C. S. Lewis: Apologist

The Beginnings of an Apologetic Method 

C. S. Lewis was arguably the most well-known, popular Christian Apologist of the 20th Century. It is ironic that this should be the case because he was an Atheist for many years. Actually, the fact that he was an adult convert to Christianity may have contributed to his success as an apologist. The barriers to belief over which he had to climb while making his pilgrimage to faith may have been an asset to his work as a defender of the faith. Fresh in his memory were the challenges to conversion and these so clear in his mind enabled him to be a convincing guide for all who were themselves, looking for answers. I would like to assert that his own questions, and the answers he found along the way, were those which he sought to set forth for his wide and varying audiences. They were at the core of his apologetic method, if we can call it a method. First, who was C. S. Lewis?

C. S. Lewis’ Early Life

Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898. He was the son of a successful police court solicitor, Albert Lewis, and a university educated mother, Flora, who was the daughter of a clergyman. From these beginnings, coming from a very educated family of faith one might have expected that Lewis would have been a Christian from his earliest days. However, the death of his mother when he was nine, as well as a deformity of his thumbs, which made him awkward at games, and the subject of ridicule at school turned him against Christianity. He said, early on, that he became a pessimist. He chose not to believe in God, and he was angry with God for creating a world; furthermore, he did not, at the time see the contradiction in his position (Lewis, 1956. P. 115). The problem of evil and human suffering turned him away from the faith of his family and turned him towards Atheism. Furthermore, he adopted Materialism as a worldview to support his Atheism. Nevertheless, early aesthetic experiences with beauty, as well as the reading to which he gravitated awakened in him a sense of longing. This longing set him in quest of the object of his desire. This longing—which he called Joy—and his Materialism, were at odds. He came to a point where he simply dismissed the longings as mere cerebral biochemistry and therefore, they were, in his mind, of no consequence. It is the way he reasoned his way back through the morass of his Atheism, his Materialism, and his concerns about the problem of evil and suffering that would eventually set the agenda for his own apologetic endeavors. That is, he sought to help others who struggled with what he struggled with to help them find their own way to faith in Christ. Consequently, he is convincing because he defends the faith most strongly at those very places that had been difficult issues for him personally. There is authenticity, and even transparency, perhaps we could even say humility and honesty, about his apologetic method. These obstacles and the solutions he discovered will provide the thread for the rest of this article that seeks to understand Lewis’ success as an apologist as well as the effectiveness of his apologetic endeavor.

Lewis’ Materialism   

As a Materialist, Lewis embraced the ontological assumption that matter has always existed and simply reconfigures itself in a variety of ways and under many variant conditions. For example, a Materialist explains away love by saying that the lovers do not truly love. The image of each lover is projected onto the retina of the other’s eyes causing the stimulation of the optic nerve. This sends a message to the brain that releases certain hormones and the lovers call it love, but, as the materialist explains, it is merely chemistry. Therefore, Lewis embracing this explanation began to believe that these longings that so hounded him were equally the product of some kind of chemistry and were of no real consequence. Nevertheless, as he thought about this, he realized that if the lovers were not free to consider their feelings for one another as genuine, but only biological, then neither could the materialist consider his explanation to be of any genuine significance either. Lewis concluded that reason had to be more than mere cerebral biochemistry (Lewis, 1947. Pp. 27-29 & 50). It was at this point in his life that he surmised if Materialism could not stand up to scrutiny, then, in fact, reason was objective and not merely a matter of biochemistry. Therefore, lovers might really love, and the longings he had felt since his childhood might be real indicators, pointing to some object to which his allegiance was due.   

Lewis understood that the most basic ontological question is, if anything exists in a universe of contingencies, something must be eternal and necessary; what could provide an adequate answer to the question? He saw that the eternality of matter was insufficient given the reasons mentioned above (Lewis, 1947. P. 61). Furthermore, Lewis came to believe that those who deny objective reality and the Transcendence behind it are left to mere subjectivity and self-reference. He writes that by the logic of such a position one is reduced to mere chance as the explanation for the universe (Lewis, 2010. P. 40).  Beginning with chance, one cannot infer direction, nor purpose, or ends; one is left with mere meaninglessness. On the other hand, if there is cause, it is inferentially coherent to believe in the possibility of direction, goals, purpose, and meaning. Lewis came to realize the reasonableness of a universe caused. He would later embrace Dante’s assumption about the Universe that “the proper operation [or purpose] does not exist for the sake of essence, but the essence has its being for the sake of operation [or purpose]” (Lewis, 1952. Arthurian Torso P. 112; Dante, 1904. Pp. 9-21).  In the Creation account, God makes Light (the function) before He makes the luminaries: the sun, moon, and stars (the essences to fulfill the function). The idea that the universe appears to have some sort of purpose and meaning behind it implies that ends must exist; therefore, it must be moral; and things, such as humans with will, ought to conform to the Transcendent moral standard. We may complain about that standard but, as Lewis asserts, “Unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it” (Lewis, 1967. P. 70). Furthermore, Lewis well understood that if the universe is moral then seeking to understand and explain the existence of evil is the very history of theology (Lewis, 1967. P. 71). Consequently, beginning with the death of his mother, Lewis struggled to understand how a good and all-powerful creator could allow evil and suffering in the world? 

Lewis’ Atheism

Furthermore, Lewis began to see that the claims by an Atheist, that there is no possibility God could exist, are inflated. They are claims beyond anyone’s capacity to make. In An Experiment in Criticism, he observes that negative assertions are always harder to substantiate than positive. To say there is no spider in the room requires a complete search of every nook and cranny in the room. On the other hand, the existence of a spider in the room could be confirmed by simply observing the spider in the room (Lewis, 1961. P. 117). While proofs for the existence of God would be more complex than establishing that a spider is in the room, nevertheless, the analogy does have merit as an illustration of the difficulties facing the Atheist’s negative assertions. Furthermore, Lewis says that in his own days as an Atheist he learned he could not be too careful about the books he read, there were millions of surprises (Lewis, 1955. P. 191). As a case in point, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is said to have shelf space containing 136 miles of books. Who can claim to have read them all? Yet the Atheist who claims there is no possibility that God exists, asserts without hermeneutical suspicion, that there is nothing contained in any books ever written information that might count against his claim. Furthermore, the Atheist is asserting that nothing ever will be written that might count against the assertion that no God exists. As Lewis reflected on his own days as an Atheist, he saw that such inflated judgements were either ignorant or foolish.  

Lewis’s Agnosticism

For this reason, Lewis saw that the position of the Agnostic, a position that one simply does not know whether God exists, has far more credit than that of the Atheist. Of course, there are observable degrees within the agnostic camp. In Lewis’s own days as an Agnostic, he recognized he could talk about the search for God about as confidently as the mouse went searching for the cat. (Lewis, 1955. P. 227). Perhaps we could infer from Lewis’ position at the time that there are at least three different types of Agnostics. First, is the dogmatic Agnostic, who claims that he does not know and says nobody else can know either? This person championed his lack of knowledge with the Atheist’s level of conviction. Furthermore, his position is subject to the same weaknesses as the Atheist. Second, is the apathetic Agnostic, who says he does not know and does not care. This position is also intellectually dishonest. If God does exist, no fact of the Universe would be more important to know; and if He does not exist grounds for moral behavior seems to evaporate with Him. Third, there is the honest agnostic who knows he does not know but would like to. His quest is a valid search to find the answer to this most important question. Again, Lewis’ own pilgrimage to faith and the issues with which he wrestled added to his apologetic appeal. He understood the struggle of an honest unbeliever. 

Lewis and the Question of Religion

Lewis deduced that the questions of ontology, and theodicy boiled down to religious questions. Which religion could best give an account for the world as we actually experienced it? Throughout history, people have believed that there is something Supernatural behind what we observe in the Universe. In fact, Lewis said the Atheist must go against the grain of the best wisdom expressed throughout human history. To disbelieve is the anomaly. In fact, all the religions of the world have more in common with each other, at this point, than any of the religions have in common with the Atheist or the Materialist. Lewis wrote that if you are a Christian, you do not have to believe everything about the other religions is necessarily false. Nevertheless, if you were a Christian you would have to believe that there is something that sets Christianity apart from the others suggesting it is true where the others are false (Lewis, 1952. Mere Christianity, P. 29). Taking a lead from Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Lewis identifies three characteristics common to all the world’s great religions, and one thing that sets Christianity apart from them. First, all the great world religions believe in some kind of supernatural other. It is defined differently whether one is an Animist, a Pantheist, a Dualist, a Monotheist, or a Trinitarian Monotheist. Otto calls this the Numinous. Second, all the great world religions believe in an objective moral code that their adherents fail to keep. Third, these religions believe that the Numinous is the custodian of the moral code so if religious people fail to keep the code, they have offended the Divine Essence (Lewis, 1977. Pp. 4-11). There is a fourth item, peculiar to Christianity and the thing that sets it apart from the other religions. This distinguishing characteristic of is found in the Incarnation, that God became a man and entered His creation in order to redeem it. In Lewis’s own pilgrimage to faith, he reasoned his way through the labyrinth of Atheism, Materialism, Agnosticism and even reasoned his way to Theism. Nevertheless, he felt he could never know God personally any more than Hamlet could know Shakespeare (Lewis, 1955. P. 223). After a late-night talk with fellow Oxford University colleagues, Hugo Dyson, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis came to understand the solution to his conundrum. In fact, Hamlet, the character in Shakespeare’s play could never break out of the play to get to know the author. However, Shakespeare the author could have written himself into the play as Shakespeare the character and therefore make the introduction possible between author and character. Lewis said he believed something like this is what happened in the Incarnation when God became a man (Lewis, 1955. P. 227).  

Lewis and the Trinity

Two supporting ideas are closely related to Lewis’ growing understanding of the Incarnation and significant in Lewis’s apologetic for the Christian faith. The first is the idea of the Trinity. Lewis writes that “the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love” (Lewis, 1952. Mere Christianity. P. 138). Lewis’ friend and fellow literary associate, Charles Williams wrote similarly that the Arians denied love to God except by means of His creation (Williams, 1974. P. 40). What does all of this mean? It is a challenge to all non-Trinitarian Monotheists. The reasonableness of the challenge flows from the inferential development of the following questions. First, is God a contingent Being, or a non-contingent Being? Most non-Trinitarian Monotheists, if they understand the question, will answer, “non-contingent”. The second Question: is God a God of love? When they answer “Yes”, the third question follows. Who is the object of God’s love? The non-Trinitarian is reduced to answer either “We are” or “God’s creation is its object”. However, if God’s love needs creation to fulfill His nature, then there is a contradiction in the theology. How can a non-contingent Being be dependent upon something, or someone, outside of Himself to fulfill His nature? Relational attributes in a noncontingent Being presuppose that relationship must be necessary in that Being. This too, was a compelling feature of Christianity; it substantiated its truth claims. Furthermore, this matter, important to Lewis during his own pilgrimage to faith, became a part of his compelling apologetic argument for Christianity. He argues the point in Mere Christianity. 

Lewis and the Claims of Jesus Christ

The second idea significant to the Incarnation and argued by Lewis are the claims of Christ. While some would suggest that Jesus was merely a great moral teacher but not God, Lewis stood in a long line of defense against such challenges going back at least as far as Augustine’s aut Deus aut malos homo (either God or Bad man). Lewis rightly says that Jesus could not be a mere moral teacher given His claims. If He claimed to be God and was in fact not God, then one would have to conclude that He was either a liar (and not moral), or a lunatic making the wild claims of a maniac. On the contrary, given His life, as described in Scripture, Lewis holds up a third alternative that He was, in fact, who He claimed to be. The argument is compelling. From this one has something to say to the skeptic, ready to dismiss Jesus’ claim that he is the only way to God (John 14:6), and that such a claim ought to be rejected because it is narrow. This objection has a fundamental flaw. Jesus’ claim may or may not be true, this must be argued on its own merit; but it cannot be false because it is narrow. All true statements are necessarily narrow. There must be reality to support the claim. Pascal rightly observed that the nature of truth is so fragile, that the slightest deviation from reality gives you a falsehood rather than a truth (Pascal, 1952. P. 16).     

Lewis and the Problem of Evil

One of the biggest challenges for Lewis, as it is for many, concerns the problem of evil and suffering. If God is good and all-powerful why is there evil and suffering in the world? It was this issue, that prompted Lewis to reject the faith of his family, and it was this problem, he addressed in his first popular work of Christian apologetics, The Problem of Pain. As Lewis approaches the questions of theodicy he begins by defining terms carefully to avoid equivocation. The solutions he suggests also follow very traditional lines. He begins his discussion of Divine Omnipotence with Thomas Aquinas’ “Nothing which implies a contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God” (Lewis, 1977. P. 14). There are somethings God cannot do. If He is love, He cannot be unloving. If He is just, He cannot be unfair. If he is immutable and unchanging, He cannot be capricious. God is all-powerful to do that which is consistent with His nature and nothing contrary. From here, Lewis develops a free-will theodicy that borrows heavily from Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and the works of Augustine. If God made humans with free will, while it made love possible, it also made possible the ill use of human will. God cannot simply remove the consequences of the ill use of human choices, that would be to give free will and not give free will. Such contradictions do not exist in the Divine omnipotence. In creating the world, God must work His purposes within the context of human failure. Lewis concludes with Leibnitz, that this is not merely the best of all possible worlds, but the only possible one given the structures put in place at creation (Lewis, 1977. P. 23). 

When it comes to Divine Goodness, Lewis follows something like Irenaeus’ approach to theodicy. That is, Lewis sees in the Divine Goodness that God may harness human suffering to cultivate human character in the process of restoring the Imago Dei. Suffering can be employed to produce courage and endurance, empathy and tenderness. Human understanding of goodness is different than Divine; but not utterly different. It is as different as a child’s drawing of a circle is different from a perfect circle (Lewis, 1977. P. 27). Following Lewis’ reasoning one sees that evil does not compare to good as an opposite. Evil is a perversion of good. Just as a bad banana presupposes the existence of a good banana gone bad. So too evil, like the child’s circle compared to the perfect circle is a diminishing of the ideal. In this sense, while this analogy is not a perfect one, nevertheless, it is a way we can understand: evil compares to good like bread mold compares with bread. Just as human creativity can take that which is bad for bread and make penicillin from it—that is something good from the bad—it would seem that we should allow at least that much creativity in the Divine will. Furthermore, Lewis cites multiple examples of suffering that are fully compatible with good intentions: the scalpel of the surgeon, the drill of the dentist, the loving discipline of the parent for the child, etc. (Lewis, 1977. Pp. 29-35). Even in Lewis’ literary critical work he acknowledges the way pain and goodness can work together for a beneficial end. He writes, “Innocence is not goodness. Even divine Nature, even in her prime, cannot make of virtue a gift” (Lewis, 1973. P. 60). Innocence may be good, in that, it is not spoiled; but it is not goodness, in that it is not proven character. The person who has overcome an area of temptation and turned practice into habit and habit into character may, in that very miniscule area of life, be better off than Adam and Eve. They were innocent and unspoiled, but this other person is beginning to have an emerging true character, miniscule, perhaps, but it is more than mere innocence. The Imago Dei is once again coming into view. 

Lewis is helpful in these matters as far as he goes, that is as he discusses the abuse of human will, and the possibilities of human character development. Nevertheless, he cannot reconcile his view with the sufferings of animals. These creatures do not have anything like free, moral will, so they do not suffer because of their bad choices. Furthermore, not having anything like human souls, they cannot experience character development from the suffering they do endure. Lewis without support for his argument posits that domesticated animals live better lives and thereby enjoy the benefits of their masters. Then he suggests that perhaps, in a similar way, animals may have imputed to them the immortality of their master’s and therefore could benefit from any pain that they endure (Lewis, 1977. Pp. 126-31). We come to expect such clarity from Lewis, but this does not rise like cream to the top of his generally precise reasoning; in fact, this kind of explanation is not in evidence of what we might call Lewis’ finest hour. Philosopher Evelyn Underhill, while generally praising Lewis’ effort in The Problem of Pain, wrote to Lewis to complain of such shoddiness of thought and said, “I do find it impossible to follow you in…your chapter on animals” (Underhill, 1956. Pp. 301-02). Many, like Underhill, believe Lewis missed the mark trying to explain the suffering of animals specifically, and is sketchy, at best, when discussing natural evil. Furthermore, Philosopher Austin Farrar, wrote of Lewis’ argument, explaining the suffering endured by animals, that his “Imagination has slipped from the leash of reason”. This concerned Farrar because while generally appreciating Lewis’ reasonableness as an apologist, he wrote, “What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realisms of his moral theology” (Farrar/Gibb, 1965. P.42). Farrar was concerned that should Lewis be weak in his argumentation it could cause critics of the faith to be dismissive, not only of the arguments made by Lewis, but that it might arm them with excuses to be dismissive of all of Lewis’ apologetic work. Farrar’s criticism may be too severe. While the standard should always be high for those doing Christian apologetics—certainly, souls are in the balance—nevertheless, the expectations of the apologist must be realistic. While Lewis did not give as full and robust an answer to the problem of evil and suffering, he is still helpful. He wrote, “…there is no getting beyond a thing without first getting as far” (Lewis, 1969. P. 239). In this way Lewis reminds us that the apologist does not need to have all the answers before doing his work, any more than the critic needs to have all the answers before asking critical questions. The work of both apologist and critic ought to be done with the humility of remembering that the dialogical is always a project in the making. It is in debate that understanding is honed and sharpened.

Lewis: The Apologist of the Imagination  

Lewis observed, “All serious imaginative work, when it touches morals, paints a conflict” (Lewis, 1973. P. 58). Consequently, Lewis saw the value of imaginative literature for doing apologetic work. In fact, his first work in Christian apologetics was a work of fiction, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism. Furthermore, before he published his first work in popular apologetics, he wrote the first of his space novels, Out of the Silent Planet. It was a work of fiction, and was never intended to be a book of apologetics per se. Nevertheless, having read the reviews, Lewis wrote to a friend and observed that any amount of theology can now be smuggled into peoples’ minds under the guise of romantic literature (Lewis, 1966. P. 167). Here again, Lewis’ faith integrated grasp of the world comes through. Transcendent truths could be imaginatively depicted. Lewis saw the value of fiction to make the Gospel clearer to those who had trouble accepting presentations more propositional in nature. First, consider that the word definition literally means, ‘of the finite’. To be defined, an object or an idea must be small enough to wrap words around it and distinguish it from other things. In fact, we define things by their limits and their function. Given these limits of definition, the question arises, how do you define God. If He is infinite, He breaks the category of definition. Even Jesus, when He spoke of Heaven would say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”. He employed figures of speech, parables, similes, and analogies. The Scholastic theologians and philosophers knew some topics defied mere definition, so they wrote of The Way of Analogy when speaking about God. Lewis also used story as an important rhetorical tool in his apologetic toolbox. 

Second, Lewis saw that reason could be used to justify, or rationalize, bad behavior. When this occurs, it leads to moral blindness. In some ways, reason can stand like dragon sentries keeping certain ideas from penetrating to the head or heart. He observed, however, that sometimes a story can get past those watchful dragons (Lewis, 1966. Other Worlds. P. 37). It must be remembered that it was through fiction that Lewis’ experienced his own awakening of spiritual hunger. So much of his life he found himself hounded by deep longing, and though there was a mystery related to these, it set him on a quest to find the proper object of his desire. Even in his days as an Atheist, he could not fully quiet the longing. Eventually, desire led him to Christ. He wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (Lewis, 1952. P. 108). Lewis benefitted in his own pilgrimage to faith through imaginative literature, it makes sense then that he would use fiction and the imagination to awaken in others the desire for God. He knew that a story might aid the apologist to help others see what they might be unlikely to see otherwise. All serious apologists would benefit from his example.  

Lewis as an Effective Evangelist 

Lewis’ apologetics were a means to a greater end; they were not an end in themselves. Lewis was an evangelist. He was not a professional one. Nevertheless, he took seriously the charge to all believers to go and make disciples. Consequently, his efforts as an apologist were that those around him might have opportunity to encounter the Christ of the Gospel. He was the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club. This group met weekly during each University term. One week a Christian would read a paper, and it would be debated. The next week a doubter or skeptic would read a paper and debate would follow. Lewis was committed to these gatherings in the hopes of making the claims of Christ clear and reasonable to students. He was also active in presenting the Gospel to the Royal Air Force pilots and airmen during World War II. Many were dying in the battle for Britain and Lewis felt an obligation to share the Gospel with them. He also preached frequently at churches and in chapels at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of these sermons have been published and therefore though once spoken still speak. He presented his British Broadcasting talks during the War, and these would eventually be published as Mere Christianity. Through those broadcasts and that publication, many have come to faith in Christ through Lewis’ reasonable presentation of the Gospel. In fact, of his writing Lewis wrote, “Most of my books are evangelistic” (Lewis, 1970. P. 181). What did he mean by this? Lewis himself explains what he meant. “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books about other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialist assumptions in other books”. (Lewis, 1970. P. 93). Here every apologist could benefit from Lewis’ apologetic ethos. A rich, liberal arts background undergirds his points of view. His life and writing were in some ways like a funnel. Into the broad end of the funnel was the literature of the Classics, the Middle Ages, the Romantics; he knew the works of the skeptics and the detractors, he wrestled with all the arguments of the materialists and learned not to be afraid. At the narrow end of the funnel, his pen gathered to a point with rich clarity. He wrote, “If our religions is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it that seem puzzling of repellant; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellant which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know” (Lewis, 1949. P. 26). 

Lewis’ passion for evangelism was at the heart of his being an effective apologist. He was not in it simply to win an argument. He truly cared about the people with whom he was communicating. “All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another; all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors” (Lewis, 1942. P. 32-33). To miss this is to miss the very heart of Lewis’ apologetic focus.  

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