Clive Staples Lewis was a lecturer at both Oxford and Cambridge University and considered one of the finest minds of his generation. But it is Lewis the Christian who changed the world. His genius was the ability to convey highly complex ideas in a straightforward and understandable manner. Like some grand champion of common sense he sliced away at cluttered thinking and double-talk.
"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils," he wrote. "One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."
Lewis declared himself a Christian in 1929, "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." It was as though he had tried to avoid the inevitable, considering every argument against Christianity, forcing himself to take on all of the objections his fertile mind could produce. Each one he overcame.
From this point on everything he wrote was informed and enlivened by his Christianity. But Lewis was too subtle to knock people over the head with his faith. He knew that talking was far more effective than shouting.
In 1952, Lewis's Mere Christianity appeared. The title reflected the author's attempt to remove Christianity away from those who would adapt it, dilute it and change what is pure and perfect. Again, he did not pepper his prose with quotes from the scriptures because he knew that this would have a limited effect with the majority of his readers. What he did do was to show that a belief in God was logical. He reversed the equation offered by the secular world, that it is the thoughtless who become Christians, the thoughtful who reject it. Simply, he summed up the arguments like an angel:
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.
In the 1950s, Lewis met and fell in love with Joy Davidman, an American convert from Judaism. The marriage was beautiful but brief and Joy died in 1960. The movie Shadowlands chronicled some of the magnificence of the relationship but managed to expunge most of the Christianity from the story. What brought them together, what sustained them during the agony of cancer and what saved Lewis after the loss was a profound Christian belief.
After Joy's death Lewis wrote a short book entitled A Grief Observed, an exploration of his own feelings following his wife's death. "Grief still feels like fear," he said. "Up till this time I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness." He told friends he could no longer remember Joy's face. Until it came to him that she was there all along, just waiting. Her face shone again in his mind and God's love and certainty overwhelmed his pain.
Though his remaining years were never as happy as those spent with Joy he wrote and lectured, becoming a famous man in Europe, as well as North America. He died in 1963, on the same day as J.F. Kennedy. Quite the juxtaposition. Kennedy was a mere President; Lewis was much greater-a mere Christian.
Legions of the uninitiated will now be exposed to his work and ideas and that is a glorious thing for anybody who cares about Christ and His church.
