Notes on Lewis

I've volunteered to give a talk to our men's group about C. S. Lewis, the next in a series of talks featuring exemplary Christians from the past. We've had a few athletes (it's a men's group, after all), a little known Scottish evangelist, a founding father, and, in my one previous talk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

When I was asked to do the next talk, my mind immediately went to Lewis, one of my own heroes, and so I've started reacquainting myself with some of his work. I'll soon have reread Mere Christianity and will go on to The Screwtape Letters next. I'll reacquaint myself with his biography via Wikipedia, and look for summaries of some of his other important works (the sci-fi trilogy, The Abolition of Man, etc.).

That's the plan anyway. I've only got a few weeks to get this done, so I can't go back and read everything. But here's what I'm wondering about? How to make the life of this intellectual Irish-English academic a compelling and inspiring story of a bunch of guys that probably only know him for the Narnia series, if at all.

Lewis has a great influence on my thinking even before I came to faith. His brand of apologetics was helpful to me, and when I wanted to know what Christianity was all about I naturally gravitated toward Mere Christianity, based on his series of radio talks in the 1940s. Rereading it now after many years, I still admire his careful avoidance of theological language (theolingo?) and his refusal to plump for the Church of England or any other denomination, or to take sides in Christianity's contentious issues. 

But I'm worried that this will all seem rather dull to my audience. What is it about Lewis that might make him compelling to an audience of men used to heroizing sports figures and warriors?

What are the basic details of Lewis' life? He was born in Belfast in 1898. He served in WWI and saw action at the Somme, where he was wounded by an enemy shell that killed two other men. 

Raised in the church, he became an atheist at the age of 15. He went on to become a scholar at Oxford University, specializing in Renaissance Literature. He was brilliant, well-read, a lover of poetry and fairy tales. The rebirth of Lewis' faith came gradually in the post-war years, influenced by writers like George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, and then crucially by his Oxford friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.

As he wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

What about Lewis as a writer? After his return to the faith he pursued what he saw as his calling as a Christian apologist. Christian Apologetics is a reasoned defense of the faith, taking on the arguments of atheism and materialism, etc. Lewis is probably the foremost popularizer of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, and has been rightfully called "the apostle to the skeptics."

In addition to that, like Tolkien Lewis was a Christian fantasist. By that meaning he was a creator of modern fairy tales and fantasy literature that prominently featured, like most fantasy, magic, strange creatures, and cataclysmic battles between good and evil, all with a clearly Christian sense of spiritual realities lying behind the material and strictly sensory aspect of the world. These fantasies include his most famous work, the 7-volume Chronicles of Narnia, and the under-appreciated science-fiction triliogy.

Now, what does C.S. Lewis mean to me and why did I choose him for my presentation this morning? Skeptics always believe themselves to be the most rational persons in whatever room they're in, and Lewis showed me, a skeptic myself, that rationality--thinking--and faith were not necessarily mutually exclusive. He taught me to be skeptical about my skepticism, to question it with at least the same incisiveness that fancied I brought to my questioning of Christianity. Lewis didn't make me a believer--God did that--but Lewis cleared a lot of the ground, removing some of the intellectual roadblocks that prevented me from treating the case for Christianity with and open mind.

So I honor Lewis for the role he played in my own coming to faith, but I honor him also as a great wordsmith and composer of elegant and effective prose. His Chronicles will enrapture you, his space trilogy will startle you, his apologetic writing will stimulate as well as amuse you (for Lewis was at times a very amusing writer), his imagination will inspire you.

Takeaways: I've noticed in the previous presentations in this series people tend to have three takeaways that we can draw from the life of the subject, 3 pieces of advice or words of encouragement. As a man whose heroes are all writers, my main takeaway is, READ! Much of today's popular culture conditions us--and it does this intentionally, I might add--to shortened attention-spans and superficial thinking. My advice is, be a rebel and encourage in yourself a disciplines sustained program of reading. We are, after all, a people of the Book. We are meant to be readers!

In today's world this will make you just a little strange, but as Christians we should be accustomed to that. And as with any discipline, you will have to start where you're at and seek to make progress by increments. Just as we often advise young Christians to read the gospel of Mark first because it is short and sweet (whereas, say, John's Gospel can seem more challenging), you might need to start with Narnia before moving on to Lewis' deeper water. 

Another piece of advice: don't look down your nose at fiction. The Spirit's sanctifying work is done at all levels of the mind and heart. Humans have always been a story-telling kind, because stories can embody deep truths and get them across in powerful ways.