Introduction

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

Few Christian writers of any century have been read by so many people who would never have opened a book of theology. C. S. Lewis was an Oxford tutor in English literature, a specialist in the poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a bachelor for most of his life, and for half of it an unbeliever. He came back to faith in his early thirties, after years of resisting it, and spent the rest of his life explaining it — to wartime radio audiences, to airmen in draughty huts, to undergraduates in debating societies, to children through a wardrobe, and to thousands of strangers who wrote him letters and received a reply in his own hand. More than sixty years after his death his books sell in their millions, in dozens of languages. Many believers can name one of them as the book that first made the faith seem not only true but reasonable, and not only reasonable but beautiful.

The reason is not that he invented anything. He insisted, to the point of tedium, that he had no new doctrines to offer and would have been ashamed of any. What he had was a gift for putting the old faith into plain words, a habit of thinking in pictures, a scholar’s knowledge of what Christians of every age had believed, and an honesty about difficulty that disarmed his readers. He wrote as a man who had stood outside the faith and remembered what it looked like from there. He took objections seriously because he had made most of them himself.

Why he still matters

Lewis matters, first, because he showed that the mind and the heart need not be enemies. He was a trained logician who could take an argument apart with relish, and he was also a man who had been haunted since childhood by a longing that no argument could explain. He came to believe that both his reason and his longing had been pointing to the same God all along, and he spent his life writing to both. His apologetics argue; his stories enchant; and the two are not as far apart as they look.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. ISAIAH 1:18

He matters, second, because he wrote for ordinary Christians about ordinary Christian life. Alongside the great questions of God’s existence and the claims of Christ, he wrote about pride and envy, about prayer when it is dull, about the difficulty of loving people we do not like, about temptation, marriage, grief and the long middle stretch of discipleship where nothing much seems to happen. He treated these things as the real battleground, which they are.

He matters, third, because he refused to be a party man. He was a lifelong member of the Church of England, but he wrote for the faith that the churches hold in common, and he deliberately kept out of the quarrels that divide the churches. Readers of every tradition have found themselves at home in his pages. That is a large part of his appeal, and, as we shall see, it is also the source of some of the places where evangelical readers must weigh him carefully.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, fifteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first group follows the road by which Lewis himself came to faith and by which he tried to lead others: the longing he called joy, the moral law written on the human heart, the question of who Jesus is, and the plain, shared faith he defended. The second group turns to the Christian life: pride and humility, the remaking of the believer into the likeness of Christ, and the reality of temptation and the enemy. The third group takes up the hardest things: pain, grief and prayer. The fourth turns to love and imagination: the four loves, myth and story, and the miracles that Lewis believed broke into nature from outside it. The last two chapters look towards eternity: the weight of glory that God intends for His children, and the final choice between heaven and hell. A conclusion follows, and a last chapter on his books, where to start with them, and the older writers he loved.

Each chapter ends with points for reflection and a prayer. Lewis believed that the purpose of thinking about God is to meet Him, and that a man who reads theology and never prays has missed the point of the reading. Take the chapters slowly, one at a time, with a Bible open.

A word about his words

Lewis’s books remain in copyright and in print, and his estate guards them carefully. This companion does not reproduce them. Not a sentence of his is quoted in these pages, not even the famous ones that appear on calendars and greeting cards. Every description of his teaching is a summary in our own words, and where his arguments are set out they are set out as we understand them, in our own phrasing. His books are named throughout so that the reader can go to the source, and the last chapter is a guide to them. Readers are warmly encouraged to buy them, borrow them and read them. Nothing here can replace the clarity, wit and warmth of the man himself.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship. Lewis was loved by evangelicals, and has been for three generations, but he never called himself one, and there are places where his convictions differ from those that most evangelical readers hold. It is kinder to name them at the start.

First, he believed in a form of purgatory — not as a place of punishment that pays for sin, but as a purifying process after death which, he thought, the redeemed would themselves want. He also prayed for the dead. Chapter seventeen weighs this.

Second, he held out the hope that some who had never consciously known Christ might yet be saved by Him, and he put that hope into one of his stories. He was clear that no one is saved except through Christ; he was less sure than most evangelicals that only those who know His name are saved by Him. Chapter seventeen weighs this too.

Third, his view of the Bible was high but not that of the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy. He believed Scripture to be the Word of God, carrying God’s message through human writers, but he thought that some Old Testament narratives were not meant as literal history. Chapter fourteen considers it.

Fourth, he accepted, as a scientific hypothesis, that the human body may have come about by a long process of development, and he offered a speculative account of the Fall that fitted it — while attacking, with real energy, the godless philosophy of inevitable progress that often travelled with the theory. Chapter ten considers it.

Fifth, he was a sacramental, high-church Anglican in his habits of worship, who made a regular confession to a priest, and he deliberately declined to take sides on questions — such as the precise way in which the cross saves us — that evangelicals have regarded as central. Chapters five and six touch on this.

None of these points is raised to diminish him. They are raised because he would have demanded it. He hated nothing more than a cult of personality, and he had no patience with readers who swallowed an author whole.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where Lewis is faithful — and he is faithful far more often than not — receive it gladly. Where he goes beyond what is written, mark it and test it by Scripture. He would not have wanted you to follow him. He would have wanted you to follow Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly whether your faith has ever been tested by hard questions, and whether you have been afraid to ask them. Write one down.

2. Think of someone you know who finds Christianity implausible. Pray for that person by name as you read this book.

3. Decide how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open and a few minutes of quiet after each prayer.

4. Obtain one of Lewis’s own books — Mere Christianity is the natural place to begin — and read it alongside these chapters.

5. Ask God to give you a mind that thinks clearly and a heart that is not afraid of the answers.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You are the truth, and You are not afraid of our questions.

Thank You for the servants You have given Your church, who have helped doubters and strengthened the weak by their words.

As I read about one of them, keep me from admiring him and forgetting You. Let every argument and every story lead me to Christ.

Give me a ready answer for the hope that is in me, and give me meekness and fear in giving it. Amen.