Today marks the 113th year since C. S. Lewis was born, and his writing is still making a major impact on the lives of people throughout the world. PreChristians and Christians alike read and are influenced by his work while much of today's Christian writing and media does not engage the world. Why is that?
The first reason is that C. S. Lewis wrote for the world. He was not writing for the already convinced. He was not writing for Christian bookstores and Christian critics. He was writing to inspire the imagination of people who did not agree with him. He wanted to inform people who were skeptical. Too often today, our communication is aimed at the convinced. When that is the case, we take too much for granted, we assume too much prior knowledge from our audience, and we become combative rather than inspirational.
Most of Lewis' work first appeared in public media. He had to connect to an unbelieving audience or the paper would stop asking him for his columns and radio stations would stop giving him air time. Captive audiences inspire laziness and inhibit creative and persuasive thought. Good outreach, inspiration, teaching, and communication is most likely to happen when we are competing to be heard along with all the other voices in the world. Then we need to push our creativity, our ability to find common ground with others, and our ability to relate to felt needs and interests. C. S. Lewis became a master of this. The power of his writing comes in part to the fact that he wasn't singing for the choir.
Lewis also had a strong respect for the truth. He wasn't interested in propaganda. He wanted God to peel back the curtain and reveal to him what was real. In this, he was never guilty of a secular/sacred split. All truth was God's truth. This meant that he went to the Bible to understand who God is, who we are on a fundamental level, and what are purpose in the universe is, but he didn't limit himself to the Bible. He was a professor of literature and knew that art was a powerful tool to explore truth. He drew quite a bit from history and philosophy and, somewhat, on science. He had little patience for people who thought they could learn science, medicine, engineering from scripture. Scripture is the highest authority on those things that God directly addresses, but we are made in the image of God and are given other tools to explore the ordered creation that God has provided us with. This added credibility to his writing.
C. S. Lewis did not neglect his Christian learning, though. He once said that nothing he wrote was original. I thought this was just false modesty until I began to read the Christian classics. More often, than I would have imagined, Lewis is translating the thoughts of Augustine or Aquinas into modern language and applying them to our current situation. Lewis' grounding in the Bible and Christian thought was the bedrock of everything he wrote. Originality is highly valued today, Lewis applied originality only after he had walked the well trod path of Christian scholarship.
I think the most powerful tool that Lewis brought to the table was his imagination and love of story. It seems that most of our communication today reflects the cold logic of the modern era. The Bible is a story, Jesus conveyed most of his message in story, yet we tend to turn the dynamic story of the gospel into a set of philosophical principles. Lewis loved and respected logic, but he loved passion, story, imagery, and metaphors more. Logic points to truth that can be contained while story and metaphor speaks of mysteries that cannot be contained. It is the latter that inspires. I'm not sure how you can communicate the wonder of the gospel unless you love story. If you don't appreciate fiction or history I can't imagine how you connect with or inspire those in the world. I don't think C. S. Lewis could either, and I'm thankful for that.
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