the trinity and the relationship of God and Jesus and comes out with the Biblical Father – Son relationship because it is the one God used. It is a powerful series of essays, published in three collections and pulled together sixty years ago as Mere Christianity. It is the best Christian apologetic of the 20th century and probably of an even longer time, but most importantly it pulls together the Christian answer to modernity.
Lewis worshiped in the Anglican Church of his childhood, he fought with Tolkien about his Evangelical tendencies, and he never stopped bulling, smoking, or drinking. In the 1950s he wrote the Chronicles of Narna and finished his science fiction; he collected and published the Screwtape Letters, probably his most popular discipleship work and one I read annually. He published on Miracles and the problem of pain, both are powerful philosophical defenses of the Christian tradition, his final work is Letters to Malcolm, a study of prayer.
In 1956, the year after he published his autobiography, he married Joy Davidman Gresham, in a secret civil ceremony, which prevented her deportation and allowed her to continue therapy for bone cancer. She was a friend, converted after reading his books in 1948, but there is no indication of a romantic attachment. She had a remarkable remission and they lived happily as husband and wife for six years until her death. He felt guilty about his grief and published “A Grief Observed” under a pseudonym in 1960. The work is based in Lewis’ journal through Joy’s illness, it is a powerful and personal memoir of grief. He did not respond as his theological work suggested he should, he cried out in egotistical grief; like the pipe and the pub, it shows us Lewis the man. Reading The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed together gives insight into fallibility and weakness despite great strength. Like the apostle C.S. Lewis had thorns in his flesh despite the magnitude of his witness.
So let us turn to the Apostle, Turn with me to the Letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth, 1st Corinthians 9:19-22.
1 Corinthians 19: Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.
20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.
21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.
22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.
Why have I spent the last twenty minutes telling you about C.S. Lewis, or more precisely why do I think Rev Adams wanted us to talk about C.S. Lewis? Lewis was a Modern Man, a well educated man, who when he reflected on the evidence could not deny the existence of God and the Love Of Christ. He then gave the modern world the tools that had converted him to use with other modern men and women. We are engaged in the improvement of our ability to tell the story this year. We have had people sharing their stories as practice but many of our stories are not stories that will reach the modern people who live with us in Montgomery County. In these final minutes together let me challenge you to take Paul’s confession to the Corinthians to heart – Learn to do whatever it takes to reach the lost!
We have begun a recreation ministry and built a fine building to house it, we are even staffing it to some degree; but teaching children to play basketball will not convert them or their parents. We must equip ourselves with more than basketballs. Many of our neighbors are well educated, they read the newspapers and they know us for the sinners we are. We have to be honest about our failures; we are not always going to give the textbook Sunday School answer and probably won’t give up every human failing we enjoy. That does not mean we are not trying to do what God wants us to do, He just is not finished with us yet. But we need to be like Lewis and focus on the essentials, we are not trying to make Baptists, we are trying to make Christians; if they become Baptists that’s nice but their becoming Christian is a matter of life and Death. As Lewis noted in the introduction to Mere Christianity: “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” So, if we are to be like Paul, and meet people where they are and help them become followers of Christ, we need to prepare ourselves with information; Lewis will help you do that. In particular, I believe the argument form Natural Law remains an indispensible evidence of the existence of God for non believers and is an absolutely crucial tool in our efforts to minister to our well educated and agnostic friends. So if you are a believer I think the Life of C.S. Lewis calls you to study, to prepare yourselves with the information to witness to people in whatever state they find themselves, Jew or Greek; weak or strong.
If you are here this morning and like Lewis, before 1929, unconvinced that there is a God or that He has a role in your life. I ask you to reflect honestly as Lewis did on the nature of humanity. Why do all cultures value honest or courage; why do we believe in and appeal to fairness? Consider the possibility that there is a God and He created a natural order of things, natural law by which those of us who share this planet are bound. How does that God respond when we ignore that natural law, when we disappoint Him? If these questions resonate with you, I urge you to find your way to the front in a few minutes when we sing a hymn and begin a discussion with one of our staff on the meaning of Christ’s life and death for you.
If you are here today and have made the decision to follow Christ, if you wish to affiliate with this body of believers, or you have any other decision to share we invite you also to come forward as we sing.