Why Honor C.S. Lewis When He Had So Many Flaws?
00:00:00.000 | We are coming off of our national conference dedicated to the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis,
00:00:09.200 | who of course died 50 years ago this fall. When you think of celebrating a guy like Lewis,
00:00:14.160 | you must also be conscious of Lewis's failures and his weaknesses, which were also addressed
00:00:18.720 | at the conference. I mean, there was celebration and critique. Pastor John, how do you process
00:00:23.200 | this, especially the critique? How did you think through the critique of Lewis throughout the
00:00:27.120 | conference? One of the big recurrent questions at the conference, sometimes behind the scenes,
00:00:33.200 | sometimes on the panel, was why can we benefit, why do I benefit from Lewis so much when he is
00:00:41.040 | so defective in some important doctrines? And he never saw himself as an advocate for any tribe,
00:00:50.080 | like my little Reformed tribe. He wouldn't have thought of himself that way. And so we had to
00:00:58.640 | try to answer the question, what is it about Lewis that is, say, different from people who share some
00:01:06.960 | of his defective views whom we wouldn't have at a conference, say, and yet here we're devoting a
00:01:13.920 | whole conference to Lewis. It seemed like a contradiction to some folks. And here are some
00:01:18.720 | of the thoughts that I've had that came out of some of those conversations about what is it about
00:01:23.280 | Lewis. And to be honest, number one, it's probably that he's dead. I don't want to pass over that and
00:01:28.960 | ignore it. I'm sure that has an effect. I'm not sure what we would do with Lewis as the living
00:01:33.760 | dinosaur, which he called himself. But I think the fact that he's dead is the least significant
00:01:40.320 | in answering this question, though I don't want to minimize it. His deposit is made. He's not
00:01:46.080 | changing anything. He's there in his books. You can kind of deal with him at a distance. You don't
00:01:50.400 | have to deal with a real person. So he's dead, and yet I don't think that's the main thing.
00:01:54.640 | Here are the other thoughts. He was a convert from atheism to orthodoxy and was moving all his life
00:02:05.920 | into an increasingly robust Christianity. He was never moving away from it. Most of the people
00:02:14.640 | today who share some of his errors, say views of Scripture or whether people can be saved without
00:02:22.160 | knowing the gospel or Christ, most of those people have been fundamentalists or evangelicals,
00:02:31.440 | and they're moving away. You can tell. Something's happened in their life to disillusion them
00:02:36.640 | with a person or with a relationship or with a church, and they're moving away. That's not a
00:02:41.680 | very safe or reliable guide. Lewis had a different instinct. His trajectory and his instincts were
00:02:49.040 | toward orthodoxy and toward Scripture, and he embraced what the church had always taught and
00:02:56.880 | wasn't becoming a disillusioned fundamentalist like so many of the, I think, wayward teachers
00:03:06.160 | today. Here's another one. He was orthodox on the core commitments of the deity of Christ
00:03:13.600 | and the Trinity and the death of Christ as a substitute for sinners and the way of salvation
00:03:19.600 | by faith alone. Lewis did not crusade for Reformed soteriology, but Doug Wilson made a pretty strong
00:03:29.440 | case that he believed it and that the best—at least I took away from Doug's talk—that the best
00:03:36.720 | prima facie evidence is that he was a settled churchman in the Anglican communion, and the 39
00:03:46.000 | articles against which he never said a word are Reformed in their soteriology, and he was at home
00:03:53.440 | there. He was an honest, orthodox Anglican, and when he wrote about the faith of the Puritans
00:04:01.520 | in his Oxford History of English lit, it was with glowing admiration that they were rejected by the
00:04:07.920 | Roman church because they were simply too happy, and what made them so happy was, like Luther said,
00:04:13.520 | they had walked through the gates into paradise when they discovered justification by faith alone.
00:04:18.880 | So Lewis is very solid on the center of soteriology, I think, even though he didn't
00:04:26.240 | want to jump into anybody's camp. Another reason I think I'm helped by Lewis so and not threatened
00:04:35.920 | by him is that he was totally devoted to being rational. He believed in reason, in the law of
00:04:43.440 | non-contradiction, the importance of propositional truth and crystal clarity, and utterly honest,
00:04:51.920 | being honest and forthright. Most of the people who I get frustrated with today who are moving
00:04:59.040 | away from orthodoxy are slippery. They debunk propositional truth. They almost mock it. They
00:05:06.560 | roll their eyes at it in a way that Lewis never, never did. They cannot hold a candle to Lewis's
00:05:15.680 | joy or his rationality, and so he was just utterly exemplary in this, and therefore I feel safe
00:05:24.160 | around Lewis. He's never spinning anything. He's never playing with words. He loves clarity because
00:05:32.960 | he was pure and honest in the way he communicated. And another one is that he really believed in
00:05:39.920 | heaven and hell and thought people were going there, and that the most sophisticated don at
00:05:45.360 | Oxford should try to rescue the perishing. I mean, I'll tell you, when I read his statements about
00:05:50.400 | bending every effort to save souls, he distances himself from a lot of disillusioned Christians
00:05:59.760 | today who are misleading people because they've lost their confidence in the power of the gospel
00:06:04.720 | to save souls. They don't even like to use that language anymore and see us as the main business
00:06:10.080 | of life. And maybe the last thing would be Lewis was seriously joyful, not glibly clever. I just
00:06:18.480 | get tired today of so many people trying to be clever. So many are disinterested in doctrine,
00:06:26.320 | moving away from truth, and doing so with a kind of cavalier cleverness and shrewdness,
00:06:32.320 | and Lewis had none of that. He was totally earnest and jovial all at the same time.
00:06:40.160 | So those are a few of the things that make me feel like he's a remarkably helpful person in spite of
00:06:49.680 | his doctrinal wavering in certain areas. He doesn't seem to me to be subtly dangerous,
00:06:58.960 | like some people are. What you see is what you get, and in all these ways, he's really helpful.
00:07:06.800 | Yes, he is helpful indeed. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:07:12.240 | Speaking of the national conference featuring the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, you can listen to
00:07:17.120 | all of the conference audio and watch all of the conference video free of charge at
00:07:21.120 | DesiringGod.org. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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