C. S. Lewis

It’s fitting that this first blog post should be about C. S. Lewis. He was one of my earliest Christian mentors, years before the Assembly, and he was the one who helped me most afterward. There is a birthday card from Danny stuck in my copy of Mere Christianity as a bookmark, dated 1993. Lewis was my lifeline then.

He helped me by his apologetics–God in the Dock, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity,– to not give up faith in God. If the Christian faith made sense to such a keen, educated mind–a Cambridge and Oxford professor, a man who disdainfully discarded the Christianity of his childhood and was reluctantly converted as an adult, “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape”, as he put it– then I could accept that it was reasonable to believe, no matter how unlikely it seemed in my post-Assemby pain and confusion. And more than that, he got to the heart of the meaning and ultimate goal of our salvation–we are intended to become “what we have never yet imagined: a real Man, an ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy,” (a quote from his essay, “Man or Rabbit?” in God in the Dock). This was a view so salutary, so clean, so different from the guilt-ridden striving pressed on us by GG, it actually made sense and infused me with hope.This view is so sublime, Lewis says it’s like “the secret of the universe waiting for you. Either that’s true, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal ’sell’ on record. Isn’t it obviously the job of every man…to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug?” The more I read Lewis–and I have read just about everything he ever wrote–I discovered that he consciously strove to live his life consistently with that statement. His letters and biographies reveal that kind of integrity. This was such a refreshing and moving difference from GG’s sham, it was in itself a confirmation of faith.

I have noticed that readership on the Assembly bulletin board has picked up in the last few days with Dave M’s challenge that Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus, seriously undermines the claims of Chrisianity. There are many like Dave who, having been painfully disillusioned by their Assembly experience, are inclined to eagerly embrace arguments that will support their understandable aversion to Christianity. I hope they can be willing to honestly examine the evidence on both sides, in spite of their emotional bias.