We are coming off of our national conference dedicated to the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, who of course died 50 years ago this fall. When you think of celebrating a guy like Lewis, you must also be conscious of Lewis's failures and his weaknesses, which were also addressed at the conference.

I mean, there was celebration and critique. Pastor John, how do you process this, especially the critique? How did you think through the critique of Lewis throughout the conference? One of the big recurrent questions at the conference, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes on the panel, was why can we benefit, why do I benefit from Lewis so much when he is so defective in some important doctrines?

And he never saw himself as an advocate for any tribe, like my little Reformed tribe. He wouldn't have thought of himself that way. And so we had to try to answer the question, what is it about Lewis that is, say, different from people who share some of his defective views whom we wouldn't have at a conference, say, and yet here we're devoting a whole conference to Lewis.

It seemed like a contradiction to some folks. And here are some of the thoughts that I've had that came out of some of those conversations about what is it about Lewis. And to be honest, number one, it's probably that he's dead. I don't want to pass over that and ignore it.

I'm sure that has an effect. I'm not sure what we would do with Lewis as the living dinosaur, which he called himself. But I think the fact that he's dead is the least significant in answering this question, though I don't want to minimize it. His deposit is made. He's not changing anything.

He's there in his books. You can kind of deal with him at a distance. You don't have to deal with a real person. So he's dead, and yet I don't think that's the main thing. Here are the other thoughts. He was a convert from atheism to orthodoxy and was moving all his life into an increasingly robust Christianity.

He was never moving away from it. Most of the people today who share some of his errors, say views of Scripture or whether people can be saved without knowing the gospel or Christ, most of those people have been fundamentalists or evangelicals, and they're moving away. You can tell. Something's happened in their life to disillusion them with a person or with a relationship or with a church, and they're moving away.

That's not a very safe or reliable guide. Lewis had a different instinct. His trajectory and his instincts were toward orthodoxy and toward Scripture, and he embraced what the church had always taught and wasn't becoming a disillusioned fundamentalist like so many of the, I think, wayward teachers today. Here's another one.

He was orthodox on the core commitments of the deity of Christ and the Trinity and the death of Christ as a substitute for sinners and the way of salvation by faith alone. Lewis did not crusade for Reformed soteriology, but Doug Wilson made a pretty strong case that he believed it and that the best—at least I took away from Doug's talk—that the best prima facie evidence is that he was a settled churchman in the Anglican communion, and the 39 articles against which he never said a word are Reformed in their soteriology, and he was at home there.

He was an honest, orthodox Anglican, and when he wrote about the faith of the Puritans in his Oxford History of English lit, it was with glowing admiration that they were rejected by the Roman church because they were simply too happy, and what made them so happy was, like Luther said, they had walked through the gates into paradise when they discovered justification by faith alone.

So Lewis is very solid on the center of soteriology, I think, even though he didn't want to jump into anybody's camp. Another reason I think I'm helped by Lewis so and not threatened by him is that he was totally devoted to being rational. He believed in reason, in the law of non-contradiction, the importance of propositional truth and crystal clarity, and utterly honest, being honest and forthright.

Most of the people who I get frustrated with today who are moving away from orthodoxy are slippery. They debunk propositional truth. They almost mock it. They roll their eyes at it in a way that Lewis never, never did. They cannot hold a candle to Lewis's joy or his rationality, and so he was just utterly exemplary in this, and therefore I feel safe around Lewis.

He's never spinning anything. He's never playing with words. He loves clarity because he was pure and honest in the way he communicated. And another one is that he really believed in heaven and hell and thought people were going there, and that the most sophisticated don at Oxford should try to rescue the perishing.

I mean, I'll tell you, when I read his statements about bending every effort to save souls, he distances himself from a lot of disillusioned Christians today who are misleading people because they've lost their confidence in the power of the gospel to save souls. They don't even like to use that language anymore and see us as the main business of life.

And maybe the last thing would be Lewis was seriously joyful, not glibly clever. I just get tired today of so many people trying to be clever. So many are disinterested in doctrine, moving away from truth, and doing so with a kind of cavalier cleverness and shrewdness, and Lewis had none of that.

He was totally earnest and jovial all at the same time. So those are a few of the things that make me feel like he's a remarkably helpful person in spite of his doctrinal wavering in certain areas. He doesn't seem to me to be subtly dangerous, like some people are.

What you see is what you get, and in all these ways, he's really helpful. Yes, he is helpful indeed. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Speaking of the national conference featuring the life and legacy of C.S. Lewis, you can listen to all of the conference audio and watch all of the conference video free of charge at DesiringGod.org.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. DesiringGod.org DesiringGod.org DesiringGod.org DesiringGod.org DesiringGod.org