A Voice in the Blackout

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:” — 1 Peter 3:15 (KJV)

In the early 1930s a group of friends began meeting in Lewis's college rooms on Thursday evenings. They called themselves the Inklings. At the centre were Lewis, Warnie and Tolkien, with others coming and going, nearly all Christians and nearly all writers or scholars. Someone would read aloud from something they were writing, and the others would criticise it, sometimes kindly and sometimes savagely. Tolkien read most of The Lord of the Rings to them chapter by chapter, and said more than once that without Lewis's encouragement he would never have finished it. Lewis thought real friends were people looking at the same truth together, not people who flattered each other.

When the Second World War began in 1939, Lewis was forty. Evacuee schoolgirls from London came to live at the Kilns, and the bachelor who claimed not to like children found he rather enjoyed them. He joined the Home Guard and patrolled Oxford at night with a rifle. The writer Charles Williams moved to Oxford and became a close friend. Williams believed that Christians can, in a real sense, carry part of one another's burdens in love. Lewis never forgot it. When Williams died after an operation in May 1945, Lewis found, to his own surprise, that his faith was strengthened rather than shaken.

In 1940 he published The Problem of Pain, about how a good God can allow suffering, for a country waiting to be bombed. Then, sitting in church one Sunday, he had an idea: letters from an experienced devil to a junior devil who was trying to lead a young Englishman away from God, with everything upside down. The Screwtape Letters appeared in a church newspaper in 1941. He was paid two pounds a letter and had the money sent to a fund for clergy widows. As a book in 1942 it was a huge success and made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He found writing it a strain: months inside a devil's head was dry, stifling work.

Then the BBC asked him to speak on the radio. Coached to write for the ear, with shorter sentences, plainer words and one idea at a time, he gave his first talk on 6 August 1941. Over three years he gave four series: on right and wrong, on what Christians believe, on Christian behaviour, and on God. He sounded like an intelligent man talking sense across a kitchen table. Hundreds of listeners wrote to him. He didn't like broadcasting or the fame it brought, and he had to travel to London at night through blackout and bombing. But the country was at war, many people didn't know what the faith they were defending actually was, and he had been asked. The talks later became Mere Christianity.

He also spoke to airmen of the Royal Air Force: men who had been ordered to attend, tired and sceptical, and many of them likely to be killed within months. He felt his first talks were failures. So he learned. He dropped the clever references, put every theological word into plain English, and took their questions seriously. He thought it made him a better defender of the faith.

Peter tells Christians to be ready to give a reason for their hope “with meekness and fear.” Lewis wasn't always meek. He could be overbearing in argument, and he knew it. But he never talked down to people, because he had once raised all their objections himself. You don't need to be a genius to explain your faith. You need to understand it well enough to say it plainly, and to respect the person who is asking.

One thing to do this week: try to explain, in five plain sentences with no church words, why you believe what you believe, or why you aren't sure yet. Say it out loud to one person, or practise it on paper first.