C. S. LEWIS'S THEOLOGY:

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN RANSOM AND REEPICHEEP

JAMES TOWNSEND

Bible Editor

Cook Communications

Elgin, IL

I. INTRODUCTION

Would you like to pretend that you haven't just read the title above and to try your hand at a trivia quiz? Here goes. Who was the gentleman who:

was converted to Christianity while riding to the zoo in a sidecar of his brother's motorcycle?

had his Christianity affirmed by Dr. Bob Jones but questioned by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones(!)?

would never have been a professor if the entrance math exam (which he failed to pass twice) hadn't been conveniently dropped as a requirement?

taught at colleges spelled with one letter's difference-Magdalen and Magdalene?

smoked at least sixty cigarettes a day-between pipes?

lived in the same house for thirty years with a woman to whom he wasn't married?

had tiffs with the other leading Anglican literary critic of his time (T. S. Eliot)?

had as his longest lifetime friend a homosexual (Arthur Greeves)?

died the same day as President John F. Kennedy?

This composite trivia quiz does not sound like the personality profile of a candidate for the "evangelical of the year." Then again, modern conservatives probably wouldn't have picked three murderers (or accomplices to murder), such as Moses, David, and Paul were, to have authored nineteen books of God's inspired Word! In light of this, it's rather amusing that C. S. Lewis-so much read by evangelicals-would probably be turned away from many of their churches if he were an aspiring pastoral candidate.

In the subtitle for my article, I placed Lewis: "Somewhere between Ransom and Reepicheep." These two Rs are characters in Lewis's fiction. The fictional Dr. Elwin Ransom is a Cambridge philologist (as Lewis was) whose first name has the same letters (except the substitution of an "n" for an "s") as Lewis's last name. Ransom appears in Lewis's space trilogy as the Christian character whose chosen role is to save the world. Another of Lewis's fictional characters, Reepicheep, appears in his Narnia series. Reepicheep, an oversized mouse with a needle-like sword, possesses chutzpah disproportionate to his mousely size. Therefore, I raise the question: did Lewis see himself as Ransom or Reepicheep-or a bit of both? Was he the chosen apologist of the age, whose role was to save the planet (like Ransom)

or was he merely a minor critter with an oversized sense of the daredevil, taking on all comers (like Reepicheep)?

Lewis's friend, clergyman Austen Farrer, asserted: "You cannot read Lewis and tell yourself that Christianity has no important moral bearings, that it gives no coherence to the whole picture of existence, that it offers no criteria for the decision of human choices.." Lewis became a Christianized version of movie swordsman Errol Flynn with his apologetics swordplay. Like Robert Louis Stevenson's swordsman in Kidnapped, Alan Breck Stewart, he was (to borrow Austen Farrer's image) "a bonny fighter." Lewis's long-term friend Owen Barfield noted that Lewis's former student John Lawlor had reported that in Lewis's presence he felt like he was "wielding a peashooter against a howitzer." John Beversluis called Lewis "the 20th century's foremost defender of the faith." Lewis's apologetics was so barbed because his learning was so encyclopedic. William Empson believed Lewis "was the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read." Lewis was reputedly Oxford's most popular lecturer for many years. By 1978 Macmillan had "published more than fourteen million copies of Lewis' books."

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