C. S. Lewis & Mere Christianity by Paul McCusker

Author:Paul McCusker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781624053696
Publisher: Focus on the Family
Published: 2014-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

DEFENDING THE FAITH

In spring of 1945, Jack Lewis was asked to speak to a conference of youth leaders and junior clergy at Carmarthen in Wales. The subject was Christian apologetics, which Jack quickly clarified as simply giving a defense of the faith. He gave advice to his audience, clearly gleaned from the experiences he’d had throughout the war.

He first asked his audience to consider what they might be defending—and to whom? To the first part of the question, he reminded his audience members to establish the true boundaries of their doctrines. To go beyond those boundaries would lead them so far away from the faith as to no longer be Christian. And if they were to do that, even if their intentions were sincere and honest, he hoped they would have the integrity to stop taking money from the church they now rejected and resign their positions.

Of more importance, Jack reminded his audience members that they were to defend Christianity and not their opinions of Christianity. They were to defend it because it is true and not because they liked it or believed it was good for people. And defending Christianity, as opposed to their own ideas, would force them to look at the faith fully, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.

Jack cautioned his audience to avoid reading fashionable but fleeting theological works espousing the latest doctrines—the modern kind that might be all the rage in theological circles but hadn’t stood the test of a time-tested Christianity.

He encouraged his audience to “attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want,” he argued, “is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”[35] Reading a book about Christianity wouldn’t affect people if they were already Christians or predisposed against Christianity. Reading a book on another subject, with an assumed Christianity within it, would impact people more effectively, even more so if the very best book on a given subject was written by a Christian. The twisting of any subject by a Christian in the name of evangelism would be the wrong thing to do.

The job of the apologist, Jack continued, is to present a timeless Christian message in the language of our own age, (as opposed to those who took the messages of the age and put them in the language of Christianity).

Be wary of preaching about politics, Jack instructed. Few have the right skills or knowledge to talk about politics credibly. More often than not, the only thing a sermon about politics does is tell the congregation which newspapers the preacher is reading.

He instructed his audience to give up thinking of their country as home and distant lands as mission fields. Home is the mission field now. To reach the people here and now, one must understand the language and thinking of the people.

Jack admitted that most of what he’d learned on this subject came from speaking to the RAF camps. From those servicemen, Jack learned that most were skeptical about history—including the Gospel accounts—only because it happened in the far past.

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