Who was C. S. Lewis?

from the old testament

• Isaiah 55:8-9 fits Lewis’s journey from doubt to faith, as he came to accept truths that surpassed human reasoning.
• Ecclesiastes 3:11 reflects Lewis’s lifelong fascination with longing, imagination, and the sense of something beyond, themes central to his apologetics.
• Psalm 34:18 speaks to the loss of Lewis’ mother, the trauma of war, and later the grief of losing his wife Joy—moments that shaped his honesty about suffering and faith.

from the new testament

• Core to the message Lewis eventually embraced and communicated through Mere Christianity is Romans 5:8: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
• Second Corinthians 1:3–4 mirrors how Lewis used personal pain to help others find comfort and hope.
• First Peter 3:15 captures Lewis’s role as a Christian apologist—clear, reasoned, and passionate.
• Philippians 1:21 is a fitting reflection on Lewis’s life of influence and his passing into eternity with Christ.

implications for today

Clive Staples Lewis (1898—1963) is often referred to as the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. He was a British academic, novelist, poet, broadcaster, lecturer, and apologist. He is best known for his fiction works: The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy; as well as for his non-fiction works, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. He wrote over seventy books and over thirty have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold millions of copies.

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland on November 29, 1898 to a Christian family. At ten years old, his mother died of cancer and he was soon after sent to boarding school. By age fifteen, he had declared himself an atheist because of the pain and grief of his mother's death.

In 1916, Lewis was accepted into Oxford University but was soon shipped off to WWI at the age of nineteen. The horror of trench warfare he witnessed in Somme, France only served to confirm his atheism. During training, he and a fellow cadet, "Paddy" Moore, promised to care for each other's family if either one died in the war. C. S. Lewis was injured in April 1918, five months after arriving in France. However, Paddy Moore was killed in action in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy's mother, Jane Moore, was like a second mother to him especially as he recovered from his injury. Lewis was demobilized in December 1918 and returned to school at Oxford while continuing to live with and care for Paddy's mother and sister.

In 1926, as a faculty member at Oxford, Lewis became friends with J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien's influence, a friendship with Hugo Dyson, G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, the works of George MacDonald inspired Lewis's return to theism by 1929 and Christianity by 1931. He described himself at the time of his conversion as "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Lewis is sometimes referred to as the "Apostle to the Skeptics" due to his own history as a skeptic.

During WWII, his radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought C. S. Lewis wide acclaim. During this time he also housed child evacuees in his home, which inspired him to write The Chronicles of Narnia (his highest selling books). Later in life, he corresponded with American writer and divorcée Joy Davidman who was a Jewish convert to Christianity. She came to England with her two sons from a previous marriage and married Lewis in a civil ceremony in 1956. They later held a religious ceremony at her bedside during a bout of bone cancer in 1957. Unfortunately, in 1960 the cancer returned and she died. Lewis wrote a book about his grief in the aftermath of her death called A Grief Observed, but chose to publish it under a pseudonym, N. W. Clerk, due to the raw and personal nature of the book. Ironically, many of his friends suggested the book to him to help him cope with his own grief. Joy's sons continued to live with Lewis after her death. However, Lewis died of renal failure two years later on November 22, 1963 just one week before his sixty-fifth birthday.

As with any human author, Lewis's work also attracts some criticism. Lewis's philosophy that stories and myths are mankind's way of foreshadowing God's eventual revealed truth led him to believe that the Old Testament stories might not have been literally true. Along the same lines, he did not believe the Bible, including the New Testament, to be inerrant. While believing the Bible contained contradictions and possible mistakes, he did, however, believe God's truth is contained within the Bible. Lewis also did not believe in eternal security. Instead, he believed that people are in constant spiritual motion either toward or away from God and that this direction of movement is what determines a person's salvation. Other criticisms come up when discussing particulars of specific works of Lewis and caution should be applied when interpreting Lewis's work. However, if the reader studies Scripture, remembering that Lewis's works are not Scripture, his writings can shed new light for understanding biblical truths.

C. S. Lewis stands as an example of the influence a Christian can have when he uses his gifting for the glory of God. Lewis's radio broadcasts and fiction and non-fiction works have influenced the lives of millions and continue to impact lives today more than fifty years after his death. C. S. Lewis's books continue to be a useful resource in explaining the value of Christian faith to a skeptical world.

Quotes by C.S. Lewis:

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen—not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny."

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.We are far too easily pleased."

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”