On 22nd November 1963, one of the most memorable events of the modern age took place – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, USA. Famously just about everybody can remember where they were when they heard the news. Its effect on the modern world was immense, and the conspiracy theories about his death will probably get another airing this month as television will be full of programmes marking the anniversary.
For believers, however, the date will be remembered as the day when the world lost a great modern Christian thinker and writer, Clive Staples Lewis, or C.S Lewis as he was better known. He has been known to successive generations of children as the author of the Narnia series, which began with the famous The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A wise reader will spot the Gospel themes in that book, themes that were enlarged upon in some of the Christian classics that also came from his pen. Although many Christians find difficulty agreeing with everything he wrote, Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters are among his works that should be read by all believers.
C.S. Lewis became a Christian in a most ordinary way. He simply records that, on top of a bus, “I was driven to Whipsnade Zoo one morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the Zoo I did.” From then on his life was different. Though he remained an academic of the first order, being a Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, he spent a great deal of time writing Christian apologetics; books that showed why belief in the gospel was valid in the modern age. He once wrote; “… the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.” There is good evidence to suggest that Lewis suffered for his faith amongst his fellow university experts, and probably didn’t achieve the academic accomplishments his genius deserved.
C.S. Lewis never saw himself as a theologian, but he loved theology and felt that proper theologians didn’t do enough to make Christian doctrine understandable and attractive at the level of ordinary people. That was his job as he saw it. In his words again; “If real theologians had tackled this laborious work of translation about a hundred years ago, when they began to lose touch with the people (for whom Christ died) there would have been no place for me.”
Lewis’s view of the Old Testament wasn’t one that many of us would share. He believed that stories such as those of Noah and Jonah were probably fables, though other parts of the history books were probably true. In all his writings, as far as the Old Testament was concerned, he only wrote on The Psalms. He would probably have described himself as a ‘New Testament Christian’, something which again many of us might take issue with him on. But though his doctrine of Scripture was not evangelical, he had a much clearer view when it came to the person of Jesus Christ. He defended the fact that Jesus was God all through his writings. Perhaps his most famous quote, found in his book Mere Christianity and often cited from the pulpit in New Inn, was his reaction to the idea that Jesus was just a good teacher;
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God". That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Though he may not have had a fully worked out doctrine of justification by faith, he believed that salvation was only through the death of Christ, and that through it we can go to heaven. He believed that Christians should think of heaven more than they do; “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next ... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither.”
As well as some unorthodox views on the Old Testament there are other areas where we would part company with him. Certainly, at least in the latter part of his life, he had regular confessions, prayed for the dead, and believed in some sort of purgatory. This belief in purgatory was a strange aberration and added to his agony on the death of his wife, Joy. But on the basics of the Christian faith we would regard him as a brother, and thank God for the inroads his writings made in academic circles where other Christians wouldn’t gain a hearing. At a time when liberal views of the Bible were in the ascendency, he wasn’t afraid to unapologetically defend belief in Jesus and express that in the language of common people. He understood the world around him, and tried to show that to believe in another world wasn’t as irrational as many made out. Let him speak again; “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
In all the celebration of JFK this month, thank God for CS!
