Narnia was C.S. Lewis’s Literary Petri Dish

It provided a controlled environment where he could develop, observe, and test his ideas about life and faith.

Though C. S. Lewis died many decades before the rise of the New Atheists, he taught and wrote in an academic world where naturalism, scientism, and secular humanism were ascendant and the Christian worldview was either dismissed or relegated to the personal, emotional realm. In the refined Oxbridge atmosphere in which Lewis lived and moved and had his being, most professors took for granted that miracles did not happen, that Jesus was just a good, moral teacher, and that evolution was a sufficient theory to explain everything we see around us and experience within us.

In response to this reigning materialist paradigm, one he had vehemently embraced throughout his teens and 20s, Lewis wrote three works of apologetics that have not lost any of their power. In Mere Christianity, he first argued for the existence of God on moral grounds and then clarified the essential teachings of the gospel, biblical morality, and Christian theology. In The Problem of Pain, he reconciled the ubiquity of pain and suffering in the world with the all-good and all-powerful God of the Scriptures. In Miracles, he argued that miracles do not break the laws of nature but are consistent with the God revealed in Christ and the Bible.

While vigorously but genially defending the Christian worldview, he also defended, in such academic works as The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image, the Christian Middle Ages from fashionable—but mostly false—charges of ignorance, superstition, and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, he countered the Freudians and Marxists by analyzing the theological and psychological dimensions of sin and temptation, and upholding, if slightly repackaging, traditional Christian ...

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from Christianity Today Magazine
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