C.S. Lewis and Apologetics — A Reformed Assessment

Many Christians admire C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) and enjoy his writings.  I was introduced to C.S. Lewis through my Grade 4 teacher who read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe out loud to us.  I was hooked.  Shortly thereafter I went out and bought my own set of the complete Chronicles of Narnia.  That just got me started.  I’ve long enjoyed his imagination and literary style and I’m by no means alone.

But his influence goes further.  He was a well-known and persuasive advocate for Christianity.  Many people claim to have become Christians through the writings of Lewis.  Books like Mere Christianity and Miracles are still widely-read and touted as powerful tracts promoting Christian truth.  He was one of the most influential Christian apologists of the twentieth century.  But what should a Reformed believer think about his method?  Can we make use of his writings in Reformed apologetics?

Some Background     

Lewis was born in Ireland, but spent most of his life in England.  He was a professor of English at Cambridge University.  He wasn’t trained as a theologian, but did study and briefly teach philosophy.  He’d been an unbeliever for much of his young adult life.  He writes about this in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy:

I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions.  I maintained that God did not exist.  I was also very angry with God for not existing.  I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.[1]

In the early 1930s, Lewis abandoned his atheism and professed to be a Christian.  He became a member of the Church of England.

Today many Christians believe C.S. Lewis to have been an orthodox, evangelical believer.  However, it’s important to realize that Lewis had some serious theological problems.  For example, he didn’t hold to the inerrancy of the Bible.  In his book Reflections on the Psalms, he insists that the imprecatory psalms (like Psalm 137) are “devilish.”  In Mere Christianity, he affirms the theory of evolution.[2]  In the same book, he writes about the possibility of Buddhists belonging to Christ without knowing it:  “…A Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believe) the Buddhist teaching on other points.”[3]  There are more such issues.  On the basis of some of his statements, one might even wonder to what extent C.S. Lewis really understood the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ.  For myself, I’m not sure.

One thing that is certain is that Lewis has had a huge influence.  In the last few years, this is definitely because of the Chronicles of Narnia books being made into films.  As mentioned earlier, there are many people who claim to have become Christians because they read a book by C.S. Lewis like Mere Christianity or Miracles.  Let’s briefly look at those books and the method Lewis uses.

Mere Christianity 

Mere Christianity was originally a series of radio talks.  It was an attempt by Lewis to argue for a basic (‘mere’) form of the Christian faith.  Early in the book, Lewis uses the moral argument for the existence of a deity.  He says that because there is moral law, there must be a law-giver.  That law-giver must be a deity.  At that point, he wasn’t arguing for the Christian conception of God, but only a generic divine being.  His method becomes clear in what he says here:

We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity.  We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law.  We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.[4]

Lewis was thus trying to reason to God apart from any revelation from God.  He was asking readers to independently judge the existence of God on the basis of the arguments presented.  This method is found elsewhere in Mere Christianity as well.

Lewis tries to build up his case bit by bit.  Eventually he gets to the question of what should his readers think about Jesus and his claim to be God:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.[5]

That’s a brilliant piece of writing, often quoted.  You’ll sometimes hear it condensed down to the idea that people have to decide whether Jesus was Lord, liar, or lunatic.  Yet note again that people are called to judge.  You have to judge the claims of Jesus.

C.S. Lewis wrote another book entitled God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics.  In that book he gets to the heart of the problem with his own approach in parts of Mere Christianity.  He writes:

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge.  For the modern man the roles are reversed.  He is the judge: God is in the dock…The trial may even end in God’s acquittal.  But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God in the dock.[6]

That’s exactly what Lewis did in Mere Christianity.   He allowed man to judge God.  He flattered the unbeliever.  Lewis gave him a position of authority over God.  That method was and is not unique to C.S. Lewis.  Many others before and after him have done exactly the same thing.  I should also note that it can sometimes be persuasive.  These types of arguments can work to get people thinking about the Christian faith, and maybe even convince them.  However, just because they work doesn’t mean they’re right or pleasing to God.

Miracles

In his book Miracles, we do find Lewis using a different method at times.[7]  He discusses the philosophy of naturalism, the idea that nothing exists besides nature.  Against naturalism is supernaturalism, which allows for the existence of other things outside of nature, and therefore also allows for the existence of miracles.

Lewis starts off by rightly noting how the disagreement between the naturalist and the supernaturalist over miracles is not merely about facts.  One needs to spend time considering the philosophy of facts held by each side.  Lewis is saying that presuppositions matter.  He writes,

The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence.  The philosophical question must therefore come first.[8]

That could have been said by Reformed theologians like Herman Bavinck or Cornelius VanTil.  Lewis recognizes that people have pre-existing philosophical commitments which must be exposed and discussed.

So when it comes to naturalism, Lewis does exactly that.  He does an internal critique of this philosophy and how it fails to account for logic, morality, and science.  To illustrate, let’s just briefly look at what he says about naturalism and logic or reason.

Lewis demonstrates that the naturalist cannot consistently hold to his position without undermining reason itself.  His philosophy cannot account for reason and cannot support reason.  Even though the naturalist tries to talk highly of reason, he actually destroys it.  This is because our reasoning powers are not explainable with naturalism.  Naturalism is materialistic – all that exists is matter.  But what is reason?  Is reason material or non-material?  Because reason is non-material, naturalism cannot account for it, we have no way for knowing whether it’s true, and our reasoning has no legitimacy.  Lewis writes:

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court.  For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.  It would be destroyed by its own credentials.  It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound…which is nonsense.[9]

Naturalism collapses under its own weight when it comes to reason.  Later in the book, Lewis shows that naturalism also collapses when it comes to morality and science.

Instead of naturalism, Lewis argues that supernaturalism can account for everything.  While he doesn’t get to the point of affirming that only the Christian worldview’s supernaturalism can account for everything, he comes close.  Elsewhere in his writings, he did reach that conclusion.  There is this famous quote from his book The Weight of Glory:

Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions.  The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.  I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.[10]

That is very well said — completely in line with Psalm 36:9, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.”  Indeed, only Christianity can consistently account for everything.  Christianity is true because of the impossibility of the contrary.  Lewis didn’t always consistently work with this method, but when he did, he used it to great effect

At the end of the day, Lewis is worth reading, not only to see some wrong ways of doing apologetics, but also to learn to use some right ways — and brilliantly.  Moreover, if you have non-Christian friends, reading Lewis with them might be a great way to bring Christian truth to bear on their lives.  If you do that, I’d recommend Miracles over Mere Christianity.

******************

[1] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, New York: Walker and Company, 1955, 170.

[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, London: Fontana Books, 1952, 181ff.

[3] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 173.

[4] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 35.

[5] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 52-53.

[6] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. W. Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 244.

[7] For this section on Miracles, I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Daniel R. Dodds, “Elements of Transcendental Presuppositionalism as Found in the Works of C.S. Lewis.”

[8] C.S. Lewis, Miracles, New York: Fount Paperbacks, 1947, 8.

[9] Lewis, Miracles, 18-19.

[10] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1980, 92.

Motorcycle Evangelism

I was in Grade 2 and it was my first effort at evangelism, or at least to try and invite someone to church.  Our family was living in the Arctic town of Inuvik and we were attending the local Baptist church.  My Sunday School teacher was outward looking and tried to teach us church kids to be the same.  She encouraged us to invite our friends to come to church so they could hear the gospel.

Nicky lived on the same street as us, a few doors down.  Like me, his father was an RCMP officer — he was a street cop, my Dad a pilot.  Nicky was also in my class at the Sir Alexander Mackenzie School.  Unlike me, he was a Newfie; he had this quirky Newfoundland accent.  He and his family were also not church-going folk.

One day I was hanging out over at Nicky’s place.  What my Sunday School teacher said was weighing on my mind.  So I said to Nicky, “Hey, do you want go to church with me on Sunday?”  Nicky replied, “Nah, I don’t go to church and I don’t wanna.”  I stopped for a moment and thought.  Nicky needed an incentive.  So I said, “If you come, you’ll get one of these really neat pencils.”  I showed him the pencil I got at Sunday school.  It had all these colours associated with Jesus and the gospel and then Bible verses in tiny print to explain what each meant.  Nicky wasn’t impressed:  “I don’t need a stupid pencil.  Nah, I told you, I don’t wanna go to church.”

He was stubborn.  I had to up the ante.  Clearly he needed a bigger incentive than a pencil.  I thought of something Nicky would regard as irresistibly cool.  With the most persuasion I could muster, I told him, “If you come, they’ll give you a motorbike!”  I don’t how I came up with that whopper, but it certainly didn’t work.  Nicky just said, “No way, I don’t believe you.  No church would give away a motorbike.  Nope, not comin’.”  Nicky never did come to church with me.

I was in Grade 2.  So perhaps you can forgive me for being an evangelist whose honesty didn’t match his zeal.  In my desire to achieve the goal, I tried to appeal to the greed naturally resident in human hearts.  But, in aiming so high, my pitch was transparently unbelievable, even to a kid in Grade 2.

Sadly, some of what passes for evangelism doesn’t get much beyond my Grade 2 efforts.  The human heart isn’t naturally drawn to the gospel message of rescue for sinners through the cross of Christ.  In their natural condition, human hearts don’t find that message attractive or persuasive.  Christ crucified is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23).  Yet some try to share the good news in a way that promises things the Bible doesn’t.  Maybe not motorbikes, but certainly health, wealth, and prosperity:  “If you come to Christ, you’ll be blessed materially.  Your health will be better.  Your relationships will improve.”  Such incentives are really no different to a Grade 2 kid telling his friend to come to church so he can get a motorbike.

I often think of the memorable words of C.S. Lewis in God in the Dock:

As you perhaps know, I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

Lewis was right.  Becoming a Christian is going to mean struggle and difficulty.  It means bearing a cross, dying to yourself, killing sin.  From a this-world perspective, there isn’t much (if anything) to commend it.

So, how do we make the gospel persuasive?  Or:  how do we even just make a case for someone to join us for Sunday worship at a church service?  Here’s the thing:  the power of persuasion ultimately isn’t in us.  Our calling is simply to speak the truth in love.  We’re called to share the gospel with whomever we can.  Now 1 Peter 3:15 says you should be prepared to give an answer if someone asks you, “Why?”  Why should someone believe the gospel?  Because it’s the way to be rescued from the judgment we deserve and it’s the way back to the way things should be in terms of how we relate to our Creator.  Why should someone come to church?  Because, we tell them, there they’re going to hear the best news available to humanity.  In a world of bad news and worse news, a faithful Christian church is going to herald the good news of who Jesus is and what he’s done.

When we say true things like that, God may be at work in that person’s heart with his Holy Spirit.  The words we speak may be God’s instrument to persuade and draw that person in to Christ.  Or perhaps not.  Ultimately the persuasion isn’t in our power.  God persuades when he chooses to do so.  We just have to speak the truth.

I Recommend

This past week, I shared the following links on social media and I think they’re worth sharing here too:

Does Systemic Racism Exist?

That’s a provocative question in today’s environment.  Samuel Sey’s answer will stir up your grey matter.

When C.S. Lewis was an atheist…

This is an excerpt from Douglas Bond’s book War in the Wasteland.

Why haven’t we heard from ET?

Jon Dykstra considers the possibilities and comes up with what seems to me to be the most likely answer.

A Free People’s Suicide? — The End of Law and Order in the West

I’m sure you’ve heard the rallying cries of either defunding or dismantling police forces around the world.  What could possibly go wrong?  David Robertson provides some penetrating analysis of the spirit of the age, a spirit which is increasingly lawless and illogical.

Does the Condition of Your Church Facility Matter to Guests?

“I find that many church members take better care of their homes, boats, cars, motorcycles, and even their pets than they do their ministry facilities. Is this acceptable to you? It is not to me, and I suggest that the church (big “C”) wake up, take notice, and do something about it. I believe that God will hold each of us responsible and accountable for how we steward every resource entrusted to us.”  And even more than stewardship, this is about the gospel.  When we show that value the church and its facilities poorly, it reflects poorly on the rich gospel we aim to preach there.

Greed, Heresy, and the Prosperity Gospel

The White Horse Inn is one of my favourite radio programs.  This episode features a powerful interview with two ex-insiders from the prosperity “gospel” world.  Costi Hinn is a nephew of Benny Hinn; Michael Cerullo is a grandson of Morris Cerullo.

 

 

Lyin’ to Yourself

If you only know where to look, self-deception is all around us.  It’s in old 80s songs.  John Waite sang about lying to himself that he ain’t missing you.  It’s in literature.  One of my favourite examples is from C.S. Lewis.  The Magician’s Nephew is the first of the Chronicles of Narnia.  Narnia has just been created by Aslan.  The animals are meeting with Aslan and at a certain point Aslan begins singing.  All of this was observed by Uncle Andrew. This is what Lewis wrote next:

When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the whole point; for a rather interesting reason.  When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song.  And he had disliked the song very much.  It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel.  Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (‘only a lion,’ as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make himself believe that that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing – only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world.  ‘Of course it can’t really have been singing,’ he thought, ‘I must have imagined it.  I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order.  Who ever heard of a lion singing?’ And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.  Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.  Uncle Andrew did.  He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.  Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.

That’s a classic example of self-deception.

The Bible speaks about this phenomenon, especially in relation to people and their knowledge of God.  Nowhere is this more direct than Romans 1.  Romans 1 says that all people know, at some level, that the true God exists.  However, not all people acknowledge his existence.  There’s a crucial difference between knowing something and acknowledging something.  Romans 1:18 says that unbelievers “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” about God.  That’s telling us that unbelief isn’t an intellectual failure.  Instead, it’s a profound moral problem.  Unbelievers make the moral choice to pretend the true God isn’t there.  This is an evil choice for which they’re fully responsible.  Romans 1:20 says that they’re “without excuse.”  They have no ground to stand on before God’s judgment.  They’re going to be held accountable for their choice to know about the true God and yet refuse to acknowledge him.

The truth is every person knows deep within them that they’ve broken God’s law.  Moreover, they know they’ll stand in judgment for that.  Romans 1:32 speaks the truth, “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”  What keeps an unbeliever from openly acknowledging this?  It’s simply the most irrational thing in the universe:  sin.  As it says in Romans 1:21, sin leads to futile thinking and darkened hearts.

What’s the way out of this profound self-deception with regards to the true God?  Regeneration by the Holy Spirit.  Only the Holy Spirit can bring light to the darkened heart.  Only the Holy Spirit can bring purpose and meaning to our thinking.  Only he can lead us to acknowledge God and, even more, trust in him.  But it’s important to remember that the Holy Spirit uses means.  He uses people who speak the truth of God’s Word to challenge the foolishness of self-deception (1 Pet. 1:23-25).  What the self-deceived need more than anything is someone to come along with the truth, to pull the façade down, to rip off the mask, and show the way things really are.  When we do that with the requisite love and humility of our Saviour, God can use that to work regeneration and faith.

Book Review: Know Why You Believe

Know Why You Believe, K. Scott Oliphint.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017.  Softcover, 221 pages.

There’s a need for different types of books on apologetics.  We need the books on theory – and there are plenty of them.  Several efforts have been made over the years to write books specifically addressed to unbelieving skeptics.  However, so far as I’m aware, there haven’t been too many books written for believers at a popular level.  I’m talking about the kind of book you could give to your teenage son or daughter when they start asking hard questions about the Christian faith.  This is that book.

As a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Dr. Scott Oliphint is well-qualified to write this kind of work.  He has a great grasp of the background philosophical and theological issues – and this is evident in his more scholarly apologetics books.  Yet he also has a track record of accessible writing for popular audiences – for example, some years ago I reviewed his great series of biblical studies entitled The Battle Belongs to the Lord: The Power of Scripture for Defending Our Faith.  He’s done it again.  Except for a couple of more technical sections, most of Know Why You Believe should be comprehensible to the average reader from young adults upwards.

The book launches with this profound quote from C.S. Lewis at his best:  “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”  That really sets the tone for everything following.  One of the reasons I really love this book and can highly recommend it is because it takes God’s Word seriously.  It takes Psalm 36:9 seriously:  “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.”  God’s light especially shines forth in his Word.  If you want to see clearly, you need to see things God’s way.  This is also true when it comes to the reasons for believing the Christian faith.  The best and most trustworthy reasons come from God himself – the faithful God who never lies.  That’s the basic approach undergirding Know Why You Believe – a biblical, Reformed approach to apologetics.

Oliphint covers 10 questions we might struggle with:

• Why believe in the Bible?
• Why believe in God?
• Why believe in Jesus?
• Why believe in miracles?
• Why believe Jesus rose from the dead?
• Why believe in salvation?
• Why believe in life after death?
• Why believe in God in the face of modern science?
• Why believe in God despite the evil in the world?
• Why believe in Christianity alone?

Each chapter deals with one of these questions.  It explains the reasons and then also addresses responses or objections that might arise.  There are also “Questions for Reflection” and recommended readings with every chapter.

Just touching on one chapter, the second last deals with the problem of evil.  It describes the problem and then explores two ways in which Christians have tried to address it, albeit unsatisfactorily.  Instead, Oliphint attempts to offer biblical reasons as to how evil can co-exist with a good God.  He points out that God has recognized the problem of evil from before creation.  Furthermore, God created human beings in his image as responsible agents.  When Adam and Eve fell, God rightly judged their sin.  The real blame for evil is on them, not God.  He then points out how God himself has dealt with, is dealing with, and will deal with the problem of evil through his Son Jesus Christ.  This is a good explanation, but Oliphint might have said more.  For instance, he could have added that because God is good, he must have a morally good reason for allowing whatever evil there is to exist.

Not every Christian ponders the deeper questions of why we believe what we do.  But if you or someone you know does, this will be a great read.  It would also make a great gift for consistories to give to young people who make public profession of faith.