The Oxbridge Evangelist

Motivations, Practices, and Legacy of C.S. Lewis

Gehring

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498290074
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In The Oxbridge Evangelist: Motivations, Practices, and Legacy of C. S. Lewis, Michael Gehring examines the evangelistic practices of one of the most significant lay evangelists of the twentieth century. In the early 1930s not many who knew Lewis would have guessed that he would become such a significant evangelist. He has left an evangelistic legacy that has influenced millions across the world. Yet Lewis scholarship has not given sufficient attention to this crucial aspect of his legacy. This work examines Lewis's loss and recovery of faith, and it shows how his experience heightened his own awareness of the loss of the Christian faith in England. Because of his ability to identify with others, Lewis engaged in the work of evangelism with uncanny skill. This work required singular courage on his part; it cost him dearly professionally and in his relationships. Gehring critically explores Lewis's motivations, practices, and legacy of evangelism. In doing so he provides penetrating insight for those interested in the theory and practice of evangelism in a culture that too readily leaves it to the crazies of the Christian tradition or relegates it to the margins of church life.

Chapter One

C. S. Lewis: An Unusual Evangelist

1.1 Introduction: Lewis’s Evangelistic Legacy

Clive Staples Lewis is one of the most significant lay evangelists of the twentieth century. In Surprised by Joy Lewis detailed his spiritual journey from nominal Christianity to atheism, from atheism to idealism, from idealism to theism, and from theism to Christianity. He stated that he embraced belief in a personal God during the Trinity Term of 1929 and became a Christian in 1931. Once he became a Christian, Lewis was not content to rest believing that he had simply arrived at his religious destination, but felt the need to share his religious beliefs with others. George Sayer, who was a student of Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later a lifelong friend, wrote, “He devoted himself to developing and strengthening his belief, and, almost from the year of his conversion, he wanted to become an evangelist for the Christian faith.”1 Lewis did not enter into the field of evangelism because he was dispatched by his church, nor did he have an official endorsement from his denomination to engage in this Christian work. As will be demonstrated later, many of Lewis’s opportunities to engage in evangelism were the result of invitations yet, in some sense, it would not be completely inaccurate to say Lewis was a self-appointed evangelist.

A year after his conversion to Christianity, on a fortnight-long vacation in Belfast, Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and in allegorical form told the story of how the vision of the Island eventually led the protagonist John to embrace belief in the Landlord (God). For Lewis, aesthetic intuition was an avenue for discovering the reality of belief in a personal God. He continued to engage in his literary apostolate and within ten years of his conversion he was addressing the nation on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), giving talks on basic Christianity.

Lewis’s impact as an evangelist was not limited to the United Kingdom. George Anderson wrote in The Christian Century in 1946,

When Christian writers of the future discuss the humanism of the twentieth century, they will be compelled to recognize as one of its strongest opponents this plain layman. Others have roused the religious thinking of England’s people—Newman, Pusey and Wesley; but they were clergymen, and the audiences of the three together did not equal that which hangs on the words of this quiet young Oxford don.2

Few who knew Lewis personally would have described him as “quiet.” Many would have described him as argumentative, and some even referred to him as a bully.3 In 1947 Lewis graced the cover of Time, and was dubbed by the magazine as “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.”4 Chad Walsh stated, “No Christian apologist in the English-speaking world is today as much talked about and argued about as C. S. Lewis.”5 Little could these writers know just how prophetic their words not only were, but would become.

Lewis himself had no inkling about how long-lasting and how widely felt would be the evangelistic legacy that he was leaving. Walter Hooper, who served as Lewis’s secretary in the summer of 1963, recounts a conversation he had with Lewis in which Lewis shared what he thought would be the future of his works. In a paper presented at the University of Granada in 1998, on the occasion of the centenary of Lewis’s birth, Hooper said,

I think I have not acted with unnecessary haste in waiting thirty-five years to tell the world that I won an argument with Lewis. Not many could make that claim. He was worried about what his brother would live on when he died, and this because he was sure that upon his own death his books would stop selling. ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘What’d you mean, ‘no’?’ he said. ‘This happens’, he said, ‘to nearly all authors. After they die their books sell for a while, and then trail off to nothing’. ‘But not yours!’ I said. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Because they are too good—and people are not that stupid’.6

Hooper has more than won that argument with Lewis.

Lewis’s numbers are staggering. It is estimated that his books have sold more than 200 million copies and have been published in forty-one different languages. His impact is measured in more than just book sales.7 Countless Christians have had their faith strengthened by his works, and many others have converted to Christianity in part due to him.8 The Ivy League educated lawyer and special counsel to President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson, converted to Christianity in 1973 after reading Mere Christianity. Colson stated, “Lewis’s logic was so utterly compelling that I was left with no recourse but to accept the reality of the God who is and who has revealed himself through Jesus Christ.”9 Francis Collins, a physician and geneticist who became the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, recounted how, while in medical school, his atheistic faith crumbled upon reading Mere Christianity. Collins wrote, “So I read Mere Christianity, and my materialist view was quickly laid to ruins.”10 Tom Monaghan, the billionaire founder of Domino’s Pizza, credited the chapter on pride in Mere Christianity as the tool which created for him a massive change of life and values. He wrote that Lewis’s words hit him between the eyes, and as a result he “took a millionaire’s vow of poverty.”11 John Beversluis, author of the classic work C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, noted that millions claim either that Lewis’s works were responsible for their conversion to Christianity or else helped them take it more seriously, and added, “Even the most partisan estimates of his influence are likely to be too conservative.”12

Lewis’s influence is indeed considerable. The American Evangelical magazine Christianity Today in 1998 dubbed the non-evangelical Lewis “the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism.”13 Time magazine on its list of the best children’s books of the twentieth century placed The Chronicles of Narnia in second place.14 Christian History named Lewis in the list of “The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century.”15 Lewis ranked sixth, and was the first layperson on the list. The first five were Karl Barth, Billy Graham, John XXIII, John Paul II, and Martin Luther King Jr. The April 24, 2000 issue of Christianity Today posited that of the millions of books published in the twentieth century, there were only a few hundred which “shaped people in extraordinary ways.”16 The magazine conducted a poll of more than a hundred of its church leaders and contributors asking them to list what they believed were the ten best books of the twentieth century. Number one on the list was Mere Christianity. Lewis’s book, which was a compilation of his wartime radio broadcasts on the BBC, ranked before Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and Karl Barth’s more than six million words of The Church Dogmatics. Lewis has not suffered a lack of praise from the most prominent evangelical magazine in the United States. Christianity Today in 2005 named the “reserved British intellectual with a checkered pedigree” a superstar, “a rock star for evangelicals.”17 Lewis was also named “the hottest theologian of 2005” by Time magazine.18

Robert MacSwain in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis argued that C. S. Lewis is “almost certainly the most influential religious author of the twentieth century, in English or any other language.”19 Lewis’s fame continued to expand with the cinematic production of Narnia. Three of The Chronicles of Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader have been made into major Hollywood movies and are available on DVD.

The fascination with him extends not only to his works, but also to his personal narrative. It is ironic that...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Chapter 1: C. S. Lewis: An Unusual Evangelist
• Chapter 2: Lewis’s Formative Years: Family, Religion, and Cultural, Socioeconomic, and Political Identities
• Chapter 3: From Faith to Unbelief
• Chapter 4: A Journey from the Loss of Faith
to Finding the Faith
• Chapter 5: Lewis’s Evangelism: Motivations and Practices
• Chapter 6: The Message, the Messengers, and Character
• Chapter 7: The Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography