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 PrintableVersion C S Lewis: clarity and confusionOur Oxford donTRAVEL WITH C.S. LEWIS C.S. LEWIS: CLARITY AND CONFUSION An internationally well-known evangelical scholar has testified that it was partly through C.S. Lewis that he was saved from liberalism. A greatly respected evangelical elder statesman has on his wall a framed invitation from C.S. Lewis. Dr. J.I. Packer is by no means alone in sprinkling his writings with quotations from C.S. Lewis (this is very true of Dr. Packer’s latest excellent book Praying). Yet there are those on the theological far right who wonder whether Lewis was a true Christian. At the other extreme, liberals pour scorn on what they perceive to be his simplistic apologetics (viz. the mad, bad or God trilemma), and he is belittled by other atheists such as Philip Pullman and A.N. Wilson. Because, apart from the latter’s biography, many of the books on Lewis have almost been hagiographic, it is good to have these two books from Day One Publications before revisionism sets in with a vengeance. Ronald Bresland’s Travel with C.S. Lewis is like the others in this series: beautifully produced and a straightforward biography introducing us to Lewis and his world, both historically and geographically. Andrew Wheeler’s book is much more of an evaluation of Lewis’s theology. It claims and proves to be balanced. Lewis is commended for his teaching on sin, the deity of Christ, the wonder of grace, the reality of heaven and hell. Mr. Wheeler could have added that what Lewis wrote about he also lived out, both in his personal devotional life and in his evangelistic endeavours. He has to be counted as one of the best Christian apologists of the 20th century. But, as well as clarity on these great truths, C.S. Lewis betrayed some confusion on other issues. Mr. Wheeler rightly points out that Lewis could hardly have signed the UCCF basis of faith with its doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture, yet his talk to the ordinands at Westcott House, titled ‘Fern seeds and elephants’, devastatingly torpedoes a liberal approach to the gospels. Mr. Wheeler has a chapter on ‘Creation and Evolution’. Here again, Lewis would not have aligned himself with young earth creationists, although firmly believing in the Creator. However, it has to be said that if this is to be the test of evangelical orthodoxy many of us are going to be rejected from the ranks. In the chapter entitled ‘The world of professing Christians’, Mr. Wheeler tackles C.S. Lewis’s understanding of ‘Justification by Faith’. Although Lewis never thought or taught for a moment that ‘works’ could achieve anything, in his humility he felt that he wasn’t fit for heaven and this led him into accepting some ideas of purgatory. Mr. Wheeler suggests that this was because Lewis didn’t realise that we are all made perfect the moment we die. It would seem that Lewis never fully grasped the wonder of imputed righteousness — namely the moment we believe we are totally accepted in God’s sight. Mr. Wheeler might have added a further confusion as there are those who have detected a touch of neo-Platonism in Lewis’s works. All in all, this is a very helpful and fair introduction to C.S. Lewis’s thought. It is not as detailed or as thorough as Will Vaus’s Mere Theology — A Guide to the Thought of C.S. Lewis (IVP), but it is excellent for starters. I remain a fan of C.S. Lewis. I would love to have met him. I expect to do so. Abiding by J.C. Ryle’s great dictum to ‘call no man master’, I recognise that the shoes of all my heroes which I’m not worthy to untie nonetheless contain feet of clay. Jonathan Fletcher,
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