(2 of 2)
Like Vanauken, Lewis started out an atheist—one reason his approach to religion appeals to outsiders. After years of struggle he "admitted that God was God" and knelt to pray one night, "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." At that point, two years before the Whipsnade Zoo outing, he was a theist but not yet a Christian. Prodded by friends, including a fellow Oxford don, Author (Lord of the Rings) J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis subsequently decided that the Christ story is a myth like other great myths, but with the "tremendous difference that it really happened."
Once convinced that in Jesus Christ "myth became fact," Lewis turned to convincing others. Two of his books as amateur theologian put many professionals to shame: The Problem of Pain (1940), an explanation of how a benevolent God can permit evil to exist; and Miracles (1947), a case for the plausibility of the supernatural. In The Screwtape Letters (1942), his witty little classic, Lewis has a veteran devil advise on how to ensnare souls for "Our Father below." Small sins were often best. Quoth Screwtape: "Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one."
The most popular Lewis book of the 1970s is Mere Christianity (1952), the work of straightforward evangelism that snatched White House Felon Charles Colson out of Screwtape's dominion. This highly original statement of wholly unoriginal doctrine was first f prepared as a series of talks "on the BBC. Lewis, whose |s prose comes clad in the crisp white linen of logic, starts from mankind's inherent sense of right and wrong. Think about this, Lewis says: men feel wet when they fall into water; fish do not. If men feel "wet"—alien—in a world where evil abounds, he reasons, an unseen kingdom of Tightness must exist, and that means God. From there Lewis proceeds to explain evil via the Fall of Man and to offer Christ as the solution. In one passage Lewis rejects the "foolish" idea that Jesus was just a "great moral teacher." No, he says, this was One who claimed to forgive sins and declared that he would judge the world. "Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman."
Lewis, an Anglican, has always had a following among Roman Catholics. But the major Lewis shrine exists at a collection on British Christian writers (including Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers) at Wheaton College in Illinois, a staunchly Evangelical Protestant school. In Curator Clyde S. Kilby's vault are many unpublished Lewis treasures: boyhood writings, diaries and 1,000 of his letters, including lifelong correspondence with Arthur Greeves, a friend from his Belfast youth.
The Greeves letters are being edited by Walter Hooper, a U.S. Episcopal priest who lives in Oxford as literary executor of the Lewis estate. Hooper has an explanation for Lewis' growing popularity. He thinks the West is moving away from materialism and liberalism and needs "a coherent, universal faith, something permanent in a world of seeming chaos." No one better fits that need than C.S. Lewis, who once said, "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date." -