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\nToday marks the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis\u2019s death, and the Christian inter-webs have been buzzing with lovingly written tributes to the man\u2019s legacy. It would be difficult for me to add much that\u2019s new to this chorus of praise, but I felt I must throw my own few pennies in the hat.
\nLike so many other Christians, my thinking has been profoundly shaped by Lewis from the first time I picked up The Chronicles of Narnia\u00a0<\/em>as a young child to the present day. \u00a0It\u2019s a testament to his impact that hardly anyone seems able to write anything about faith, life, death or the afterlife without reaching for some quote of his\u2014myself included.
\nHow could a loving God send people to Hell? What will heaven be like? \u00a0How could a person lose a loved one forever and still be happy in heaven?\u00a0How can salvation be a process? How can God be timeless? How might God deal in other worlds besides our own?\u00a0No other Christian thinker that I am aware of has presented such brilliantly lucid, richly imaginative answers to these questions as Lewis offered.\u00a0<\/span>
\nSome have tried to elevate Lewis\u2019s fictional work to the level of high literature, writing numerous books of \u201cLewis scholarship\u201d and \u201cLewis criticism.\u201d This doubtless would amuse him greatly, for Lewis himself never aspired to write \u201cliterature.\u201d What he\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>write was the best of its kind for what it was\u2014speculative theology in story form. He\u2019s often been misunderstood as intending to present definitive answers to questions of salvation, afterlife and so forth. But to insist on interpreting Lewis\u2019s stories as rigid theological texts is to miss their purpose altogether. Their purpose was to help the Christian layman get his head round things that, frankly, we will never understand fully until we shed this mortal coil. Lewis was never so arrogant as to presume that he alone possessed the vision of the anointed, unlike certain contemporary self-styled \u201cthinkers\u201d who have tried to appropriate his work for their own ends (*cough* Rob Bell *cough* *cough* *hack* *pun intended*). Rather, he wrote his stories with a humble pen, as an adult convert who was to some extent working out his own theology as he wrote. <\/span>
\nNevertheless, the ideas he offers are incredibly compelling, offering an alternative path both to today\u2019s hard-core Reformed thinkers and the smug cant of emergentist universalism. Certainly anyone with a modicum of good sense and reading comprehension skills can see that Lewis is fifty times the theological thinker Bell will ever be, and is ultimately diametrically opposed to the bland, un-threatening \u201cgospel\u201d Bell presents. Nobody can read\u00a0The Great Divorce<\/em> without getting a starkly clear picture of the power of the human will to reject God until the end. At the same time, this thought experiment also knocks down the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace. Yet even today\u2019s most popular Calvinist theologians, like John Piper and Tim Keller, are unapologetic in their admission of what they owe to Lewis. (Trivia tidbit: Lewis actually wrote four letters to Kathy Keller, Tim\u2019s wife, when she was a young girl, and you can read them all in the excellent compilation Letters to Children<\/em>.)\u00a0There are many other examples in Lewis\u2019s work where he repeatedly finds the golden mean between two theological extremes, with such scholarly vigor and insight that although you may not always agree with him, he is always worthwhile. One also can\u2019t deny the remarkable timeliness of his observations on faith and culture in reading such works as\u00a0Mere Christianity\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0The Screwtape Letters.<\/em><\/span>
\nIt would be hard to name a favorite work of\u00a0his. One is tempted to split it all up into categories\u2014letters, essays, short fiction, novels, etc. \u00a0B<\/span>ut at the end of the day, if forced to pick one overall favorite, I would most likely still have to settle on all seven of\u00a0<\/span>The Chronicles of Narnia.\u00a0<\/em>Each book in the series is like a small, finely polished gem that captures the essence of what made Lewis so great\u2014his fluid grace with words, his warmth, his wit, his simplicity, his keenness of mind and breadth of imagination, all wrapped up in stories about and for children.\u00a0<\/span>
\nI cannot say it better than John Piper, so I will close with this beautiful tribute of his, written a few years ago but perfectly applicable today:<\/span><\/p>\n
He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively\u2014even playful\u2014imagination. He was a \u201cromantic rationalist.\u201d He combined things that almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.<\/em>
\nLewis gave me an intense sense of the \u201crealness\u201d of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun\u2019s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things\u2026 He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world\u2014things that, if we didn\u2019t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today marks the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis\u2019s death, and the Christian inter-webs have been buzzing with lovingly written tributes to the man\u2019s legacy. It would be difficult for me to add much that\u2019s new to this chorus of praise, but I felt I must throw my own few pennies in the hat. Like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3595,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n
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