C. S. Lewis’ reputation for being unimpressed with the modern world, with the pretensions of newness, is well established. Long before Thomas Oden coined the phrase modern-chauvinism and then critiqued its underlying assumptions, Lewis understood and rejected its reflexive instincts. Namely, the default assumption that newer ideas and practices are necessarily superior to older ones.
Now […]

I am off to Britain and Scotland and, for a day, to Rome. It is a study tour for Midwestern Baptist Seminary Students. My Lewis book accounts for my presence on the trip. I am looking forward to the Lewis sites. I doubt that I will be able to blog again until June 4, but […]

The following excerpt from Christianity and Culture of 1940 is one example among many of Lewis’ fascinating and nuanced takes on the relationship between culture and Christianity (in this case culture understood as study and enjoyment of the arts):
“There is another way in which [culture] may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated […]

C.S. Lewis was not known for aggressive proselytizing during his tutorial sessions at Oxford and Cambridge. J.I. Packer once had the privilege of attending a Lewis lecture. “There was no clue that the man might be a Christian” Packer reports. There is nothing new here. It has long been known that Lewis, as Packer puts […]

It is well known that C.S. Lewis grieved over the spectacle of public squabbles between professing Christians and took great pains to avoid being drawn into such internecine strife himself. From his conversion forward Lewis exhibited consistent protectiveness of Christian unity. Not at the expense of Christian orthodoxy, but precisely for its defense. Note this […]

How did it happen that C.S. Lewis moved to the right rather than to the left as time passed? The more serious and focused an academic he became, the more seasoned a scholar he proved to be, the less impressed he was with liberalism or perhaps we might say, with the so-called “modern” approaches to […]

“Mystery.” I encounter this word periodically in my research of the emerging church movement and the emergent conversation. D.A. Carson is correct that a protest posture shapes many of the leaders and shapers of this broad and diverse phenomenon (I think this protest aspect accounts for much of what is most unattractive in the movement […]

*** “I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked ‘goodness’ so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. […]

***I suppose I first learned of the inevitable idolatrous tendency of protestant liberalism (and apologetic approaches to theology generally) from Karl Barth. He convinced me that unless we allow the God-borne witness to in Holy Scripture to speak for Himself, we find ourselves speaking in His place, and so, wittingly or not, we make a […]

***Lewis modeled the retention of myth and story as fit instruments for Christian expression, entertainment, inquiry, and instruction. He did so against the backdrop of the deadening, spirit-evacuating tendencies of the higher critical approaches to history and the Bible so dominant at the time. Lewis did so earlier, more impressively, and with more faithfulness to […]