Archive: What C.S. Lewis might say to the United Methodist Church

By Lyle Dorsett

C. S. Lewis would have applauded the UMC’s emphasis on being Christian in a more inclusive and less sectarian way than many of the reformed and creedal denominations. The Methodist emphasis on being primarily Christ-centered rather than doctrinally directed would have appealed to the man who wrote Mere Christianity. Through that book he underscored the essentials of the Christian faith without insisting that all believers rally around secondary issues such as specific confessions, creeds, modes of baptism, definitions of the sacraments and adherence to church law and traditions.

Indeed, Lewis’ refusal to get bogged down in denominational issues kept his books free of sectarianism, which is reason for the lasting popularity of his writing.

Although Lewis would have enjoyed the inclusiveness of modern American Methodism, he would have been appalled by the ordination of women. Extremely traditional in his view of the female sex, Lewis wrote an article entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” for Time and Tide in 1948. Reprinted in God in the Dock, this article contains a logical if not fashionable case against having a female serve as priest to represent God to the Anglican church. It is true that Methodists have deacons and elders rather than priests. Nevertheless the priestly function of administering the sacramental elements of God’s grace to God’s Church is, to Lewis, an image of God feeding His flock. To say God’s representative here can be a woman as well as a man is to say that the role of the bride and bridegroom can be reversed at will. According to Lewis, if we reverse the church (bride) and the Christ (bridegroom) at will, we have a goddess rather than a God, and we have the groom subject to the will of the bride.

In this same 1948 essay Lewis addressed the non-sexist language issue that currently occupies much attention among United Methodists, especially in our seminaries. Lewis admits that God is a biological being without sexual identity. This admission notwithstanding, it does not follow that we are therefore at liberty to call God She, Mother or Daughter. Why? Because through the biblical revelation, “God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is,” according to Lewis, “to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential.” This latter view, says Lewis, “is surely intolerable.”

Because of his high view of Scripture, Lewis would also have opposed the teaching that a homosexual lifestyle is consistent with the Christian faith. In letters, in his autobiography Surprised By Joy and elsewhere, Lewis made it clear that he saw the practice of homosexuality as sinful and destructive.

Lewis’ commitment to scriptural Christianity would have placed him at odds with much that is taught in United Methodist seminaries today. He wrote an entire book, Miracles, where he presented a powerful treatise on the myopia of philosophic naturalism that has permeated our thinking and caused us to doubt the “great occasions” when God has intervened and set aside natural law.

The biblical basis of Lewis’ faith not only led him to embrace miracles such as the Virgin Birth and physical resurrection of Christ, it likewise led him to assume the veracity of Jesus’ teaching on sin and hell. Lewis would have been appalled by the liberal promulgation of cheap grace. Modernist universalism, manifested in the preaching of forgiveness of sins without repentance, absolution without personal confession, and baptism and church without obedience and discipline, would have bothered him as much from today’s Methodists as it did from his own Anglican tradition.

Inasmuch as Lewis deplored the peddling of cheap grace, he advocated a vigorous emphasis on evangelism. It is true that he disliked the highly emotional appeals of some fundamentalists and evangelists. Nevertheless, he noted in his “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittinger” (God in the Dock) that since his conversion “most of my books are evangelistic.” And Lewis himself did a fair amount of evangelistic preaching to Royal Air Force crews during World War II. Furthermore the Oxford Socratic Club, of which he was an active participant, had as its primary objective the conversion of non-believers to faith in Jesus Christ.

In brief, Lewis would never have applauded the Methodist trend of making social issues a higher priority than missions and evangelism. To Lewis the Good News is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, not the correction of political, economic and social ills. Because of this assumption Lewis would have applauded attempts to make evangelism a priority once again in mission work and to reintroduce professors of evangelism in the United Methodist seminaries.

I am certain Lewis would have urged all Methodists to do two things: First, “be busy learning to pray.” This was how he exhorted one brother in Jesus Christ to progress in the faith, and most certainly he would have urged the church to get on its knees and make prayer a priority. Second, Lewis would have urged a turn from self-analysis and self-absorption to a clear focus on Jesus Christ.

As he put it at the end of Mere Christianity, “Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” I have no doubt C. S. Lewis would apply this principle to the United Methodist Church as well as to individuals.

Dr. Lyle Dorsett is director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.