In the notes, C. S. Lewis is referred to as CSL when citing Letters. The parts of Mere Christianity are cited using book and chapter numbers; for instance, 1:2 refers to book 1, chapter 2. All italics are in the original quotations.
INTRODUCTION
1. “Books of the Century: Leaders and Thinkers Weigh in on Classics That Have Shaped Contemporary Religious Thought,” Christianity Today, April 24, 2000, 92–93.
2. David Biema, “Religion Beyond the Wardrobe,” Time, October 30, 2005, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1124316,00.html.
3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 55.
4. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 568.
5. Jacobs, Narnian, 75.
6. Quoted in Jacobs, Narnian, 78.
7. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 167.
8. Ibid., 178.
9. Ibid., 171.
10. Ibid., 178–79.
11. Ibid., 181–82.
12. McGrath, A Life, 138.
13. McGrath (in ibid., 141–46) makes a convincing case that Lewis misdated this step as being taken in the spring of 1929.
14. CSL to Greeves, October 18, 1931, Letters, 1:977. Of the many accounts, I have followed most closely McGrath’s recent and insightful one, in A Life, 131–59, except in his attempt to redate to the spring of 1932 Lewis’s experience, while riding to Whipsnade Zoo, of finding himself believing in Christ’s divinity. The letters to Greeves of October 1 and 18, 1931, far outweigh the consideration that Lewis referred to spring flowers when he mentioned “the bluebells underfoot,” which may well have been simply a poetic expression.
15. Cf. Hooper’s summary, Guide, 184.
16. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), quotations from 551 and 552.
CHAPTER ONE
War Service
1. CSL to Greeves, September 15, 1939, Letters, 2:274.
2. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976 [1949]), 32.
3. Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940, available at WinstonChurchill.org, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches.
4. CSL to Dom Bede Griffiths, OSB, July 16, 1940, Letters, 2:423.
5. Robert E. Havard, “Philia: Jack at Ease,” C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, and other Reminiscences, edited by James T. Como (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 220.
6. Havard, “Philia,” 222.
7. CSL to Brother George Every, SSM, October 12, 1940, Letters, 2:448.
8. James Welch to CSL, February 7, 1941, quoted in Phillips, Time of War, 80.
9. From a translation of the Latin dedication (1931) to Phillips, Time of War, 16.
10. Kenneth M. Wolfe, The Churches and British Broadcasting: The Politics of Broadcast Religion, 1922–1956 (London: SCM, 1984), 66–75.
11. Phillips, Time of War, 39. Angus Calder, in The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Granada, 1971), 551, reports a survey in a section of London at the end of the war in which three quarters of the women and two-thirds of the men said they believed in God, but six in ten never went to church.
12. Wolfe, Churches and British Broadcasting, 170–91.
13. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London: Collins, 1986), 40 (referring to around the 1920s). Robert Currie et al., in Church and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), report that in 1940 there were about 2.5 million Catholics in England and Wales and a total of about 3 million in Great Britain. In Great Britain in 1940 (when the population was just under 50 million), the “church membership” numbers are reported as 2.255 million Anglicans, 1.311 million Scottish Presbyterians, and 1.874 million Nonconformists. “Annual Church Membership in Britain, 1900–1970,” 25.
14. Phillips, Time of War, 83–84.
15. Walter Hooper, in the introduction to Mere Christianity: An Anniversary Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1981), xi, says he probably never owned a radio and tried to stay out of earshot of them.
16. Welch to CSL, February 7, 1941, in Phillips, Time of War, 80.
17. CSL to Welch, February 10, 1941, Letters, 2:470.
18. Keith Robbins, “Britain, 1940 and Christian Civilization,” in History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London: Hambledon, 1993), 195–213.
19. George Orwell and I. Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London, 1968), 17–18, quoted in Robbins, “Britain, 1940,” 213.
20. Hooper, Guide, 268.
21. Hooper, Guide, 304n.
22. Harry Lee Pole, “C. S. Lewis was a Secret Government Agent,” Christianity Today, December 10, 2015. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/december-web-only/cs-lewis-secret-agent.html CSL to Greeves, May 25, 1941, Letters, 2:486.
23. Babbage, “To the Royal Air Force,” in C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher, edited by Carolyn Keefe (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971), 65 and 69.
24. CSL to Sister Penelope, CSM, May 15, 1941, Letters, 2:485 and 485n.
25. CSL to Dorothy Sayers, April 1942, Letters, 2:515.
26. CSL to Greeves, December 23, 1941, Letters, 2:504.
27. Babbage, “To the Royal Air Force,” 68.
28. Lewis, “God in the Dock,” in God in the Dock, 242–43.
29. CSL to Sister Penelope, May 15, 1941, Letters, 2:484–85.
30. McGrath, A Life, 209.
CHAPTER TWO
Broadcast Talks
1. Phillips, Time of War, 117–18. For a popular account of Lewis and the broadcasts, see Paul McCusker, C. S. Lewis and Mere Christianity: The Crisis that Created a Classic (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2014). A dramatized version of the story is also available on CD: C. S. Lewis at War: The Dramatic Story Behind Mere Christianity (Colorado Springs, CO: Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, 2013).
2. George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Time (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 168. Phillips, in Time of War, 119, reports a similar recollection, from John Lawler, of Lewis’s reception in an RAF mess where everyone stopped to listen.
3. Walter Hooper, introduction to Mere Christianity: An Anniversary Edition of the Three Book (New York: MacMillan, 1981), xv. Both Hooper and Phillips have compared the original transcripts to the publications and pointed out any notable differences.
4. MC 1:5.
5. Phillips, Time of War, 119.
6. MC 1:2.
7. Fenn to CSL, September 4, 1941, quoted in Phillips, Time of War, 135. CSL to Fenn, September 7, 1941, Letters, 2:491.
8. Hooper, note, Letters, 2:483.
9. CSL to Arthur Greeves, December 23, 1941, Letters, 2:504.
10. Jacobs, Narnian, 224
11. CSL to Fenn, February 25, 1942, Letters, 2:509–10.
12. CSL to the Reverend Joseph Dowell, November 30, 1941, Letters, 2:498.
13. Hooper, note, Letters, 2:498.
14. Reproduced from the original transcript in Hooper, introduction to Mere Christianity: An Anniversary Edition, xvii–xviii. The original preface to Broadcast Talks: Reprinted with Some Alterations from Two Series of Broadcast Talks (“Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” and “What Christians Believe”), Given in 1941 and 1942 (The Case for Christianity in the United States) (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), condenses this original and leaves out being blown “sky-high” and the medical analogy.
15. Fenn to CSL, December 3, 1941, Letters, 2:499.
16. Cf. his sermon “The Weight of Glory”: “Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am …,” in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, edited by Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 31. (Cf. my chapter 8.)
17. MC 2:3. See the discussions of this argument in chapters 6 and 7 of this book.
18. MC 2:5.
19. Fenn to CSL, February 18, 1942, in Phillips, Time of War, 153.
20. CSL to Fenn, August 15, 1942, Letters, 2:528.
21. See, for instance, Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Granada, 1982 [1969]), esp. 305–8.
22. CSL to Sister Penelope, November 9, 1941, Letters, 2:496.
23. CSL to Dorothy Sayers, April 1942 [no day], Letters, 2:515. Cf. to Sister Penelope, October 24, 1940, Letters, 2:451.
24. Quoted from Phillips’s interview with Jill Freud, November 19, 1999, in Phillips, Time of War, 180.
25. CSL to Sister Penelope, October 24, 1940. He told Hooper of the cold feet. Green and Hooper, Biography, 198.
26. Phillips, Time of War, 160.
27. MC 3:1.
28. MC 3:5.
29. CSL to Fenn, November 30, 1942, in Phillips, Time of War, 167.
30. See Phillips, Time of War, 305, on a comparison of the broadcasts and chapters. The chapter “Christian Marriage” in Mere Christianity also expands the section on “being in love” from one paragraph in the original book, Christian Behaviour, to six.
31. MC 3:2.
32. Green and Hooper, Biography, 210, quoting a review in the Tablet (June 26, 1943), n.p.
33. Bruce R. Johnson, “C. S. Lewis and the BBC’s Brains Trust: A Study in Resiliency,” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review, November 2013, 79–80. Lewis’s largest audiences were for his second (1.7 million) and third (2.1 million) broadcasts, delivered on August 13 and 20, 1941. Johnson observes that when Lewis appeared as a guest on the Brains Trust show in 1942, it drew over 5 million listeners for each of two shows. “Don v. Devil,” Time, September 8, 1947, 67, reports that each talk was heard by about 600,000 people, a figure that is widely repeated but is far too modest. Only Lewis’s very first broadcast had an audience that small.
34. Stephanie L. Derrick, in “The Reception of C. S. Lewis in Britain and America,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sterling, 48, cites the following with the same subtitle: Wright, The Average Man: Broadcast Talks (London: Longman, Green, 1942); Fred Townley Lord, A Man’s Religion: Series of Four Broadcast Talks on the B.B.C. Forces Programme (London, 1940); Walter Carey, As Man to Man: Broadcast Talks to the Forces (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1940); W. A. L. Elmslie, Five Great Subjects: Broadcast Talks, etc. (London: SCM, 1943), preface; and J. H. Oldham, ed., The Church Looks Ahead: Broadcast Talks (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 340–374. On Wright, see also Wolfe, Churches and British Broadcasting, 278–80. Wolfe reports (269) that Wright’s audiences eventually numbered around 7 million, a figure that, as Derrick observes, makes Lewis’s audience seem modest by comparison. I am indebted to Derrick for sharing with me a draft of her revised book manuscript, “Chronicling Fame: the Reception of C. S. Lewis in Britain and America.”
35. Hooper, Guide, 309.
36. CSL to Greeves, [January 1943], Letters, 2:549.
37. See Phillips, Time of War, 221–31, for an account of exchanges between Lewis and the BBC leading to these broadcasts.
38. McGrath, A Life, 197–99.
39. CSL to Fenn, April 12, 1943, Letters, 2:568.
40. Phillips, Time of War, 225–27. The BBC records do not include Lewis as having appeared on this program of July 22, recorded on July 19. Lewis, however, did have a script of the discussion and may have pulled out at the last minute. See Phillips, Time of War, appendix 3, 308–11, for the text of this script.
41. Fenn to CSL, May 6, 1943, in Phillips, Time of War, 227–28.
42. CSL to Fenn, May 7, 1943, Letters, 2:571–72.
43. CSL to Fenn, June 16, 1943, Letters, 2:581.
44. CSL to Fenn, July 1, 1943, Letters, 2:583.
45. Phillips, Time of War, 243–44.
46. CSL to Fenn, February 10, 1944, Letters, 2:602.
47. MC 4:1.
48. MC 4:8. Phillips, Time of War, 253–54.
49. “C. S. Lewis’s Surviving BBC Address,” YouTube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHxs3gdtV8A.
50. See Phillips, Time of War, appendix 4, 306–7, for a chart comparing the seven broadcasts, the seven Listener publications (with slightly different titles), and the eleven chapters of the book versions.
51. CSL to Fenn, March 25, 1944, Letters, 2:608–9. Lewis responded to one letter in The Listener that had accused him of preparing the way for a return to the burning of witches. He pointed out that he was against religious compulsion of any kind and had protested against “the intolerable tyranny of compulsory church parades for the Home Guard.” CSL, “To the Editor of The Listener, [published March 9, 1944], Letters, 2:605–6. But he pulled a broader “apologia,” observing that “replies, except in a real rigorous high-brow controversy, are always a mistake.” CSL to Fenn, April 4, 1944, 2:610. A version of this apologia is likely found in “Two Notes,” which is chapter 6 of the published editions of Beyond Personality.
52. Fenn to Lewis, March 31, 1944, in Phillips, Time of War, 255.
53. Fenn to Lewis, March 23, 1944, in Phillips, Time of War, 254.
CHAPTER THREE
Loved or Hated
1. CSL to Fenn, April 4, 1944, Letters, 2:610.
2. CSL to Fenn, March 25, 1944.
3. Fenn to Lewis, November 10, 1942, quoted in Phillips, Time of War, 172.
4. Freethinker, November 1, 1942, 449–50.
5. George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, October 27, 1944, http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19441027.html. I am indebted to Stephanie Derrick for pointing me to this review.
6. Times Literary Supplement, September 19, 1942, 460.
7. “Theology as Discovery: Mr. C. S. Lewis’s Talks,” review of Beyond Personality: The Christian Idea of God, TLS, October 21, 1944, 513. See Hooper, Guide, 327–28, for summaries of some other reviews. Bruce L. Edwards, in C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 3:67–68, quotes some additional reviews.
8. G. D. Smith, “Nature and Spirit, According to a Recent Work,” Clergy Review, February 1945, 69. Specifically, Smith held that Lewis’s account at the beginning of chapter 5 of Beyond Personality, which said that the fallen state of humans involved the natural self-centered life distorting our spiritual sensibilities, needed to be replaced with a Catholic doctrine regarding the supernatural endowments of humans lost at the Fall and restored in salvation.”
9. R. L. De Wilton [of Macmillan Publishers USA] to Edward A. Golden, New York City, December 3, 1943, Wade Center Archives, Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
10. R. C. Churchill, “Mr. C. S. Lewis as an Evangelist,” Modern Churchman, January–March, 1946, 334. Churchill quotes a number of such reviews in church periodicals, without exact references.
11. Lee, C. S. Lewis and Some Modern Theologians (London: Lindsey, 1944), 4, 10, and 11–16.
12. E. L. [Edgar Leonard] Allen, “The Theology of C. S. Lewis,” Modern Churchman, January–March 1945, 317–24, quotations from 318–321.
13. Churchill, “Mr. C. S. Lewis as an Evangelist,” 334–42, quotations from 335, 341, and 342.
14. Sayers to Mrs. Robert Darby, May 31, 1948, Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 3, edited by Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge, England: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1998), 135, quoted in Samuel Joeckel, The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity in the Public Sphere (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2012), 269.
15. On his earliest reception, cf. Mark Noll’s paper “C. S. Lewis in America: 1933–1947,” presented at a conference at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, in October 2013. My account of Lewis’s American reception up to the mid-1950s is dependent on the thorough research of Maggie Noll. I am most grateful to these valued friends for sharing their work with me.
16. “Books—Authors,” New York Times, July 8, 1943, 17.
17. P. W. Wilson, New York Times Book Review, March 28, 1943, 3.
18. “Sermons in Reverse,” Time, April 19, 1943, 76.
19. Leonard Bacon, “Critique of Pure Diabolism,” review of Screwtape, Saturday Review, April 17, 1943, 20.
20. De Wilton to Golden, June 16, 1943, December 3, 1943, and March 3, 1944, Wade Center Archives. In November 1948, Chad Walsh wrote, “Twentieth Century Fox is considering the possibilities of extracting a movie from Screwtape.” Preface to C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (New York: Macmillan, 1949), ix.
21. “Reluctant Believer,” Time, January 24, 1944, 96. The sales figures suggest that Screwtape had already sold even better in America than in Great Britain. De Wilton reported that Screwtape had sold seventy thousand copies in Great Britain since February 1942. CSL to Golden, June 16, 1943, Wade Center Archives.
22. Leonard Bacon, “The Imaginative Power of C. S. Lewis,” review of Perelandra, Saturday Review, April 8, 1944, 9.
23. Forman, “Common-Sense Humanist,” NYTBR, April 23, 1944, 12.
24. Wilson, “Prophecy Via BBC,” NYTBR, July 22, 1945, 8.
25. Cooke, “Mr. Anthony at Oxford,” New Republic, April 24, 1944, 578–80.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Based on Maggie Noll’s wide-ranging search of American periodicals, the only strongly negative comment in the general press seems to have been that of John Haynes Holmes, a Universalist pastor and editor and a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, who, while praising the first half of The Case for Christianity (November 14, 1943, 42), describes the second book as involving “an almost incredibly naïve statement of Christian theology.” Oddly, however, Holmes’s brief review of Beyond Personality in the same journal (September 23, 1945, 12), has only praise for Lewis for the “magic” of “his clarity of thought and simplicity of expression.”
29. Charles Keenan, review of The Case for Christianity, America, September 18, 1943, 664, and James J. Maguire, CSP, review of the same, Catholic World, November 1943, 215–16.
30. Anne Freemantle, review of Beyond Personality, Commonweal, September 14, 1945, 528 and 529; Harold C. Gardiner, SJ, review of Beyond Personality, America, May 26, 1945, 158–59; and Philip J. Donnelley, SJ, “Protest on C. S. Lewis,” America, June 30, 1945, 263.
31. Malachi J. Donnelly, SJ, “Church Law and Non-Catholic Books,” American Ecclesiastical Review, June 1946, 403–9, quotations from 406 and 408.
32. As in the anonymous comment under “Books Received” regarding Beyond Personality, Christian Century, June 20, 1945, 734. Cf. an anonymous brief review in Christian Century, September 29, 1943, 1105; Talmage C. Johnson, review of The Problem of Pain, Christian Century, December 1, 1943, 1400; and an anonymous brief review of Christian Behaviour, Christian Century, January 26, 1944, 114.
33. Poling, editor’s comment, Christian Herald, December 1943, 70.
34. Walter F. Whitman, review of Christian Behaviour, Anglican Theological Journal, July 1944, 191.
35. Myers, “The Religious Works of C. S. Lewis,” review, Theology Today, January 1, 1945, 545–48, quotations from 545 and 548.
36. Anderson, “C. S. Lewis: Foe of Humanism,” Christian Century, December 25, 1946, 1562–63. Cf. a wholly positive review of Miracles: A Preliminary Study, by Gaius Glenn Atkins, Christian Century, December 3, 1947, 1486–87.
37. Unsigned review, Moody Monthly, December 1943, 239.
38. Moody Monthly, May 1944, 536. Cf. the largely positive but cautious unsigned review of Beyond Personality in the Sunday School Times, October 5, 1946, 914–15.
39. C. S. Lewis, “How I Know God Is,” His, February 1944, 11–13. Cf. the very positive review of Screwtape by editor Virginia Lowell, His, January 1946, 21–22.
40. Woolley, review of these two books and The Problem of Pain, Westminster Theological Journal, May 1944, 210–14, quotations from 210 and 213.
41. Eppinga, review of Beyond Personality, Westminster Theological Journal, May 1946, 225–27, quotation from 226.
42. Van Til, review of Beyond Personality, United Evangelical Action, May 15, 1946, 21. For Van Til’s fuller critique, see his Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1955, 75–77. See also “The Theology of C. S. Lewis,” an unpublished manuscript largely about Mere Christianity, available at WordPress.com, http://presupp101.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/the-theology-of-c-s-lewis-by-cornelius-van-til/.
43. United Evangelical Action, June 15, 1946, 15.
44. Walsh, “C. S. Lewis, Apostle to the Skeptics,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1946, 115–19, quotations from 119.
45. Elton Trueblood, While It Is Day (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 68 and 99–101. Cf. James R. Newby, Elton Trueblood: Believer, Teacher, and Friend (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 67–68.
46. For example, “World Seen Split by Two Ideologies,” New York Times, July 18, 1949, 15, reporting on a sermon by an Episcopal leader, the Reverend Leland B. Henry, and mentioning Lewis among those helping to turn the West back from godlessness.
47. “Don v. Devil,” Time, September 8, 1947, 65–74, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,804196,00.html. Lewis’s observations on fashions is from his 1946 address “The Decline of Religion,” in God in the Dock, 218–23.
48. Paul Jordan-Smith, “I’ll Be the Judge, You Be the Jury,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1949, D5.
49. Nash K. Burger, “Of Modern Books and Living Faiths,” NYTBR, December 25, 1949, 1.
50. On neo-Thomism, or neo-Scholasticism, as a passing fashion, see, for instance, CSL to Dom Bede Griffiths, January 6, 1936, Letters, 2:176.
51. Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, quotations from 12, 13, and 73. See also 73–75 and 166–68.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Classic as an Afterthought
1. “Don v. Devil,” 74.
2. CSL to John Beddow, October 7, 1945, Letters, 2:673–74. See Phillips, Time of War, 260–79, for Lewis’s declination of almost all broadcasts—except a dramatization of The Great Divorce.
3. “Christian Apologetcs,” in God in the Dock, 103. Lewis says much the same thing in a letter to Dorothy Sayers (August 2, 1946, Letters, 2:730).
4. Hooper, Guide, 343–44.
5. Harry Blamires, “Teaching the Universal Truth: C. S. Lewis among the Intellectuals,” Pilgrim’s Guide, 16.
6. For some detail on the early project, see George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Time (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 308–9 and 312–13.
7. Cf. Christopher W. Mitchell, “C. S. Lewis and the Oxford Socratic Club,” in Lightbearer, 329–52, esp. 342–43, and Walter Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences, edited by James T. Como (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 137–85. Humphrey Carpenter, in The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 217, suggested that Lewis may have changed course due to the Anscomb debate, and A. N. Wilson, in C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 210–14, provides a strong version of it. The Journal of Inkling Studies, October 2011, 9–123, provides a symposium on the philosophical issues of the Anscombe–Lewis exchange.
8. Jacobs, Narnian, 235.
9. Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 214–22. Ward, however, more than Jacobs, sees the turn to Narnia as, at least in part, a response to the Anscombe debate.
10. Lewis, Broadcast Talks, 37–38.
11. See chapters 7 and 8.
12. Letters, 3:213n.
13. CSL to John H. McCullum, October 1, 1956, Letters, 3:791. The original subtitle in the United States included The Case for Christianity rather than Broadcast Talks. In twenty-first-century editions, “Enlarged” has been changed to “Amplified” in the subtitle.
14. The Screwtape Letters, Letter 25.
15. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock, 201–2.
16. Richard Baxter, Church History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils, Abbreviated (1681), xiv.
17. Broadcast Talks, 5.
18. Beyond Personality, 5–6.
19. CSL to Peter Milward, SJ, July 4, 1955, Letters, 3:628.
20. See chapter 7 for reactions to this argument.
CHAPTER FIVE
Into the Evangelical Orbit
1. Although Geoffrey Bles continued to publish the volume and had offered a second printing by 1955, those British sales were soon eclipsed by those of the Collins publishing house, which offered a mass-market paperback Fontana Books edition in 1955, which was in its tenth impression by 1963. Macmillan issued a Colliers mass-market edition in 1960 and also a trade paperback in 1962 that became the best-selling edition over the next few decades. By 1965 Macmillan was offering a sixteenth printing (apparently of its original edition) and by 1967 was into the eight printing of another edition (presumably the paperback). The heavy American sales appear to have begun in the 1970s. Publishers Weekly, August 13, 1982, 47, reports that Macmillan had sold 1.620 million copies since issuing it as a trade paperback in 1962. Cf. chapter 6, note 1. See also WorldCat, Abe Books, and Goodreads for listings of editions and printings, including those from a number of other publishers over the years. The Case for Christianity was published as a separate volume as late as 1996 by Touchstone Books, Simon and Schuster. The latest printing of Christian Behavior as a separate volume is from Geoggrey Bles in 1963, and the latest of Beyond Personality is from Bles in 1959 (according to WorldCat listings).
2. Kathleen Nott, The Emperor’s Clothes (London: William Heiemann, 1953), quotations from 8, 48, and 312. In addition to such dismissals of the popular apologetics, Nott included a lengthy critique of Lewis’s argument in Miracles that naturalism is self-refuting because of the unreliability of reason that it entails (258–84).
3. Tom Driberg, “Lobbies of the Soul,” New Statesman and Nation, March 19, 1955, 393–94.
4. Walsh, “Impact on America,” in Light on C. S. Lewis, edited by Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), 111–13.
5. Lewis, “Cross-examination,” interview with Shirwood Wirt, May 7, 1963, in God in the Dock, 265, originally published in Decision, September 1963, 3, and October 1963, 4.
6. See Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–200.
7. Kenneth Dole, “Seminarian Assails Billy Graham Work,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 14, 1955, 30.
8. W. Norman Pittenger, “Apologist versus Apologist: A Critique of C. S. Lewis as ‘Defender of the Faith,’” Christian Century, October 1, 1958, 1104–1107.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. C. S. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger,” Christian Century, November 26, 1958, 1359–61. This is also found in God in the Dock, 177–83. Pittenger offered a reply, published as a letter in the Christian Century, in which he agreed that there had long been a need for “translators” of the faith for the common person. Nonetheless, he insisted that always keeping an eye out for “what Jones will take” was a “very bad modernism.” Apologists had to commend the faith, “but at the same time to commend it in absolute integrity of mind—with guarding of style, with nuances, with fine shades, with ambiguity, at those place where these things are indicated as essential to a fully truthful presentation of the faith.” “Letters to the Editor,” Christian Century, December 24, 1958, 1486.
12. Ibid.
13. Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1964), 5. Even strict fundamentalists might enlist Lewis as at least a co-belligerent. Bob Jones II, president of the ultrafundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina, visited Lewis in Oxford shortly after World War II and pronounced him, despite his smoking and drinking, “a Christian.” Green and Hooper, Biography, 229.
14. CSL to Carl F. H. Henry, September 28, 1955, Letters, 3:651. This exchange occurred prior to the meeting with Graham (November 5, 1955), which may have helped soften Lewis’s attitude.
15. CSL to Kilby, November 2, 1958, Letters, 3:985.
16. CSL to Carl Henry, December 1, 1958, Letters, 3:992–93.
17. “John Stott,” InterVarsity Press Web page, https://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/author.pl/author_id=82.
18. Stott, Basic Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1958), 139.
19. “C. S. Lewis Dead; Author, Critic, 64,” New York Times, November 26, 1963, 18. This obituary provides the figure of a million copies. William White, in The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 26, says, without an exact reference, “A London obituary announced that Lewis’ paperback sales alone were in the vicinity of one million in England, and provides the sales estimates of 270,000 for Mere Christianity and 250,000 for Screwtape. The Problem of Pain also sold almost 120,000.”
20. Walsh, “Impact on America,” 115.
21. Bob Smietana, “C. S. Lewis Superstar,” with additional reporting by Rebecca Barnes, quoting Hooper from an interview, Christianity Today, December 9, 2005, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/december/9.28.html?paging=off.
22. Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis: A Critical Essay (Front Royal, VA: Christendom College Press), 5.
23. “This Week,” Christian Century, December 30, 1970, 1566. The reviewer did allow room for a Lewis revival, saying, “Since ‘transcendence’ is making a strong comeback, perhaps Lewis too will have a new inning.”
24. Holmer, C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Two significant volumes of this era, both from mainline Protestant publishers, are Richard B. Cunningham, C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), and William Luther White, The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969). Although these both provide some summary and commentary regarding Mere Christianity, neither provides significant insight in the way that Holmer’s volume does.
25. Holmer, C. S. Lewis, ix, 1, and 3.
26. Ibid., 5; cf. 6–7.
27. Ibid., 8, 86, 108, and 115.
28. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, 159; cf. 147–72.
29. Keith Hunt and Gladys Hunt, For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the USA, 1940 to 1990 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 111.
30. “C. S. Lewis and InterVarsity,” InterVarsity.org, December 7, 2005, http://www.intervarsity.org/news/c-s-lewis-and-intervarsity.
Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, cited Lewis’s “trilemma” argument (discussed in my chapter 7) in a widely used pamphlet, “Jesus and the Intellectual,” first published in 1959, available at http://www.cru.org/how-to-know-god/jesus-and-the-intellectual/02-man-myth-god.htm. But although that argument was very widely employed by Campus Crusade, that agency does not seem in its early years to have promoted Lewis’s own works as much as InterVarsity did. I am grateful to John G. Turner, biographer of Bright, for confirming this impression by e-mail on August 21, 2014.
31. Walsh, foreword to William Luther White, The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 7.
32. Lewis, C. S. Lewis: Five Best Books in One Volume (Washington, DC: Canon, 1969). One intriguing feature of this volume, which went through a number of printings from various publishers in the next few years, was that the five books were The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Miracles, The Case for Christianity, and Christian Behaviour. For some reason Beyond Personality, book 4 of Mere Christianity, was omitted, indicating that at that late date Mere Christianity had not yet fully established its iconic identity as a single volume. Whether the breaking up of Mere Christianity represented doctrinal concerns, issues of publishing permissions, or something else is not clear.
33. Lindsell, foreword to Five Best Books, vi–vii. On Lindsell, Lewis, and inerrancy, cf. James L. Wall, “C. S. Lewis and Evangelical Ambivalence,” Wittenberg Door, August–September 1981, 20–25.
34. Donald T. Williams, review of Real Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Works of C. S. Lewis, by Leanne Payne (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone, 1979), and Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1979), Christianity Today, May 2, 1980, 38. Williams disparaged “Lewis’s own naïvete concerning what is at stake in the doctrine of inerrancy.”
CHAPTER SIX
Many-Sided Mere Christianity
1. Daisy Maryles, compiler, “Trade Paperback High Rollers,” Publishers Weekly, August 13, 1982, 46–47. The average of 80,000 per year over twenty years suggests some increase since the early 1970s. In 1974 it was reported (“Chuck Colson’s Leveler,” Newsweek, November 9, 1974, 73) that Americans had bought 100,000 copies in the past eighteen months, so the rate was about 66,700 per year (but presumably that included all editions). A good guess is that the sales were considerably under the 80,000 average for this edition in the 1960s and correspondingly higher than the average in the early 1980s. Apparently the sales steadily increased to the numbers they would eventually reach (something like 250,000 per year for all the HarperOne English versions in first decade of the twenty-first century). Cf. Publishers Weekly, October 10, 1994, 31, where Mere Christianity is listed fourth among “Religion Bestsellers” and Screwtape is eighth.
2. “The Man Who Converted to Softball,” Time, June 17, 1974, 16.
3. Charles W. Colson, Born Again (Old Tappan, NJ: Chosen Books, 1976), 108–30, quotations from 113. The passages from Mere Christianity that Colson quotes are from 3:8.
4. Colson, Born Again, quotations from 125, 127, 129, and 130.
5. Newsweek, October 25, 1976.
6. Jonathan Aitken, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 290–91.
7. “C. S. Lewis Testimonials,” file, Wade Center. Cf. the summary of these testimonies in Philip Ryken, “Winsome Evangelist: The Influence of C. S. Lewis,” in Lightbearer, 68–72.
8. Olford, quoted in Ryken, “Winsome Evangelist,” 56, from a video interview of Olford, November 7, 1983, Wade Center. After just a few years of talking to people about Lewis, I find Olford’s estimate, based on far more contacts, entirely plausible.
9. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 21.
10. N. T. Wright, “Why Left, Right & Lewis Get It Wrong,” ReadtheSpirit.com, http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/nt-wright-interview-why-left-right-lewis-get-it-wrong/#sthash.P6doYagh.dpuf. See also some of Wright’s criticisms in my chapter 7.
11. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006). See also N. T. Wright, “Simply Lewis: Reflections on a Master Apologist after 60 Years,” Touchstone, March 2007, http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20–02–028-f.
12. Anthony Sacramone, “An Interview with Timothy Keller,” First Things, February 25, 2008, http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/02/an-interview-with-timothy-kell; Jonathan Parnell, “When (Seemingly) Opposites Meet, Tim Keller and John Piper on C. S Lewis,” DesiringGod.org, http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/when-seemingly-opposites-meet-keller-and-piper-on-lewis; and John Piper, “Keller and Piper Talk Lewis,” DesiringGod.org, http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/keller-and-piper-talk-c-s-lewis. Piper, himself a highly influential pastor and a prolific writer living in Minneapolis, has written an e-book tribute to Lewis, Alive to Wonder: Celebrating the Influence of C. S. Lewis, DesiringGod.org, http://www.desiringgod.org/books/alive-to-wonder. Piper came to know and love Lewis’s work when at Wheaton College in the 1960s and as a student of Clyde S. Kilby. He writes that he puts Lewis among “the top three writers who have influenced how I read and respond to the world” (1). Like Keller, Piper combines an admiration of Lewis with a great love for the theology of Jonathan Edwards.
13. McGrath, A Life and Intellectual World.
14. McGrath, Mere Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2012), 12.
15. “Christian Leaders and Books That Have Had Most Influence on Their Lives,” Grace Awakening Web site, http://graceawakening.faithsite.com/content.asp?SID=263&CID=68273. The eight are Brian McLaren, Howard Hendricks, Os Guinness, Chuck Swindoll, C. John Miller, Peter Rossoni, and Chuck Colson. See also Mary Anne Phemister and Andrew Lazo, Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2009), which provides over fifty such stories from prominent Christians, including George Gallup Jr., David Lyle Jeffrey, Michael Ware, and Philip Yancey.
16. D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90.
17. “The Best Christian Book of All Time: One Year Later,” Emerging Scholars blog, http://blog.emergingscholars.org/2014/02/the-best-christian-book-of-all-time-one-year-later/#prettyPhoto[13583]/0/.
18. Joseph Pearce, “C. S. Lewis and Catholic Converts,” Catholic World Report, November 19, 2013, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2724/cs_lewis_and_catholic_converts.aspx. Cf. Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), for helpful reflections on Lewis’s relation to Catholicism.
19. Ibid.
20. Walker Percy, foreword to The New Catholics: Contemporary Converts Tell Their Stories, edited by Dan O’Neill (New York: Crossroad, 1987), xv. Also cited by Pearce in “C. S. Lewis and Catholic Converts.”
21. Mark Oppenheimer, “Ross Douthat’s Fantasy World,” Mother Jones, January–February 2010, quoted in Pearce, “C. S. Lewis and Catholic Converts.”
22. Mariah Blake, “How an Eccentric Right-Wing Billionaire’s Attempt to Build a Catholic Law School Ended in Disaster,” Washington Monthly, August 20, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/story/142499/how_an_eccentric_right-wing_pizza_billionaire%27s_attempt_to_build_catholic_law_school_ended_in_disaster?page=0%2C0. Cf. Thomas c. Monagham, “C. S. Lewis’s Impact on My Faith,” in Phemister and Lazo, Mere Christians, 175–76 (“dream house” quotation).
23. Pearce, “C. S. Lewis and Catholic Converts.”
24. Most explicitly in Thomas Howard, The Achievement of C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL: Howard Shaw, 1980).
25. Dwight Longenecker, More Christianity: Finding the Fullness of the Faith, foreword by Thomas Howard (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), 17–39.
26. Francis Beckwith, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009).
27. John Mallon, “A Conversation with Walter Hooper,” from Crisis magazine, July–August 1994, http://johnmallon.net/Site/Walter_Hooper.html.
28. Christopher Derrick, C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome: A Study in Proto-ecumenism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1981), 181, 200, and 201. David Mills, in “No Mere Christianity,” First Things, October 18, 2010, http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/10/no-mere-christianity, also says “mere Christianity” is a Protestant concept.
29. Ian Kerr, “‘Mere Christianity’ and Catholicism,” in C. S. Lewis and the Church: Essays in Honour of Walter Hooper, edited by Judith Wolfe and B. N. Wolfe (London: T. and T. Clark, 2011), 131.
30. Longenecker, More Christianity. Cf. his foreword to Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, ix and x. W. Patrick Cunningham, in “The Delusion of Mere Christianity,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review, May 1999, http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Homiletic/May1999/delusion.htlm, argues from a Catholic perspective that Lewis’s imprecision has mostly, although not wholly, negative effects.
31. Andrew Walker, “Under the Russian Cross: A Research Note on C. S. Lewis and the Eastern Orthodox Church,” in A Christian for All Christians: Essays in Honour of C. S. Lewis, edited by Andrew Walker and James Patrick (London: Regnery, 1990), 63. Ware, “C. S. Lewis, and “Anonymous Orthodox?,” in Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Church, 135.
32. Kallistos Ware, “God of the Fathers: C. S. Lewis and Eastern Christianity,” Pilgrim’s Guide, 53–69, quotation from 69.
33. Mark A. Noll, “C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ (the Book and the Ideal) at the Start of the Twenty-first Century,” SEVEN, An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002), 31–44.
34. For a Protestant example, see J. Todd Billings, “The Problem with Mere Christianity,” Christianity Today, February 2007, 46–47. The article is subtitled “We Jettison ‘Non-essential’ Theology at Our Own Peril.”
35. Noll, “C.S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Chrisitianity.’” Michael H. Macdonald and Mark P. Shea, in “Saving Sinners and Reconciling Churches: An Ecumenical Meditation on Mere Christianity, in Pilgrim’s Guide, 43–52, make much the same point. They also note (48) the explicit use of idea of “mere Christianity” by Charles Colson as a basis for the cooperative initiative Evangelicals and Catholics Together, begun in 1994.
36. Douglas LeBlanc, “Mere Mormonism,” interview with Richard Ostling, Christianity Today, February 7, 2000, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/february7/8.72.html.
37. Daniel K. Judd, “C. S. Lewis: Self-Love and Salvation,” In C. S. Lewis: The Man and His Message, edited by Andrew C. Skinner and Robert L. Millet (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1999), 61–72. Judd, a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, says that the passage in Mere Christianity (4:7) in which Lewis describes sins with the image of “rats in the cellar” had “more influence on me and on my personal conversion to Christianity than anything else C. S. Lewis ever expressed” (69).
38. Millet, “The Theology of C. S. Lewis: A Latter-day Saint Perspective,” typescript of a paper presented at the Seventh Annual Wheaton Theology Conference, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, April 16, 1998. I am indebted to the author for this typescript and for correspondence regarding Mere Christianity in LDS circles. Cf. his “Introduction: C. S. Lewis: The Man and His Message,” in C. S. Lewis: The Man and His Message, 1–19. Millet writes that he has received little or no criticism from Mormons regarding his views on Lewis but strong critiques from evangelicals. E-mail to the author, January 13, 2014.
39. Mike W. Perry, “Appendix A: C. S. Lewis Resources,” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West Jr. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 435–44.
40. Almost all the publications that provide a public record of responses to Mere Christianity come from the United States or Great Britain. The book is also popular in evangelical communities in other parts of the former British Empire, such as Australia and Canada.
41. The Reverend Philip George, “C. S. Lewis ‘Mere Christianity’ Behind the Iron Curtain,” e-mail account to the author, August 1, 2014. Marsh Moyle, a Christian evangelist in Eastern Europe for many years, reports that a version was smuggled in significant quantities into Czechoslovakia under Communism.
42. From a compilation of comments including those from Miro Jurik, Milan Cicel, and Pavel Raus gathered by Sarah Liechty in an e-mail to the author, December 5, 2014. I am grateful to the many who have contributed to gathering evidence regarding the use of Mere Christianity outside the English-speaking world.
I am especially grateful to the following: to Daniel Denk of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for his numerous inquiries among the world networks of the International Fellowship of Christian Students, especially in Eastern Europe; to Professor John A. McIntosh of Sydney, Australia, for his inquiries among some forty missionaries from countries including Burma, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania; to Steven Van Zanen of Christian Reformed World Missions for inquires among their missionaries; to Colin Duriez for identifying translators and publishers in Western Europe; to Colin MacPherson for information regarding publications in Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Serbian, and Tartar; to Dane Vidovic regarding Serbian publication; to James Sire for some helpful observations; to Martin Haizmann regarding German use of Mere Christianity; to Marsh Moyle regarding Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian publication and use; to David Bahena regarding Latin American use; and to Jonathan Lamb (United Kingdom), David Gifford (Mexico), John Vander Stoep (Haiti), Harold Kallemeyn (France), Jeff Bos (Bangledesh), Gerald de Vuyst (Ukraine), Troy Bierma (Nepal), Denis McIntyre (Japan), and a number of other anonymous respondents. I am especially grateful to the Wade Center, particularly to Marjorie Mead and Shawn Mrakovich for posting a request on their Web site asking for information regarding use of Mere Christianity abroad. I am also grateful to Mary L. G. Theroux, David Beckmann, Robert Trexler, and Robert MacSwain for posting the inquiry on the Web sites of various C. S. Lewis societies.
Based on publishing information and the results of these unscientific inquiries, I have formed the following additional impressions: Mere Christianity has not been much used in non-English-speaking Africa. It has not been translated into any African language except Afrikaans. It has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish, as have many of Lewis’s books, but there are no reports of more than moderate usage of Mere Christianity in Spain, Portugal, or Latin America (thanks to Juliana K. Fidler for Spanish publication figures). The situation is comparable in Western Europe, where the book has been available in most languages. In South Korea, where there is a large, well-educated Christian population, Lewis is well known, but Mere Christianity appears to be only moderately used. (Thanks to Byunghoon Woo for furnishing me information to that effect from the largest Korean Christian Internet bookstore in an e-mail sent November 7, 2013.) In Japan, where Christianity is less common, Mere Christianity appears to have only scattered use. Other languages in which it has been published include Albanian, Estonian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Slovene, Thai, and Turkish. I am grateful to Mickey Maudlin of HarperOne and to Laura Schmidt of the Wade Center for lists of non-English publications.
43. “Most likely to have read” is from Phillip Holtrop, a theologian from Calvin College, who also furnishes the final quotation as “typical” (e-mail to the author, May 1, 2013). The publication information and other quotations from online sources are furnished by a translator, Yongmei Wang (e-mail to the author, September 10, 2014). The information about Professor He is from an e-mail from a Chinese editor, Chun’an Li, forwarded by Jin Li to the author September 29, 2014. The same e-mail includes a forwarded e-mail from another editor, Zhiyue Xu, adding some additional details. I am grateful to all those who helped in providing this information.
44. Hitchens, God Is Not Great (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 118, quoted by Stephanie Derrick in “The Reception of C. S. Lewis in Britain and America,” 296.
45. This is according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia_(film_series).
46. “A Service to Dedicate a Memorial to C. S. Lewis, Writer, Scholar, Apologist,” service program, Westminister Abbey (London: Barnard and Westwood, 2013). I am grateful to Michael Ward, a participant in the service, for sending me a copy of the program.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Critiques
1. Margaret P. Hannay, C. S. Lewis (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 265–66.
2. John Beversluis, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, revised and updated (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007 [1985]), 10. Peter Kreeft, for instance, refers to Beversluis’s work as the “abomination of desolation,” in C. S. Lewis: A Critical Essay (Front Royal, VA: Christendom College Press, 1988), 5. Thomas V. Morris’s review of Beversluis’s book in Faith and Philosophy, July 1988, 319–22, offers an example of a more dispassionate but largely negative critique.
3. Christopher Derrick reports receiving hostile responses from some Lewis fans when he commented favorably on Beversluis’s book in a review. Derrick, “Some Personal Angles on Chesterton and Lewis,” in G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, edited by Michael H. McDonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1989),10.
4. Beversluis, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 23, quoting from MC 3:11.
5. Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), 2 (2nd ed., 24).
6. Cf. Beversluis, Search, 2nd ed., 73–74, and his stronger version of this objection in the 1st ed., 37, where he says of Lewis, “First, he consistently presents alternatives to his own views as being perfectly absurd, and second, he consistently presents the absurd view as the only alternative to his own.”
7. Beversluis, Search, 1st ed., 41.
8. Beversluis also deals at length with other of Lewis’s arguments, including his “argument from desire,” which appears briefly in Mere Christianity in 3:10 but is prominent in other of his works; the argument from reason (that in naturalistic outlooks we have no basis to trust our reason), developed mostly in Miracles; and Lewis’s arguments regarding the problem of evil, as found largely in The Problem of Pain. Beversluis raised the ire of many Lewis partisans not only by his philosophical arguments but also by claiming that Lewis may have lost his faith, or at least his confidence in his faith, after the death of Joy Davidman Lewis.
9. Beversluis, Search, 2nd ed., 105–6.
10. Ibid., 111–41. An equally negative but far less sustained critique is found in A. N. Wilson’s controversial C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1991 [1990]). Wilson says that it was “when a carapace of intellectual laziness was hardening upon him” that he entered into apologetics (62). The only specific argument Wilson examines critically is the “trilemma” (163–66), but he characterizes Lewis’s apologetic works as “breezy” (187), and particularly the broadcast talks as addressing major issues “with a breeziness and a self-confidence which on an academic podium would have been totally unacceptable” (180).
11. Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003). See also David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls, eds., C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), in which Reppert and others update their arguments partly in the light of Beversluis’s second edition.
12. Reppert, Dangerous Idea, 36–44; quotation from Lewis on 38–39 from “Obstinacy of Belief,” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 3rd ed., edited by Louis Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 390.
13. For another critical assessment of Lewis’s arguments, see Erik J. Wielenberg, in God and the Reach of Reason: C. S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), who quotes as his epigraph Lewis’s remark about “fully rational minds” disagreeing and provides carefully reasoned nonpolemical critiques arguing that Lewis’s principal arguments, although not without merit, are not successful in the sense of providing logically decisive reasons why Christianity must be true.
14. From Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare” (1939), in Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 265, quoted in Michael Ward, “The Good Serves the Better and Both the Best: C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Reason in Apologetics,” in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, edited by Andrew Davidson (London: SCM, 2011), 61–62; cf. 59–78.
15. CSL to Arthur Greeves, October 18, 1931, Letters, 1:976–77, quoted in Ward, “Good Serves the Better,” 64–65.
16. Cf. J. T. Sellars, Reasoning beyond Reason: Imagination as a Theological Source in the Work of C. S. Lewis (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), e.g., 18–22, regarding Mere Christianity.
17. The most important sympathetic interpreter to dissent from this view is the literary scholar Ralph Wood, who sharply separates Lewis’s imaginative works from his apologetics and says that in his apologetic works, including Mere Christianity, “Lewis sometimes regards Christian faith as a set of intellectual propositions” and that his “rationalist proofs” are “among his weakest writings.” Wood, “The Baptized Imagination: C. S. Lewis’s Fictional Apologetics,” Christian Century, August 30–September 6, 1995, 812. In Wood’s view, Lewis believed that “because these truths [of Christianity] can be rationally demonstrated, they should command assent of all fair-minded people.” “C. S. Lewis and the Ordering of Our Loves,” Christianity and Literature, Autumn 2001, 109–17. Stanley Joeckel, in The C. S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2013), presents a complex version of such a view in which Lewis emerges as simply inconsistent in his views of reason. Joeckel’s central thesis is that as a “public intellectual” Lewis adopted “the rules of the liberal-Enlightenment paradigm,” which Joeckel sees as involving a basic “evidentialism” assuming universal reason (138). But he also recognizes that Lewis is “indebted to Augustine, who … helps give shape to concepts of preconditionalism” (that is, that reasoning is conditioned by prior commitments). Joeckel attempts to explain this tension in terms of a change in Lewis, especially in the 1950s, or as “Hesitant Steps beyond the Public Sphere,” as he titles one chapter of his book. Yet he notes that the preconditionalism is already present in Mere Christianity (184–85).
18. Ward, “Good Serves the Better,” 71. Cf. McGrath, Intellectual World, 135, who says: “Lewis’s argument here, as elsewhere, is fundamentally inductive, aiming to show how the Christian faith can ‘fit in’ our experiences of life.”
19. Greene and Hooper, Biography, 200.
20. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (New York: Dodd Mead, 1925), esp. 239–41.
21. Phillips, Time of War, 148.
22. For example, Beverslius, Search, 2nd ed., 117–18.
23. For this and other objections, see Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in God in the Dock, 152–66.
24. For example, see Beversluis, Search, 2nd ed., 132–33.
25. MC 2:3. And see “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?,” in God in the Dock, 156–60.
26. Wright, “Simply Lewis,” Touchstone, March 2007, http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20–02–028-f.
27. McGrath, A Life, 226–27. Anthony Kenney, in “Mere C. S. Lewis” (a review of McGrath’s A Life and Intellectual World, Times Literary Supplement, June 19, 2013, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1275683.ece), says that “Lewis’s principal apologetic arguments have not worn well” and is dismissive of the trilemma and of Lewis’s argument from desire but sympathetic to Lewis’s general stance that “naturalism is collapsing under its own weight.”
28. Horner, “Aut Deus aut Malus Homo: A Defense of C. S. Lewis’s ‘Shocking Alternative,’” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, edited by David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 68–84, citing (on p. 84) Lewis, “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?,” in God in the Dock, 159–60.
29. Daniel T. Williams, “Lacking, Ludicrous, or Logical?: The Validity of Lewis’s Trilemma,” Midwestern Journal of Theology, Spring 2012, 91–102; reprinted as chapter 4 of Williams, Reflections from Plato’s Cave: Essays in Evangelical Philosophy (Lynchburg, VA: Lantern Hollow, 2012). A shortened and popularized version of this piece was published as “Identity Check: Are C. S. Lewis’s Critics Right, or Is His ‘Trilemma’ Valid?,” Touchstone, May–June 2010, 25–29.
30. Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics (San Francisco, Ignatius, 1988), 59. Probably the most influential instance of popularizing and expanding the argument and associating it with Lewis is found in Josh McDowell’s immensely popular Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino, CA: Here’s Life, 1979 [1972]), 104–5.
31. Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (New York: Riverhead, 2005), 204–5. I am grateful to Larry Eskridge for this reference. He has also provided other “Mere Christianity sightings” in popular culture, such as an account of punk rocker Larry Chimes’s conversion in response to Lewis’s chapter on pride: Madeleine Teahan, “Punk Rocker Describes His Return to Catholicism,” Catholic Herald, January 28, 2014, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/01/28/punk-rocker-describes-his-return-to-catholicism/. Orson Bean, in Mail for Mickey (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade, 2008), tells of striking interest in Mere Christianity in the world of television (8) and uses the trilemma argument (131).
32. MC 3:6.
33. MC 3:8.
34. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, edited by Barbara Reynolds (Cambridge, England: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society & Carole Green, 1998), 3:375 and 4:144, as quoted in Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, A Sword Between the Sexes? C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 109–10.
35. Jacobs, Narnian, 252.
36. McGrath, A Life, 228–29.
37. Jacobs, Narnian, 255. See “Priestesses in the Church?” (1948), in God in the Dock, 234–39.
38. For instance, Ann Loades, in “On Gender,” in Cambridge Companion, 160–73, does not mention Mere Christianity.
39. For an overview of debates on Lewis and gender, see the colloquium on that topic in Christian Scholar’s Review, Summer 2007, 387–484, especially the introduction by Don W. King, which contains a bibliography (388–90). As in Van Leeuwen, these discussions typically have to do with the larger scope of Lewis’s views of gender and women rather than debating his remarks in Mere Christianity, which are taken as dated and deplorable. A more recent collection is Women and C. S. Lewis, edited by Carolyn Curtis and Mary Pomroy Key (Oxford: Lion Hudson Press, 2015).
40. Van Leeuwen, A Sword between the Sexes?, 9–10. Margaret P. Hannay presented an early version of this observation in “Surprised by Joy: C. S. Lewis’ Changing Attitude toward Women,” Mythlore, September 1976, 15–20.
41. Van Leeuwen, A Sword between the Sexes?, 109–38. For examples of scholars’ views of Lewis’s misogynist remarks, see Van Leeuwen, A Sword between the Sexes?, 32. Kathryn Lindskoog, in her entry “Women” in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West Jr. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 429, writes, “C. S. Lewis has often been accused of misogyny, but in truth his attitude toward women was generally enlightened.” Cf. Will Vaus, Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 142–43, for a similar argument.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lasting Vitality of Mere Christianity
1. Dorsett, preface to Lightbearer, 9–10. John Stackhouse, in “Why Mere Christianity Should Have Bombed,” Christianity Today, December 2012, 38–41, provides a valuable overview that takes into account some of the book’s shortcomings while providing insights on its lasting strengths.
2. For instance, the popular Christian writer Lauren Winner remarks, “I read Lewis’s Mere Christianity in high school. It was either given to me or I stumbled upon it; at any rate, I didn’t really like it. One of the reasons I wrote Girl Meets God—and I think this is also one of the reasons spiritual memoir has been popular throughout the last decade—is that there are a lot of people who aren’t asking the Enlightenment questions that more standard apologetics texts like Mere Christianity strive to answer. Having C. S. Lewis, however brilliantly, explain the logic and rationality of Christianity didn’t speak to me where I lived.” Bill McGarvey, interview with Lauren Winner (ca. 2002), Mars Hill Review, http://www.marshillreview.com/menus/interviews.shtm. Sarah Arthur, citing Winner, observes that the “roadblock” for postmoderns may not be that Lewis is too modern but rather that he is “pre-modern.” Arthur, “Roadblocks to Reading C. S. Lewis,” presentation at C. S. Lewis Festival, Petosky, MI, October 2012. Arthur is, however, a sympathetic critic who suggests that people can get beyond such roadblocks, including Lewis’s views on gender.
3. See Lewis, “The Funeral of a Great Myth, in Christian Reflections, 82–93.
4. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1980 [1949]), 58–59.
5. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 1.
6. The exception, of course, is gender, which he did not see as controversial in the 1940s but has proved to be. See my discussion in chapter 7.
7. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 7. Cf. Mere Christianity 3:3, where Lewis says most of us have “the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.”
8. Eric Fenn said of the original draft of Beyond Personality that it gave “the impression of a purely individualistic approach.” Fenn, however, was concerned to see more about the church or the Christian community rather than about politics. Fenn to Lewis, December 29, 1943, quoted in Phillips, Time of War, 238.
9. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” 49 and 53.
10. MC 3:3.
11. MC 3:3.
12. Muggeridge, foreword to Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans 1988 [1983]), xi. See also Aeschliman’s chapter “Common Sense and the Common Man,” 2–15.
13. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 112.
14. Times Literary Supplement, September 17, 1954, 592, quoted in Hooper, Guide, 507.
15. Lewis, Experiment, 140. Hooper, in Guide, 522, points out the comparison with Mere Christianity.
16. MC 4:11.
17. Owen Barfield, introduction to Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), xvi.
18. Barfield, “C. S. Lewis,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 14. Barfield says this as though it applied to the whole of Lewis’s income, not just to his royalties and fees. He also says that Lewis especially liked to help needy individuals that he heard about and sometimes corresponded extensively with them.
19. Lewis, “God in the Dock,” in God in the Dock, 243.
20. CSL to John Beddow, October 7, 1945, Letters, 2:674.
21. Lewis, letter to the editor, Christian Century, December 31, 1958, 1515, in Letters, 3:1006–7.
22. MC 1:1.
23. MC 1:5.
24. This paragraph depends to a great extent on Joel D. Heck, who in “Praeparato Evangelica,” in Lightbearer, 235–58, uses the same quotation (on p. 240), from Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 75–76.
25. From Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes” (1939), 265, quoted in Ward, “Good Serves the Better,” 61–62; cf. 59–78. Cf. also my discussion in chapter 7. Ward exemplifies well the prevailing interpretations of Lewis on reason, emotion, and imagination.
26. See also my discussion of this point in chapter 7, drawing on Reppert’s, Dangerous Idea. Lewis’s “On Obstinacy of Belief,” in The World’s Last Night, and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), is especially helpful on this point.
27. Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis, 37, quotation from 31.
28. Holmer, C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought, 8 and 86.
29. Packer, “Still Surprised by Lewis,” Christianity Today, September 7, 1998, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1998/september7/8ta054.html.
30. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 138.
31. MC 3:10.
32. McGrath, Intellectual World, 136; cf. 129–146. Cf. McGrath regarding Lewis’s argument from desire, 105–28. Scott R. Burson and Jerry L. Walls, in C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the Most Influential Apologists of Our Time (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), also provide helpful insights on Lewis’s apologetic method.
33. Quoted in McGrath, Intellectual World, 83, from Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 21.
34. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan), 109.
35. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (London: Bodley Head, 1955), chapter 10.
36. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 31.
37. See Michael Ward, “Escape to Wallaby Wood: Lewis’s Depictions of Conversion,” in Lightbearer, 143–67, esp. 146.
38. James Como, Branches of Heaven: The Genius of C. S. Lewis (Dallas: Spence, 1998), 150, based on the Winger interview with Como (n.d.); cf. 140–66. On Lewis’s rhetoric, see Gary L. Tandy, The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis’s Nonfiction Prose (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009); cf. Tandy, who is appreciative but also provides some criticisms of Lewis’s arguments and rhetorical techniques.
39. Ward, “Escape to Wallaby Wood,” 151; cf. 143–57.
40. Maudlin, “The Perennial Appeal of C. S. Lewis,” presentation at the C. S. Lewis Festival, Petosky, MI, October 2012. I am indebted to Maudlin for furnishing me with a typescript of this talk. The talk also suggested the format of the present chapter.
41. Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 205.
42. Ward, “How Lewis Lit the Way,” Christianity Today, November 2013, 38. The Lewis quotations are from “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” 265.
43. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” 265, quoted in Lyle H. Smith Jr., “C. S. Lewis and the Making of Metaphor,” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, edited by Peter J. Shakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 9 and 21. Smith points out that this view reflects a sort of Christian Platonism in Lewis, who sees reality as made up of images and shadows that point to higher realities. One can find similar idealism in many places in the Christian tradition, as in Augustine or Jonathan Edwards.
44. Lewis, “The Language of Religion,” in Christian Reflections, 139–40.
45. Ibid., 140.
46. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1974 [1944]), 2. Cf. Michael Ward, “Good Serves the Better,” esp. 62. This is one of the most helpful summations of Lewis’s use of reason and imagination.
47. Barfield, “The Five C. S. Lewises,” in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis,” edited by G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 122.
48. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” 265.
49. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” 117.
50. Quoted from a manuscript that Hooper titles “Early Prose Joy,” in Hooper, Guide, 181–82.
51. Preface to the French edition of The Problem of Pain (1950), from a translation in Hooper, Guide, 297. Lewis also remarks, “Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity,” 296.
52. Ferry, “Mere Christianity: Because There Are No Mere Mortals; Reaching Beyond the Inner Ring,” in Lightbearer, 169–90.
53. Maudlin, “The Perennial Appeal of C. S. Lewis.”
54. MC 12:3.
55. MC 4:8, 4:9, and 4:11.
56. Meconi, “Mere Christianity: Theosis in a British Way,” Journal of Inklings Studies, April 2014, 3–18. Mere Christianity quotations from 4:7. Paul Fiddes, in “On Theology,” in Cambridge Companion, 89–104, explores the centrality in Lewis’s theology of being drawn into the life of the Trinity and looks at both the strengths and some of the theological ambiguities of the metaphors Lewis uses to describe how that happens. Particularly, he points out, as some earlier commentators have, that the idea that the transformation involves being not just “made” but “begotten” by God, though not without precedent, is hardly “mere” or “common” Christianity (93).
57. Lewis, “The Personal Heresy in Criticism,” in Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 11.
58. Dallas Willard, Living in Christ’s Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 26. Cf. Paul Holmer, who observed in C. S. Lewis, “It is the authority of someone who has found something out about this or that and who tells us not how he feels but the way things are” (108).