C.S. Lewis: The Plain Old Faith, Made Clear

C.S. Lewis (1898 to 1963) was an Oxford and Cambridge scholar, a former atheist who came to faith "kicking, struggling, resentful," and then became the most beloved explainer of Christianity the modern world has known. He invented almost no doctrine; that was the point. He took the faith the whole church has always held and made it plain, reasonable, and luminous for people who thought they had outgrown it. On this site he is the modern accessible voice of the old consensus, standing in the same line as the early fathers, only speaking our language.

Who Christ is: the trilemma

Lewis's most famous argument cut off the comfortable modern escape that Jesus was merely a great moral teacher. Read what He actually claimed, Lewis said, and that option vanishes:

Liar, lunatic, or Lord, but not merely a wise man. It is the modern form of the question Jesus Himself pressed: "whom say ye that I am?" (Matthew 16:15; see The Word Made Flesh).

Critics add a fourth door, and it deserves to be opened rather than ignored: or Legend, that the Gospels themselves invented or inflated the claims, so there is no historical Jesus behind them to corner. It is the strongest form of the objection, and also the one with the clearest answer: the timeline. The earliest confession of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3–7) is creedal material datable to within a few years of the events, far too early for legend to overwrite a remembered man. The accounts circulated while eyewitnesses, friendly and hostile, were still alive to contradict them. And legend does not manufacture its own embarrassments, the disciples' cowardice, the women as the first witnesses in a culture that discounted their word. Close the Legend door on the evidence, and the trilemma stands.

The argument from longing

Lewis noticed a desire in himself that nothing on earth ever satisfied, a stab of joy that always pointed past its object. He drew the quiet, devastating conclusion:

It is Augustine's "our heart is restless until it rests in Thee," and Ecclesiastes' "he hath set the world in their heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11), recovered for a skeptical age. And he warned that the real problem is not that our desires are too strong but too weak: "we are far too easily pleased," he wrote, like a child making mud pies in a slum "because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."

The moral argument: a straight line behind the crooked

The road that led Lewis into faith ran straight through the thing he had used against it. He had been an atheist partly on the grounds that the universe was so cruel and unjust; but the harder he pressed that objection, the more it turned in his hand:

This is the opening move of Mere Christianity, what Lewis called the Law of Human Nature. People everywhere appeal to a standard of fair play they expect each other to already know, even as they break it, and no one is really content to treat right and wrong as a mere matter of taste. That nagging ought, he argued, is not something we invented but something pressing on us from outside, the nearest thing to a clue the universe gives about its Maker. It is just what Paul says is written even on the hearts of those who never had the Scriptures: that the Gentiles "do by nature the things contained in the law," and so "shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness" (Romans 2:14–15).

So Lewis followed the crooked line back to the straight one, and the straight one back to its Source. A real injustice presupposes a real justice; a real justice presupposes something more like a mind than like the blind matter he had wanted to believe in. The very sword he had raised against God turned out to have God's fingerprints on the hilt.

The argument from reason: trusting the thinker behind thought

If the moral argument followed the crooked line of justice back to its Source, the argument from reason does the same with thought itself. Lewis pressed a hard question at materialism: if the mind is only atoms colliding by blind physical law, then the very reasoning that arrived at "there is no God" is itself just a chemical accident, and gives us no reason to trust it. The naturalist has to saw off the branch he is sitting on:

Reason cannot be the accidental by-product of unreasoning matter and still be trusted to find truth; valid thinking points back to a Mind it came from. It is John's ancient claim turned into an argument: the universe did not begin in blind matter but in Logos, in Reason Himself, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:1–3; see The Word Made Flesh).

The great sin, and the weight of every soul

Lewis named pride "the great sin," the one that turns even religion rotten, "the complete anti-God state of mind." And against the modern habit of treating people as a faceless mass, he set the staggering Christian truth that there is no such thing as an ordinary person:

Forgiveness: forgiving the inexcusable

Lewis thought forgiveness one of the plainest Christian duties and one of the hardest to actually do. We recite "the forgiveness of sins" in the Creed without thinking, he said, and then find the real test not in some grand pardon but in "the incessant provocations of daily life." His sharpest move was to separate forgiving from excusing. Much of what we call forgiving is only a hunt for excuses, and where a thing can be wholly excused there is nothing left to forgive. Real forgiveness begins exactly where the excuses run out, looking the inexcusable full in the face and releasing it anyway:

It is the Lord's Prayer read without flinching. Christ joined our pardon and our pardoning, and would not let us pull them apart: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:14–15). The order is the gospel's own. The forgiveness we extend never earns God's, but it is the surest sign that His grace has reached us, the inexcusable in us pardoned first, and then flowing on through us to the next person who has wronged us.

Charity: the vulnerability of love

Against an age that prizes safety and detachment, Lewis insisted that love by its very nature opens us to wounding, and that this is not a flaw in love but its cost. The only way to stay perfectly safe from love's hurts, he warned, is to refuse to love at all, and that refusal is itself a kind of death:

The locked, loveless heart does not stay safe; sealed away from every risk it only hardens. And the willingness to be wounded for love's sake is no mere sentiment but the very image of God, whose love was costly first: "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world ... Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:9–10; see loving the church you disagree with). To love as God loves is to accept the wound, because He accepted it first.

The problem of pain: God's megaphone

Lewis did not pretend suffering away; his most personal book of apologetics wrestled it head on. He granted that pain is a real evil and an honest objection to faith, yet he saw that it does what comfort never can, breaking through our deafness and refusing to be ignored:

It is no glib answer, and Lewis knew it: the megaphone, he admitted, is a terrible instrument that some only resent and that can harden as easily as it wakes. But for those it does rouse, the affliction works a strange mercy, the very thing the psalmist confessed: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes" (Psalm 119:71; see suffering). Years later, in his own grief at his wife's death, Lewis would meet this same problem from the inside, no longer a theory but a wound.

The two destinies, and the dignity of the will

Lewis refused both the sentimental hope that no one is finally lost and the caricature of a God who hurls the unwilling into the dark. In The Great Divorce he set the alternative as a choice God honors all the way down:

It is a hard mercy and a high view of the creature. God so respects the will He gave that He will not finally drag a soul into a joy it has spent its whole life refusing; the door of hell, as Lewis pictured it elsewhere, is locked from the inside. It is the seriousness behind Joshua's old summons, "choose you this day whom ye will serve" (Joshua 24:15), and behind the narrow and wide gates of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:13–14; see free will). Lewis even closes the passage by borrowing Christ's own promise, that those who seek will find, and to those who knock it will be opened.

Where this lands

Read Lewis when faith feels embarrassing to the modern mind, when you suspect you must choose between being thoughtful and being a believer. He is living proof you need not. He reasoned his way out of atheism and into the plain old creed, and then spent his life handing it to others in words a child can love and a philosopher cannot dismiss. He points, always, away from himself and back to the faith once delivered, the same faith the martyrs died for, made clear enough to live on.

Related: The Screwtape tribute, Kierkegaard, The Word Made Flesh, and What the Early Church Confessed. C.S. Lewis died in 1963 and his works remain in copyright; the short quotations here are offered under fair use, attributed to their works. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.