C.S. Lewis – 60 years after his passing

C.S. Lewis died on this day 60 years ago. It was overshadowed at the time because he died on the same day as President Kennedy.

Lewis is one of the most influential Christians of the past century. He was never a pastor nor a professional theologian. He had a distinguished career as a professor of medieval literature at Oxford (and then at Cambridge), but he’s best remembered today for his writing.

During World War II, he gave a series of talks about belied in God and the basics of faith. Those talks became the classic book “Mere Christianity.” It was during the years of World War II that other well known Lewis books were written, such as “The Problem of Pain” (1940), which explores the complex philosophical questions of “How does a good God allow suffering?” In 1942, Lewis wrote “The Screwtape Letters,” another of his most enduring books. It’s a fictious series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood on how to tempt humans to sin.

In the 1950s, Lewis produced his other great classic, the children’s fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

One of the unique things about Lewis is that he has wide appeal across various sects of Christianity. He was an Anglican but he’s also popular with Catholics, and probably most popular of all with evangelical Protestants.

The things I’ve always appreciated about Lewis were his reasonableness and the winsomeness with which he made points. At one point in his life, he had been an outspoken atheist, but had a dramatic conversion to faith where he would later write “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”