Known to his friends as 'Jack' (he didn't like 'Clive Staples'), C.S. Lewis was born on the outskirts of Belfast on November 29 1898, and died in his Oxford home, The Kilns, almost 65 years later on November 22 1963.
He was equally a scholar and a storyteller, for years an Oxford don, and then Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.
C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia are familiar to very many people through television adaptations. The seven books themselves are consistently among the best-selling children's books, and firmly established as classics.
He also wrote successful science-fiction, and popular theology for adults. One of his most widely read religious books is The Screwtape Letters. The unlikely don was one of the first modern media evangelists. For an enormous number of evangelicals, Lewis has been the defender of our faith and, for very many, the evangelist who led them to Christ, particularly through the published BBC radio talks, Mere Christianity.
The nourishment we receive from Lewis forces us out of our normal criteria for judging a 'mere Christian' who was not, in some respects, an evangelical, at least in a confessional sense. He is undoubtedly part of the evangelical movement, particularly in America. We have to step into a larger world to appreciate and to be enriched by his writing, reasoning and imagination. We have to do an equivalent of stepping through a magical wardrobe.
I wish I had been a fly on the wall when Billy Graham met Lewis during his Cambridge mission of 1955, or on the occasions when Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones met him. C.S. Lewis notably also spoke at a 'This is Life' crusade at Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones's Westminster Chapel in London. According to an eye-witness, Stephen F. Olford, Lewis gave a convincing testimony of his own commitment to Jesus Christ. Lewis's talk was followed by a gospel invitation from Olford, which received a substantial response.
Well-known evangelicals owing a great debt to Lewis include Rebecca Manley Pippert, Os Guinness, Charles Colson, and Clyde S. Kilby. Kilby was responsible for inaugurating the Marion Wade Collection at Wheaton College, indispensable for anyone researching Lewis and his friends.
Lewis and evangelicals
To be an evangelical is to belong to a movement which originated in the early 18th century, and to be part of a confession which goes back to apostolic times. It is not easy to disentangle the two dimensions.
Significantly, Christianity Today devoted much of one of its recent issues to an analysis of the shaping forces of American evangelicalism over the last 40 years. In one article, John Stackhouse Jr. surveyed the key books in that period. Near the top of the list of importance, above even Stott, Packer, and Schaeffer, Stackhouse writes: 'It is perhaps fair to say, however, that one author's books indisputably affected American evangelicals during this period more than any of the other authors mentioned above. And that author was neither American nor quintessentially evangelical. I mean, of course, C.S. Lewis. Even though many of his most popular books were written before this last 40-year period, Lewis's influence swept over American evangelicalism only latterly - indeed, like a tide whose influence has not receded more than 30 years after his death. The most prominent of the popular titles . . . merely hint at Lewis's colossal impact upon a generation and more who sought practical wisdom, digestible theology, wit, verve, logic and imagination.'
In a paper given to the Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society, 'C.S. Lewis as the Patron Saint of American Evangelicalism', Philip Ryken feels that several characteristics of Lewis, man and writer, account for his enormous stature. These include Lewis's Englishness (even though he was an Ulster man!), his devotion to allegory, and his stress on the new birth, or being born again. Americans are not surprised by Surprised by Joy.
Another appealing characteristic of Lewis is his 'powerful grasp of what it means to live a life of close fellowship with God.' Ryken points out that this kind of relationship is embodied powerfully in Lucy, 'who best exemplifies the reverence and joy at the heart of the Christian life'. Though she was rightly in awe of Aslan, she was able to embrace the lion. Ryken observes that it is The Chronicles of Narnia, more than any other of Lewis's writings, that has secured his prominence in America. For these reasons, Lewis is the most quoted of all Christian writers. Ryken remarks: 'The Lewis quotation is the evangelical equivalent of the political soundbite, and every bit as American.'
It is not possible, I believe, to characterise present-day evangelicalism, and thus the part that Lewis has played in it, without taking America into account.
The historian David Bebbington has elucidated four characteristics of the evangelical movement, a categorisation that has now been widely adopted. These consistent characteristics of evangelicals are conversionism, activism, biblicism, and cross-centredness.
Other features could be added. Let us try to look briefly at Lewis in the light of just some of these characteristics, to throw light on his complex and enduring relationship with evangelicals.
Activism
Lewis's conversion first to theism and then to Christian faith completely altered his life. At the time of his conversion, Lewis was writing a major work of literary scholarship that eventually established his reputation as a literary critic throughout the world. This was The Allegory of Love, eventually published by OUP in 1936. Lewis continued through his life to add to this scholarship, with works such as A Preface to Paradise Lost, Ohel (his name for his exhaustive contribution to the Oxford History of English Literature), and The Discarded Image. However, shortly after his conversion he wrote a theological allegory in the manner of Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Regress, composing it during a fortnight's holiday in Northern Ireland. Though frequently obscure, it has Lewis's characteristic narrative pace, and can be re-read many times with enjoyment. Not many years later, he turned his hand to the increasingly popular science-fiction genre. Writing Out of the Silent Planet made him realise what a subversive medium popular fiction could be. Any amount of Christian theology could be smuggled into people's minds for consideration. It was only a few more steps before he was able to accomplish The Chronicles of Narnia, a feat of popular communication of Christian meaning that may be unrivalled in the history of the church. Lewis once confessed, in God in the Dock, that: 'Most of my books are evangelistic.' He would, he said, have traded a lifetime of literary study 'for the salvation of a single soul'. Lewis was an activist. He considered every man or woman on a journey to either heaven or hell, and this reality stopped him leading merely a contemplative life.
Cross-centredness
The atonement for Lewis was at the centre of Christian faith, and this emphasis is warmly in tune with evangelical belief. Lewis wrote in his preface to Mere Christianity that the talks were: 'an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the atonement) that this imparts despair rather than comfort.'
In the same book, evangelicals tend to be dismayed to find Lewis regarding penal substitution as only a theory of the atonement, one of several possible theories, advocating using the theory that one finds the most helpful. For Lewis, it was the actual mysterious event of Christ's death that did the work, that made salvation possible.
It is at this point that a remarkable paradox comes into play. Lewis pointed out how in fiction and myth we are able to concretely grasp realities which to our theoretical gaze are contradictions - such as the relationship between our free will and God's sovereignty. The same is true of history. The gospels embody a satisfying unity of all the troublesome abstractions, such as freedom and God's hand in history, and the human and divine natures of Christ. In Lewis's life story, as told in Surprised by Joy, the compulsive hand of God and Lewis's own naked freedom were both a reality in his conversion. In a similar way, Lewis is able to embody deep and complex biblical teachings in fictional format in a way he doesn't find possible writing discursively. It is not surprising, therefore, to find a portrayal of the atonement in his fiction that many evangelicals find deeply satisfying. Indeed very many have been moved to tears by the death of Aslan who have remained dry-eyed reading the Gospel accounts of Christ's death, blunted by familiarity.
Lewis's main contribution
C.S. Lewis points out that it is a feature of language to win truth by metaphor. This happens as much in the sciences (with its use of models, for instance) as it does in other areas of human knowledge. Lewis observes: 'The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion.'
If Lewis is right, we are meant to see the wonder of created reality both in the large and the small, the exalted and the humble. The Word of God is necessary for the healing of our jaded perceptions. Our perceptions are not right until everything we see and perceive with our other senses speaks of God's glory, a glory which belongs to Christ. Without this symbolic perception enlightened by the Word of God, the world becomes increasingly weightless. Weightlessness is the characteristic feature of contemporary culture as it drifts from one false spirituality to another. The phrase of Lewis that returns to me most is the one he takes from Scripture, 'the weight of glory', the subject of a powerful sermon he once preached.
I see the imaginative work of Lewis as reinforcing such a biblical emphasis upon a symbolic perception of reality. His symbolic worlds, even though fictional, are in some sense solidly real. For this reason, they take us back to the ordinary world which is an inevitable part of our human living and experience, deepening both its wonders and terrors. Our awareness of the meaning of God's creation and his intentions for us is enlarged. Lewis guides us in seeing this world with a thoroughly Christian understanding. This is the key, I believe, to the continued popularity and thus cultural relevance of the symbolic fiction of Lewis. His pre-modernist imagination has outstanding contemporary appeal, an appeal that continues to grow. Our pre-modernist book, the Word of God, has an even deeper relevance to our culture that we have hardly begun to explore.
This is an adapted extract from a talk given to The Librarians' Christian Fellowship for National Libraries Week, on November 8 1997.
Colin Duriez is General Books Editor of IVP, and author of The C.S. Lewis Handbook and The Tolkien and Middle Earth Handbook. He is currently writing a handbook on The Inklings with EN columnist David Porter.
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