Contemporary apologetics so often focuses on the issues of biblical reliability and understanding in relation to science, and on the question of evil, as these are the currently contested concerns. One apologetic that points towards the existence of God, however, is one that is generally not “scientific” enough, and that is a changed life. Not a temporary change, which can indicate a simple excitement of a person’s will, but a permanent change evidenced by the long term.
This is a first in an occasional series of essays on conversion experiences—not just the initial experience, but the life-long evidence of change in the person by God’s spirit. This first is on the late C.S. (or Jack) Lewis, Oxford and Cambridge Professor (English and Philosophy), well-known author of fictional works like The Chronicles of Narnia and of highly valued scholarly works. To anyone who comes in contact with atheistic thought, what Lewis wrote to his best friend in 1916 (below) will seem quite familiar. What made him come to that conclusion, and what made him change his mind?
“I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention” (Hooper p. 9).
Lewis, or Jack, was brilliant from early age, having been tutored at home until he was nine, when his mother died. As if this great sorrow was not enough, Lewis’ dad sent him away to school, from their home in Ireland to England. Lewis’ older brother, Warnie, attended the very small school with him, but Jack hated it, and with good reason. The headmaster, a Reverend, was abusive and eventually deemed insane. At his next school, Lewis experienced an occultist head matron.
One can see the progression of Lewis’ road to apostasy from his parent’ Anglican faith: God did not heal his mother, one school leader was a cruel and crazy believer, and the other was a non-believing occultist. By the time Lewis attended his third school, he was an atheist. Hating this school as well, Lewis’ father sent him to learn under a distinguished tutor, who happened to be an atheist also. Lewis was superb at languages and translating. As his tutor wrote, Jack had “a sort of genius for translating . . . . He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met” (Gromley p. 36).
He went on to learn and teach at Oxford, with WWI service (and related injury and recovery) sandwiched in. After the war he lived with his adopted family, a much older atheist woman and her daughter.
So what would cause Lewis to stray from his atheism? A couple of strongly held ideas played their parts. One was the concept and experience of what Lewis termed “joy” – a pang of intense bliss and longing, followed by a strong desire to experience it again. The other was his concern, from an early age, that if Christianity were true it could be shown that paganism prefigured it, or that Christianity fulfilled paganism. Indeed, Lewis felt his pangs of “joy” when reading the northern mythologies that he loved so much.
Jack Lewis wanted to be his own man; he did not want to acknowledge a power or diety that demanded loyalty. Through the years, however, seeking truth and being drawn to authors and friends who helped him with answers to his search for “joy” and his concern over God’s communication with the pagan world, Lewis’ heart and mind opened enough to hear God give him a choice.
“. . . a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, of shutting something out. . . . I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. . . . I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. . . . The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open . . . . Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back – drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling” (Lewis p. 123).
Due to length constraints, please see the 2nd half of this essay here.
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