5 Talking about Faith: C.S. Lewis on the Art of Apologetics
5
Talking about Faith: C.S. Lewis on the Art of Apologetics
What we believe always remains intellectually possible; it never becomes intellectually compulsive. I have an idea that when this ceases to be so, the world will be ending.
C.S. Lewis, ‘Religion and Rocketry’
One thing our imagined meetings with Lewis cannot convey is Lewis’s voice. We can get a sense of his literary voice through his many written works, but what was Lewis like to listen to?
I have received lots of letters from people telling me about their experiences of hearing Lewis lecture. Some remembered his days at Cambridge, when he would walk into a lecture theatre, still wearing his hat and scarf, and begin delivering his lecture as he walked to the podium. Another letter was especially interesting. It was from someone who had been an undergraduate at Oxford during the Second World War and had heard Lewis speak about the Christian faith one evening. ‘The atmosphere was electric,’ he told me. ‘My friends and I were all ready to repent and be baptised, right there and then!’
Lewis’s impassioned speeches and writings on the Christian faith have earned him a reputation as one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time. When he began his studies at Oxford University in January 1919, Lewis hoped to be remembered as an atheist poet – someone who destroyed the plausibility of God through his verbal eloquence and the power of argument. Yet in the end, it was the plausibility of a dull and joyless atheism that crumbled before him.
So what brought about the change? How did Lewis move from an angry opponent of the Christian faith to a convincing apologist for it? We can identify two major influences on Lewis’s growing interest in Christianity and increasing appreciation of its rational and imaginative appeal. First, his friends – such as Owen Barfield – raised questions about his atheism that Lewis knew couldn’t be answered. Second, Lewis read works by Christian writers – such as G.K. Chesterton – which helped him to realise that their faith provided a rich and realistic way of seeing, understanding and experiencing the world. None of these people made Christianity attractive for Lewis. They just helped him to grasp its fullness and depth.
Lewis was an apologist who was helped to come to faith by other apologists, such as Chesterton. Lewis asked tough questions about faith and God, and the answers he came to on his own were not satisfactory. He needed others’ help to remove his barriers to belief. And Lewis’s chain of apologists needs to be kept going. Many Christians regard Lewis as having played a major role in bringing them to faith. So what are they doing to help others to come to faith? Are they doing for others what Lewis did for them?
Lewis would leave us in no doubt of the urgency of the apologetic task. It needs to be done! And done well. While there is no doubt a place for ‘professional’ apologists, it’s a task that all believers must share. Lewis would want us to learn the lessons that he learned the hard way – by trial and error.
So let’s imagine that Lewis is giving us a tutorial on apologetics. What would he tell us? But perhaps we need to begin by reflecting on just what we mean when we talk about ‘apologetics’. It’s not a word we use much in everyday conversation. The term apologetics makes a lot more sense when we consider the meaning of the Greek word on which it is based – apologia. An apologia is a ‘defence’ – a reasoned case which proves the innocence of an accused person in court, or demonstrates the truth of an argument or belief. We find this term used in the New Testament – as in 1 Peter 3:15–16, which many see as a classic biblical statement of the importance of apologetics:
In your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defence [apologia] to anyone who demands from you an accounting [logos] for the hope that is in you; yet do this with gentleness and reverence.
The three main tasks of apologetics could be framed in terms of defending, commending and translating our faith.
1. Defending. Here the apologist tries to work out what stops people from believing. Have these obstacles arisen through misunderstandings or misrepresentations? If so, these need to be corrected. Have they arisen because of a genuine difficulty over Christian truth claims? If so, these need to be addressed. Lewis himself, as a former atheist, had a very good understanding of what prevented people from believing, and worked out good responses to each of these concerns – concerns he once took seriously himself.
2. Commending. Here the apologist sets out to allow the truth and relevance of the gospel to be appreciated. The gospel does not need to be made relevant to these audiences. The question concerns how we help the audience to grasp this relevance – for example, by using helpful illustrations, analogies or stories to allow them to connect with it. Lewis proved to be a master of this process, and there is much to be learned from him.
3. Translating. Here the apologist recognises that many of the core ideas and themes of the Christian faith are likely to be unfamiliar. They need to be explained using familiar or accessible images, terms or stories. Through experience, Lewis worked out how he could faithfully and effectively communicate the Christian faith to a culture which was having difficulty in understanding traditional Christian terms and ideas.
We have already told the story of how Lewis became the ‘most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’.1 But there are many Christian converts, of whom few become apologists. So what made Lewis become an apologist? How did he go about doing apologetics? And what might we learn from him as we attempt to defend, commend and translate our faith? Let’s have our tutorial with Lewis and find out.
How Lewis Became an Apologist
In the summer of 1932, Lewis wrote his first book – The Pilgrim’s Regress. It is a difficult work, partly because Lewis had yet to develop his characteristically fluid writing style. The Pilgrim’s Regress is an attempt to explain how Lewis came to faith and the various obstacles he encountered along the way. Yet it is not really a work of apologetics. It is more an explanation of Lewis’s own journey to faith, rather than an attempt to defend or commend the Christian faith.
Perhaps Lewis would never have taken on the mantle of an apologist had he not received an invitation to write a book on how Christians respond to suffering. In 1939 Ashley Sampson, the proprietor of a small London publishing imprint, asked Lewis if he would contribute a volume to a series of books Sampson had edited. The Christian Challenge series was intended to help people outside the Church to make more sense of what Christianity was all about. It brought together some leading Christian voices – such as John Kenneth Mozley, whose 1937 volume, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, was particularly well received – on major Christian themes.
Sampson wrote to Lewis, asking if he would be willing to write on the question of suffering. The topic and title were not up for discussion.2 Lewis suggested that he write anonymously, as he did not feel entirely qualified to write on the topic. However, he had clearly come to the conclusion that since his conversion, he was called to explain the basics of faith to those outside the faith. He accepted the invitation. It was the first work of Christian apologetics that Lewis wrote. It was so well received that he went on to write others.
What Lewis has to say about suffering remains important and deserves a tutorial all to itself! But in this tutorial, we’ll look at the methods Lewis developed of communicating and defending the Christian faith in an increasingly hostile cultural environment. Why was he so successful?
One obvious answer is that Lewis was both a very good speaker and a very good writer. Some good writers are terrible speakers. While this is an important point, it is not particularly helpful. Lewis might well encourage us to become good at writing and speaking, but these are not transferable skills! Yet Lewis can help us in terms of the approaches we adopt and the content of what we say or write. So let’s begin by looking at one of his big themes – the need to learn and use the vocabulary of our audiences.
Translating into the Cultural Vernacular
Lewis was an Oxford academic. By the late 1930s, he had figured out how to lecture to England’s brightest undergraduates and write learned papers and books that would cement his academic reputation. He was able to communicate effectively with an academic audience. But this was a very small audience! What about ordinary churchgoers? What about the British public at large – the kind of person who would listen to the radio in the 1940s? Lewis had no familiarity with this audience at all. He would have bombed, had he tried to speak to them.
But something unexpected happened. When the Second World War broke out, many senior clergy were concerned with ensuring that the British armed forces had access to Christian teaching and encouragement. W.R. Matthews, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, proposed that Lewis be invited to tour Royal Air Force bases and talk to the aircrews about his faith. It would have been a major challenge for Lewis, who was used to teaching some of the best university students in Britain. How would he cope with ‘plodders’ – young men who had left school at sixteen and had no intention of doing anything even remotely academic? Yet whatever misgivings he may have had, Lewis accepted the offer. It was a brilliant move. It provided Lewis with a platform that forced him to translate his ideas into ‘uneducated language’.
His first lecture was at an air force base near Abingdon, just south of Oxford, in May 1941. Lewis thought it was a disaster. Nobody else did. They asked him for more. And more. We can imagine Lewis engaged in discussion and debate with hard-nosed, no-nonsense, tough-talking aircrews, learning how his academic style did not connect with them – and determining to do something about it. It was not long before Lewis was able to figure out how to express himself so that he could connect with this new audience.
By the end of the Second World War, Lewis was firmly established as one of the most effective popular speakers on Christianity, attracting huge radio audiences for his series of talks on Christianity. Nor was his success limited to speaking. Lewis was able to adapt his new skill to writing as well. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) was clunky and ponderous. The Screwtape Letters (1942), however, showed off Lewis’s new skills as a communicator – his winsome, engaging and witty prose – and won him a huge readership.
So what lessons did Lewis learn? And how can we learn from his success? Happily, Lewis gave a lecture on exactly this topic to clergy and youth leaders in Wales in 1945, in which he explained something about the insights and wisdom that he had to learn the hard way. Lewis would hammer home two points during our tutorial.
First, he would insist that we discover how ordinary people speak: ‘We must learn the language of our audience.’3 And how are we to do this? ‘You have to find out by experience.’
Lewis is asking us to listen before we speak. We need to work out what words people use, the ideas that they find helpful, and the analogies and stories that connect with them. Then we need to weave these into what we say.
Second, having learned the language of our audience, we need to translate what we want to say into that language. As Lewis put it, we need to ‘translate every bit of [our] Theology into the vernacular’.4 This is not easy, Lewis concedes. But it is essential. Not only does it ensure that we can connect with our audiences. It also means that we have understood our own ideas. If we can’t translate our thoughts into ordinary language, Lewis playfully suggests, then our thoughts are confused. ‘Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.’
So what kind of translation does Lewis have in mind? First, he’s asking us to explain what technical words mean. We need to unpack words such as incarnation and atonement, using ordinary language to help people appreciate what they mean. But second, he’s inviting us to use other genres to open these terms up. We could tell a story to unpack the doctrine of the incarnation – as Lewis himself did so effectively in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Indeed, many Lewis scholars would argue that Lewis presents Christianity in a form that appeals to reason in Mere Christianity and in a form that appeals to the imagination in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s more to it than that, but this helps us work out what he had in mind.
Lewis himself was brilliant at appealing to the imagination, spicing up his famous wartime Broadcast Talks with neat illustrations and analogies that helped him to make his points. The great lecture theatres of Oxford demanded one way of communicating – a technique that Lewis had mastered. Popular communication demanded something rather different. And Lewis mastered this as well. He was ‘bilingual’ in that he could say the same thing in one way to one audience, and in another way to a different audience.
Reflecting on Mere Christianity
Polls suggest that Lewis’s Mere Christianity, published in 1952, was one of the most influential and respected Christian books of the twentieth century. It has been enormously influential in bringing some to faith and in sustaining the faith of others. The book is basically an edited version of the four series of talks that Lewis gave for the BBC during the Second World War. These talks, which had been highly successful, now found a new audience. Let’s look at this classic work and see what we can learn from it.
In preparing for these talks, Lewis went to considerable trouble to ‘learn the language of his audience’. These talks were not an academic speaking down to his listeners, using words they could not understand about things that did not interest them. Lewis spoke with clarity and conviction. To put it simply: Lewis connected with his audience – both in the original radio talks and subsequently in Mere Christianity. Each chapter of Mere Christianity is short and self-contained, just like the original talks.
Yet what Lewis presented in Mere Christianity was not a hodgepodge of arguments about faith. As Lewis’s Oxford colleague Austin Farrer perceptively remarked, Lewis makes us ‘think we are listening to an argument’, when in reality ‘we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction’.5 This vision appeals to the human longing for truth, beauty and goodness. Lewis’s achievement is to show that what we observe and experience ‘fits in’ with the idea of God.
As we discussed in our first conversation with Lewis, he saw Christianity as the ‘big picture’ which weaves together the strands of experience and observation into a compelling pattern. The first part of Mere Christianity is titled ‘Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’. It is important to note the carefully chosen term clue. What Lewis is noting is that the world is emblazoned with such clues, none of which proves anything individually, but which taken together give a cumulative case for believing in God. These clues are the threads that make up the great pattern of the universe.
Mere Christianity begins with an invitation to reflect on two people having a dispute. Lewis argues that determining who is right and who is wrong depends on recognising some standard which both parties agree is binding and authoritative. Lewis makes the case that we are all aware of an objective standard to which we appeal and which we expect others to observe, a ‘real law which we did not invent, and which we know we ought to obey’.6
Yet although everyone knows about this law, everyone still fails to live up to it. Lewis thus suggests that ‘the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in’ consists in our knowledge of a moral law and an awareness of our failure to observe it.7 This awareness ought to ‘arouse our suspicions’ that there ‘is Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong’.8 Lewis suggests that this points to an ordering mind governing the universe – which fits comfortably with the Christian idea of God.
The second line of argument concerns our experience of longing. It is an approach that Lewis had earlier developed in his sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, preached at Oxford in 1941. Lewis reworked this argument for the purposes of his Broadcast Talks, making it much easier to understand. His argument can be summarised like this: we all long for something, only to find our hopes dashed and frustrated when we actually achieve or attain it. So how is this common human experience to be interpreted? Lewis argues that these earthly longings are ‘only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage’ of our true homeland.9 He develops an ‘argument from desire’, suggesting that every natural desire has a corresponding object and is satisfied only when this object is attained or experienced. This natural desire for transcendent fulfilment cannot be attained through anything in the present world, leading to the suggestion that it could be satisfied beyond the present world, in a world towards which the present order of things points.
Lewis argues that the Christian faith interprets this longing as a clue to the true goal of human nature. God is the ultimate end of the human soul, the sole source of human happiness and joy. Just as physical hunger points to a real human need which can be met through food, so this spiritual hunger corresponds to a real need which can be met through God. ‘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.’ Most people, Lewis argues, are aware of a deep sense of longing within themselves which cannot be satisfied by anything transient or created. Like right and wrong, this sense of longing is thus a clue to the meaning of the universe.
In his arguments from both morality and desire, Lewis appeals to the capacity of Christianity to ‘fit’ what we observe and experience. This is integral to Lewis’s approach to apologetics, precisely because Lewis himself found it so persuasive and helpful a tool for making sense of things. The Christian faith provides a map that is found to fit in well with what we observe around us and experience within us. Again, perhaps this approach is expressed most succinctly in the famous quote from a wartime talk Lewis gave to the Socratic Club in Oxford: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen – not just because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.’10
For Lewis, the kind of ‘sense making’ offered by the Christian vision of reality is about discerning a resonance between the theory and the way the world seems to be. Though Lewis uses surprisingly few musical analogies in his published writings, his approach could be described as enabling the believer to hear the harmonics of the cosmos and to realise that it fits together aesthetically – even if there are a few logical loose ends that still need to be tied up.
So do Lewis’s arguments in Mere Christianity still work? Some, it must be said, are showing their age, especially when Lewis makes assumptions about the moral values of his age. Yet his approaches still work remarkably well, raising questions about the deeper meaning of life that continue to speak to many – but not all – today. Both Lewis’s ‘argument from morality’ and his ‘argument from desire’ continue to speak deeply, even if we might need to rephrase them and adapt their imagery to our own day and age. Lewis continues to evoke a sense of intrigue, interest and even wistfulness on the part of many of his readers.
Perhaps one of the lessons that we can learn from our tutorial with Lewis is that apologetics is at its best when it makes people wish that Christianity were true – by showing them its power to excite the imagination, to make sense of things and to bring stability, security and meaning to life. The final stage is to show people that it is true!
Reason in Apologetics
As we noted earlier, Lewis was an atheist himself while a student at Oxford University. His move away from atheism, initially to theism and then to Christianity, partly reflected his growing disenchantment with the imaginative deficiency of a godless world. It was dull and drab. He found that the ‘glib and shallow rationalism’ he had adopted was intellectually unpersuasive and existentially unsatisfying.
Lewis believed that Christianity was reasonable. He also believed that reason could not fully grasp the richness of the Christian faith. In 1926, while beginning to move away from atheism, Lewis commented to a friend that he was now convinced that reason was ‘utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things’.11 What really mattered lay beyond reason’s ability to grasp it – even if it proved to be eminently reasonable once it was grasped. Does Lewis contradict himself here? Surely not. The point Lewis is making is that there are limits to what we can work out about the meaning of life for ourselves. He’s right. Let me try to explain.
When I was young, I was very interested in astronomy. I had a little telescope, and enjoyed looking at the moons of the planet Jupiter and watching the slow movements of the planets against the background of the stars. Once I tracked the movement of the planet Mars for a period of weeks. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Mars drifted eastwards for several nights, then seemed to stop and move westwards. Eventually, it moved eastwards again.12 I was baffled.
Having completely failed to make sense of this, I asked my science teacher to explain it to me. He drew some diagrams to show me the relative motions of the earth and Mars. It was all about the earth rotating round the sun faster than Mars. After about five minutes, I got it. I could see what was happening. The penny had dropped. But someone had to tell me. My teacher gave me a framework for understanding what I had seen, and it made perfect sense. I couldn’t figure it out for myself, but when someone wiser than me explained it, I could see it with clarity.
That’s the point Lewis is trying to make. Christianity gives us a ‘big picture’ that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves. But once we are given it, we discover just how much sense it makes. When Lewis tells us that faith is both ‘beyond reason’ and ‘reasonable’, he means that we need to be told and shown the way things really are. Yet once we have been given this way of seeing things, we discover just how much sense it makes.
Lewis developed approaches to apologetics based on an appeal to reason during the 1940s and early 1950s. Both Miracles and Mere Christianity argue that the Christian faith makes more sense of things than its eligious or secular alternatives.
Lewis was quite clear that reason was unable to prove the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith. But it could nevertheless point us in the right direction. Especially in Mere Christianity, Lewis’s concern was to explore what could be worked out about God ‘on our own steam’, instead of ‘taking anything from the Bible or the Churches’.13 Lewis wanted to be able to mount a public demonstration of the reasonableness of Christianity without appealing to any specifically Christian resources. Instead, he draws on common human experience and reflection about the world. Lewis’s approach is to show how intelligent reflection on the experiences of life strongly suggests – but does not prove – that there is a God.
To demonstrate the reasonableness of faith does not mean proving every article of Christian belief. Rather, it means showing that there are good grounds that these beliefs are trustworthy and reliable. For Lewis, the Christian faith makes sense of what we observe and experience, even if it cannot offer unassailable and incorrigible proof of its truths.
So why does Lewis think this is important? He wants to sweep away a series of roadblocks to faith – one of which is the belief that faith is irrational. This was a big issue back in Lewis’s day, and it remains so today. In the 2000s, the movement known as the ‘New Atheism’ rose briefly to prominence. This aggressive godlessness argues that religious belief is irrational and dangerous. Belief in God is about running away from reality, this ‘New Atheism’ holds, and about seeking refuge in toxic delusions that warp people’s minds and make them do bad things. Lewis rightly sees that the rationality of belief in God has to be proclaimed and defended in both private and public.
Lewis’s point is fair. Christians can’t just tell one another that their faith makes sense. They’ve got to get that message over to their culture at large. For Lewis, apologetics thus aims to create and sustain ‘an intellectual (and imaginative) climate favourable to Christianity’.14 If we fail to do so, we will lose public credibility.
If the intellectual climate is such that, when a man comes to the crisis at which he must accept or reject Christ, his reason and imagination are not on the wrong side, then his conflict will be fought out under favourable conditions. Those who help to produce and spread such a climate are therefore doing useful work.15
Much the same point was made more clearly by Lewis’s close friend, the Oxford theologian and New Testament scholar Austin Farrer. In an article reflecting on why Lewis was so successful as an apologist, Farrer pointed out that demonstrating the reasonableness of faith was vital in securing its cultural acceptance.
Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.16
Lewis enriches our vision of apologetics, allowing us to affirm that Christianity makes sense, without limiting it to the ‘glib and shallow’ rationalism that he himself once knew as an atheist. Reason and imagination are woven together, using a rich concept of truth which emphasises how we come to see things properly and grasp their inner coherence. Truth, beauty and goodness all have their part to play in Lewis’s apologetics. Such an ‘imaginative apologetics’ allows us to affirm the reasonableness of faith, while at the same time displaying its power to captivate the imagination. Christian churches need to ensure that their preaching, witness and worship express this rich vision of reality and lead others to wonder how they can go ‘further up and further in’ to the landscape of faith.
The Imagination and Apologetics
In 1946, Lewis was awarded the first of five honorary degrees – a doctorate of divinity from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Professor Donald M. Baillie, speaking at the award ceremony on behalf of the university’s Faculty of Divinity, explained the reason for their decision to honour Lewis in this way. Lewis, he declared, had ‘succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to professional theologians’, and had ‘arranged a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination’.17
Baillie was accurate in his assessment of Lewis’s significance. We’ve noted how Lewis had secured a huge readership for his popular religious writings. But what did Baillie mean by ‘a new kind of marriage between theological reflection and poetic imagination’? And what is its relevance to apologetics?
We’ve already seen how Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia make an appeal to the imagination. In an earlier meeting, we looked at the way in which Lewis subverted Sigmund Freud’s argument that God was merely a wish-fulfilment (see page 67). Lewis’s tale of the sun and the lamp is not so much a logical argument as a new way of seeing things. Lewis gives us a way of realising that the argument that the sun is just an imaginary bigger and better lamp sounds clever – but is just plain wrong. So what of the related argument that Aslan is just an imaginary bigger and better cat? Or that God is just an imaginary bigger and better father? Lewis leaves us to work this out for ourselves. But it’s not hard to work out where his approach takes us.
To reiterate a point we touched on earlier, Lewis sees reason and imagination as existing in a collaborative, not competitive, relationship. That’s one of the reasons why Lewis uses analogies so much in his apologetics. Lewis wants us to see how some observation or experience fits within a Christian way of looking at things. It is like trying on a hat or shirt for size and looking at ourselves in a mirror. How well does it fit? How many of our observations of the world can a theory accommodate, and how persuasively? It is basically about seeing how our experiences of desire fit a Christian framework.
Take Lewis’s ‘argument from desire’. He basically argues that we experience desires that nothing in this world seems able to satisfy. And when we see these experiences through the lens of the Christian faith, we realise that this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect if Christianity were true. Christianity tells us that this is not our true home and that we were created for heaven. For Lewis, Christianity provides a clear way of seeing our desires: ‘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 invites his audience to see their experiences through a set of Christian spectacles and notice how these bring what might otherwise seem to be fuzzy or blurred into sharp focus.
Or consider his ‘argument from morality’. This is sometimes portrayed in ridiculously simplistic terms – for example, ‘experiencing a sense of moral obligation proves there is a God’. Lewis did not say this, and did not think this. As with the ‘argument from desire’, his argument is rather that the common human experience of a sense of moral obligation is easily and naturally accommodated within a Christian framework. The Christian lens brings things into focus. It enlightens the landscape of reality, allowing us to see how God, desire and morality are all held together within a greater scheme of things.
Lewis helps us to appreciate that apologetics need not take the form of deductive argument. Instead, apologetics can be an invitation to step into the Christian way of seeing things and explore how things look when seen from its standpoint. Lewis’s approach says, ‘Try seeing things this way!’ If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason. Yet once seen, its intrinsic rationality can be appreciated.
Again, Lewis’s explicit appeal to reason involves an implicit appeal to the imagination. This may explain why Lewis’s approach is still so fresh and popular despite its age. It appeals to both modern and postmodern outlooks. Lewis’s imaginative reasoning bridges the chasm between modernity and postmodernity, insisting that both reason and imagination have their argumentative strengths because they are both part of a greater whole.
It’s time to end this tutorial. But Lewis might well have one final word of advice to give us before we go our separate ways. A theme that often emerges in Lewis’s writings of the late 1940s is that apologetics is exhausting and draining. Lewis makes this point explicitly in his 1945 lecture ‘Christian Apologetics’, in which he remarks that ‘nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist’. Why? Not because there is anything irrational or incoherent about the Christian faith. It is, Lewis explains, the act of defending a doctrine that makes it seem ‘spectral’ or even ‘unreal’.18 Perhaps this helps us understand why Lewis later focused on works that explored the riches of faith – such as The Four Loves (1960). Lewis would remind us that apologists need to be looked after. They get spiritually drained.
This gives us an idea for what we might talk about next. Lewis established his reputation as an apologist with The Problem of Pain. So what can we learn from his approach to human suffering? We’ll find out later. But there’s another theme that we need to look at first. Lewis was a professional educationalist, who realised the importance of a deep immersion in knowledge for both culture and faith. So let’s imagine that we’re going to have lunch with Lewis, perhaps at The Eagle and Child in Oxford. What would he have to say about the importance of education?
