Evangelicals who insist that C. S. Lewis was an orthodox Christian are seriously mistaken, and do a great disservice to Christ's church and the Gospel.

It seems nearly impossible, in recent years, to find a self-described evangelical writer who does not quote C. S. Lewis as an authority on the Bible, theology, and the Christian life. Often many of these writers effectively elevate Lewis to a position of philosophical authority that supersedes Scripture, and frequently contradicts God's Word.

Lewis died on November 22, 1963. News of his death would have made front-page headlines around the world, but it was pushed to the back pages by the saturation coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath.

Fifty years later, Lewis was remembered by the unveiling of a memorial plaque in Britain's greatest place of honor for its literary and artistic figures, the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, London. (His body was not, as some news sources reported, re-buried there.) Among those who are buried in the Poets' Corner are Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, George Frederick Handel, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Laurence Olivier. Among those memorialized by plaques and floor stones are Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott.

A 2021 motion picture, The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis, was advertised as the account of "C. S. Lewis' incredible journey from hard-boiled atheist to the most beloved Christian writer of the century."

Lewis was, arguably, the most influential religious writer of the twentieth century. Many evangelicals embrace Lewis as a believer in, and teacher of, authentic Biblical Christianity. Thousands of students at reputedly conservative religious colleges, and churchgoers around the world, are told that Lewis was an orthodox Christian believer and teacher. But precisely what did Lewis believe? What exactly was this "most reluctant convert" converted to? Sadly, it was not authentic Biblical Christianity but a postmodernist form of Anglo-Catholicism.

"Towering Practitioner" of Christianity?

Many self-described Evangelicals mistakenly continue to view Lewis as one of the greatest thinkers of authentic Christianity. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who identifies as an evangelical, has praised Lewis as "perhaps the 20th century's most towering intellectual practitioner of the Christian faith." Thomas has said that Lewis' "humility" puts him in a category with Pope Francis. Thomas said that this shared trait is "why Pope Francis is enjoying so much favorable attention, even from non-Catholics..."[1]

Although many Evangelicals will not recognize or admit it, C. S. Lewis and the present Pope do belong in the same category, but for a far more significant reason: They share a great deal theologically, all of it un-Biblical.

James Houston, who knew Lewis when he was a teacher at Oxford, and was later one of the founders of Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, said that Lewis "had no cultural connections with Evangelicals. He had no friends among them.... His friends were all Anglo-Catholic or Catholic.... Lewis, of course, has been adopted by the Evangelicals in America in a way that would have made him very uncomfortable. He didn't associate with them; he didn't think of himself as one of them."[2]

Indeed, C. S. Lewis was not an Evangelical for two simple reasons: He did not believe that Scripture is entirely the Word of God, and he did not believe that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Lewis On Scripture and Salvation

His opinions regarding Scripture were anything but orthodox. He believed that the Old Testament was filled with myths, as well as some history that may have been "pretty accurate," but also included much that was not.[3] Of Paul's epistles Lewis said, "I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him so many gifts, withheld from him (what would to us seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly expression."[4] Of the words of the Lord Jesus himself, Lewis said that he found Him "the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question."[5] Lewis said that Scripture is not in its entirety the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God, but that we must "find the Word in it."[6] Lewis' incomprehension of Scripture reminds us of the Biblical fact that

the natural man does not receive [in the Greek, grasp] the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Lewis' doctrine of salvation - faith plus works - echoed that of Rome. He taught that salvation requires partaking of the sacraments of water baptism and the Eucharist, and living a life of good works. He referred to Christ's atonement as "the bit we could not have done for ourselves" and salvation as a "good infection" that we must "catch" from Christ.[7]

Furthermore, his allegory of the atonement in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of his Chronicles of Narnia, resurrects the ancient heresy of the Cross as a pact between Satan and Christ. Clement, Origen and others of the heretical Alexandrian School in the second and third centuries A. D. taught that Jesus offered Himself as a ransom to Satan on men's behalf. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa also proposed a theory involving a purported deception of Satan.[8] Origen said that Satan was deceived in the transaction through a technicality. In Origen's view, said theologian Louis Berkhof,

Satan accepted this ransom without realizing that he would not be able to retain his hold on Christ because of the latter's divine power and holiness. Satan swallowed the bait of Christ's humanity, and was caught on the hook of His divinity. Thus the souls of all men - even those in Hades - were set free from the power of Satan.[8]

These alleged technicalities have no basis in Scripture, and deny the eternal plan of redemption declared to us throughout Scripture. The covenant of redemption is not a covenant between Christ and Satan, but an agreement among the persons of the Trinity:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth - in Him.

In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory. In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory. (Ephesians 1:3-14)

...elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace be multiplied. (1 Peter 1:2)

Lewis effectively rejected these truths, teaching in their places the false tenets of Anglo-Catholicism mingled with his own postmodernist philosophy. Through both his fictional writings and his religious books and essays, those false teachings have poisoned the thinking of succeeding generations of professing Christians.

A Must-Read Essay

We could say much more about Lewis' heterodoxy. But much has already been said, and very well. In 2003 the late Dr. John W. Robbins wrote an excellent essay titled Did C. S. Lewis Go To Heaven? which explores the depths of Lewis' heterodoxy and answers it from Scripture. In view of evangelicals ongoing efforts to portray Lewis as an authentic Biblical Christian, I commend Dr. Robbins' essay to anyone who might be given the mistaken impression that C. S. Lewis actually believed and taught the one true Gospel (as I was inclined to think, when I was a much younger Christian). Clearly, and sadly, he did not.

References:

1. Cal Thomas, "November 22, 1963, Was a Day That Took Three Famous Men" as viewed at The Washington Examiner, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2269789/nov-22-1963-was-a-day-that-took-three-famous-men/ on 4/26/2024.

2. James Houston, "Reminiscences of the Oxford Lewis" in We Remember C. S. Lewis: Essays and Memoirs, David Graham, editor (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman, 2001), page 136.

3. C. S. Lewis, "Reflections on the Psalms" in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1994), page 186.

4. Reflections, page 189.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1952), page 156.

8. John Kaye, Account of the Writing of Clement of Alexandria (London: Griffith Farran Okeden & Welsh, 1899), pages 248ff; Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), page 167.

9. Berkhof, page 166.

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