Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is extremely popular with many evangelicals today and considered as a foremost Christian thinker and philosopher. Though Lewis died in 1963, sales of his books have risen to two million a year.
In an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lewis’s birth, J I Packer (a man who has abandoned orthodoxy for ecumenism) called him “our patron saint.” Leading US publication, Christianity Today said Lewis “has come to be the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary Evangelicalism” (Sept. 7, 1998). In its April 23, 2001 issue, Christianity Today again praised Lewis. It said that he has been called “the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist.”
It went on to say that he wrote several mythical works, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which the magazine recommended, saying “Christ came not to put an end to myth but to take all that is most essential in the myth up into himself and make it real.” Such a statement from a so-called Christian magazine is be condemned as arrant nonsense. In his Chronicles, Lewis depicts the Lord Jesus Christ as a lion named Aslan who is slain on a stone table. Of this depiction, Christianity Today says, “In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real.”
Can such a claim by this publication be justified? Is there a setting forth of true Biblical Christianity in C S Lewis’s writings?
We say “NO” to both questions and that for the simple reason that C S Lewis was a denier of many cardinal doctrines of the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ and a setter forth of error.
Christianity Today significantly stated of him that he was “a man whose theology had decidedly unevangelical elements”. A Christianity which “in parts” is evangelical, is not evangelical Christianity!
Had he lived a little longer, it is likely that Lewis would have converted to Roman Catholicism. He believed in prayers for the dead and purgatory and confessed his sins regularly to a priest. He received the Roman Catholic sacrament of last rites on July 16, 1963.
Lewis also rejected the doctrine of bodily resurrection and believed there is salvation in pagan religions.