CHAPTER 3
Undragoned
From the Editor: Many people huff and puff about C.S. Lewis’s theology. They say that his artful explanations often skew truth or miscommunicate. People have pinned him as unorthodox, or off the mark. In this short chapter, John Piper and David Mathis help us to take a charitable view of Lewis and consider this theology objectively.
Was C.S. Lewis Full of Contradictions?
It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, C. S. Lewis is perhaps the most insightful muddler you will ever read. He, along with Chesterton, has the capacity to edify you profoundly at the very moment he is saying things to make you wrench at your head in exasperation.
I am thinking here of a book such as Reflections on the Psalms. But when he is on, which is almost always, you can be done with the wrenching and just enjoy the edification. So there’s that.
Having said this, in The Screwtape Letters Lewis takes a jab at modern man, who is accustomed to carrying around a mass of contradictions: “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together in his head.”
And Owen Barfield once said that Lewis himself was utterly unlike this, saying that what Lewis thought about everything was contained in what he said about anything.
I add this because I believe that there are many times when we are wrenching at our heads in exasperation over Lewis while the heavenly host is looking down on us, wrenching at their heads—if angels do that.
There will be times when we are tempted to write off something in Lewis as a simple contradiction, when we are the ones who have not thought very deeply about what we are saying.
Michael Ward has shown in Planet Narnia that Lewis could look like he was just dashing something off when he was actually building an impressive structure on deep foundations. So let us feel free to differ with him, but let’s also take care not to be patronizing.
Make no mistake, Lewis had an intentional project, and that project is still a gathering river, one which shows no sign of diminishing. It is already astonishingly wide, and it is only down as far as Vicksburg. We ought not to be patronizing in how we “forgive” Lewis’s little side ventures and do some more serious thinking about how he managed to pull off something like this massive project.
Peter Escalante has argued—in an outstanding presentation on Italian humanism and its cultural impact, represented by men like Dante—the following:
Can any of you think of outstanding examples in our own time of the Italian humanist style? Let me give a checklist: 1) a trained philologist devoted to comprehensive Christian wisdom, 2) exploring and expressing the themes of that wisdom in widely various literary genres and for a while abstaining from formal systematic presentation, 3) addressing the general public rather than a professional elite, 4) passionately concerned about the whole commonwealth, and 5) with a vision of the cosmos which has poiesis as its very heart?
Right. The answer is C. S. Lewis.
How Did C.S. Lewis View Salvation?
With all of this said, in what might appear to be a somewhat desultory beginning, I think we should all exhort me to pull it together and try to bring in some razor-sharp focus. So let’s begin our discussion of Lewis’s view of salvation by looking at Lewis’s view of his own salvation.
The whole issue really boils down to how you understand the grace of God. Is salvation a cooperative affair, or does God simply intervene to bless us by taking the initiative? Was Lazarus raised from the dead in a semi-Pelagian fashion, with Lazarus pushing and Jesus pulling, or not?
Watch C. S. Lewis describe a moment in his own conversion:
In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.”
As Ransom discovered on Perelandra, freedom and necessity are actually the same thing. Lewis had this to say about freedom and grace: “When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will.”
Moving to the experience of conversion as it was experienced by others, Lewis describes the experience of conversion as it was felt by “an early Protestant.” He says this: “All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace.” He is clearly in sympathy with this, for this is how he experienced it.
Understanding C.S. Lewis’s Religious Background
Now if we want to pursue this discussion, keep in mind that terms do not always stay put in history. When we refer to Calvinism today, we are usually talking about soteriology—the five points. Thus it is that a man can be a Calvinist and also be a dispensationalist, a charismatic, or even a Presbyterian. That last has been known to happen. I’ve met some.
But during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, identifying as a Calvinist was more about ecclesiology, including your view of the sacraments.
In this sense, a bunch of the non-Calvinists (their sense) were all Calvinists (our sense). One of the historiographical fiascos caused by the Oxford Movement happened as the result of their vain attempt to pretend that the Church of England was not part of the Continental Reformed community of churches—but it manifestly was.
Lewis was a conservative Anglican churchman, who understood the Thirty-Nine Articles in their original context, and they were robustly Calvinistic. He was thoroughly sympathetic with theologians such as Hooker, Jewel, or Andrews who were not exactly Victorian Anglo-Catholics.
They were Protestants, and Calvinists in a broad sense. They were a key part of the Reformed churches of Europe, which is exactly where they wanted to be. Lewis, as a literary historian, knew what they were teaching, and he identified with them.
But as a natural-born irenicist, he also wanted to keep the peace for the sake of contemporary inter-Anglican affairs. This meant that the precise historical nature of the founding of the Church of England sometimes got a bit blurred. But even with that said, Lewis is far more helpful on this period than many who ought to know better.
Speaking of ecclesiology, remember the vivid picture of the church “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” And also remember that Lewis’s most famous phrase—mere Christianity—is taken from Baxter. This is plainly Protestant ecclesiology.