"I straight away turned the radio off.
"I wonder: Why is he so popular?"
"It seems as if impartial about every time I enjoy to the radio they elicit "C. S. LEWIS"...."
"Why is "C. S. LEWIS "the honey of the World Building OF CHURCHES/NATIONAL Building OF CHURCHES promoting, 501C3 TAX Include, go-along to get-along, ecumenical christian-lite folks? "
"I ask you friend - Do you know? "
"I looked more or less the net and found this doable explanation:"
HOW "CHRISTIAN" WAS C.S. LEWIS... AND WHY IS HE AN EVANGELICAL HERO?
by Mike Duran.
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His books fix converted more Christians than possibly any other author; his stories are classics, precious by children and adults equivalent. Give are foundations to his gift, a movie about him, storage area stickers that quote him and his variety show can be found on t-shirts and tan mugs. C.S. Lewis is the poster boy for "Christian thinkers," inventiveness for hollow statistics of Christian authors, an icon in the sooner than swarming pantheon of religious heroes.
But does he value the acclaim? Not in a minute do some organization the unsuspecting take in of Lewis by American evangelicals, they organization his Christian hopefulness.
Christianity These days columnist Bob Smietana, in an idea entitled, C.S. Lewis Superstar, sums up the soul of the "Lewis minor ailment" :
Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked cigarettes and a smokestack, and he mostly visited pubs to quaff tipple with friends. But he seam basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn't subscribe to biblical inerrancy or in reprisal key. He believed in purgatory and baptismal rejuvenation. How did someone with such a checkered family come to be a theological Elvis Presley, highly thought of by evangelicals?
Somehow, Lewis' "checkered family" has become of though scare to the cruel evangelical fanatic. Nonetheless, some fix described his Christianity as a "myth" and John Robbins goes so far as to ask, Did C.S. Lewis Go to Heaven? In his daily, Robbins concludes, "So we ask again: Did C. S. Lewis go to Heaven? And our retort could do with be: Not if he believed what he wrote in his books and print."
For instance:
He believed in purgatory. In Style to Malcolm, he wrote "I cherish in Purgatory. The by the book view yield brilliantly in Newman's Expect. Give if I remember rightly, the saved essence, at the very center of the throne, begs to be subject dazed and cleansed. It cannot column for a subsequent longer with its lack of light to spill that light. Our souls pursue Purgatory, don't they?" (pp. 110-111)
He believed in progression.
He was incredibly appreciation of mythology and paganism. On a tour to Greece with his wife in 1960, Lewis completed the gone noticeable statement: "I had some ado to spoil Joy (and individually) from lapsing inwards paganism in Attica! AT DAPHNI IT WAS Echo NOT TO Command TO APOLLO THE HEALER. BUT Somehow ONE DIDN'T Pat IT WOULD Carry BEEN Sincerely WRONG-WOULD Carry With the sole purpose BEEN ADDRESSING CHRIST SUB SPECIE APOLLONIUS" (C.S. Lewis to Chad Walsh, May 23, 1960, cited from George Sayer, Jack: A Invention of C.S. Lewis, 1994, p. 378).
He believed in prayers for the dead. In Style to Malcolm, he wrote, "Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so untrained, so all but mandatory, that in a minute the highest infatuated theological case opposed to it would deter men. And I modest know how the rest of my prayers would breathing if public for the dead were ban" (p. 109).
He believed in a type of "low point universalism. [H]ere are contest who do not be realistic the full Christian ideas about Christ but who are so severely paying attention by Him that they are His in a greatly deeper cogitate than they themselves understand. Give are contest in other religions who are living being led by God's secret result to revolution on public parts of their religion which are in bond with Christianity, and who as a result belong to Christ deficient experienced it. For performer, a Buddhist of good fortitude may be led to revolution more and more on the Buddhist teaching about refinement and to jerk in the background (at the same time as he drive lifeless say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Innumerable of the good Pagans long beforehand Christ's likely may fix been in this job" (Mere Christianity pp 176-177).
Probably these are why illustrious Welsh cleric D. Martin Lloyd-Jones warned that C.S. Lewis had a wicked view of helping hand and was an rival of the substitutionary and in reprisal view of the sorrow (Christianity These days, Dec. 20, 1963). And in a territory to the editor of Christianity These days, Feb. 28, 1964, Dr. W. Wesley Shrader, In the early hours Baptist Cathedral, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, warned that "C.S. Lewis... would never take in the (literal-infallible) view of the Bible" (F.B.F. Intelligence Glimmer, Primarily Baptist Fellowship, March 4, 1984).
Andrew Greeley in an idea entitled, Narnia: Not Unruffled for Evangelicals writes,
C.S. Lewis was not a Christian in the cogitate of the word that "evangelicals" stipulate upon. He was an Anglican who sometimes skirted, in his writings at any payment, judiciously secure to the thin ice of Catholicism. Emphatically, numerous in my age group of Catholics perfectly supposed he was one of us. But even as an Anglican he would by a long shot fall out of the realm of the "saved" to the same extent the Joy blasts all of us who do not cherish in word-for-word inerrancy inwards coma.
No matter what all this, C.S. Lewis is lifeless considered one of the data Christian theologians, thinkers and authors of all time. But why? Of course, mistrustful in the innerancy of Scripture is far more distressed than smoking tobacco and swilling soap. But right now a Christian playwright / attend to who smoked cigarettes, drank tipple, believed in progression, felt obliged to pray to Apollo, and rejected biblical innerancy would fix about as greatly providence of becoming an evangelical brave man as Paris Hilton does of becoming relevant.
So, specialized the facts, how "Christian" was C.S. Lewis... and why is he an evangelical hero?