C. S. Lewis and the Defense of the Faith (part eight)

In 1945, C. S. Lewis was invited to address a gathering of Welsh Anglican priests and youth workers on the subject of Christian apologetics. Here are his remarks, published in the book, God in the Dock, and, as needed, some commentary on them.

(3) A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes [God-fearers, or Gentiles who converted to Judaism]) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, “good news.” We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault–the capitalists’, the government’s, the Nazis, the generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as his judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obvious uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)

I cannot offer you a water tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and “crime” and bring them down to brass tacks–to the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of “ordinary decent people” like themselves (and ourselves).

Once again, it seems Lewis’s assessment is spot on for our culture, as well. Though now the list of sexual sins has expanded, sins people in our country do not generally believe are sinful. And his approach makes sense, as well. People do need a sense of their being in rebellion against God, and the kinds of rebellion they will most likely identify are what Lewis calls “the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness and conceit,” sins we see in  ourselves and can therefore speak convincingly about to them.