Hauerwas on C.S. Lewis and War

From Religion and Ethics:

Many people are Christians because of the work of C.S. Lewis. With wit and wisdom, Lewis imaginatively exploded the hollow pretensions of the secular. Moreover, he helped many see, for the first time, the world in the light of fact that “it had really happened once.”

It is, therefore, not easy to criticize Lewis when he has such a devoted following. Yet I must write critically of Lewis because here I want to examine his views concerning violence and war. I am a pacifist. Lewis was anything but a pacifist. I want to show that his arguments against pacifism are inadequate, but I also that he provides imaginative resources for Christians to imagine a very different form of Christian nonviolence, a form unknown to Lewis, with which I hope he might have had some sympathy.

Before turning to Lewis’s arguments against pacifism, I think it important to set the context for his more formal reflections on war by calling attention to Lewis’s experience of war.