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

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.

While we are on the subject of science, let me digress for a moment. I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s lines of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent… You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if wherever we read an elementary book on Geology, botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the reconversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground. Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interest of apologetics would be sin and folly. But I must return to my immediate subject.

Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he may think about the Beveridge Report* and talk about the coming of the kingdom. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies [a building erected on land owned by another] is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress.

What a perfectly brilliant idea! And what work it takes.

*The Beveridge Report is ‘lengthy’, a detailed survey of the state of welfare in Britain and its suggested future direction, presented to Parliament in November 1942.  At the heart of the report was Beveridge’s decree that future action to improve social insurance, steps on the road of ‘social progress’, should not be hindered by any ‘sectional interests’ – instead government should work to abolish the ‘Five Great Evils’ which plagued society: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.