“C.S. Lewis: Pre-Evangelism for a Post-Christian World” by Brian Williams

In his introduction to C.S. Lewis: Pre-Evangelism for a Post-Christian World, Brian Williams poses a question. What is it about the world and our imaginations that make a visitation of “joy” not only possible but even likely? Does joy imply something beyond the world we see and experience?

 

Williams also describes it another way. A child or adult can read one of the Narnia tales by C.S. Lewis, one like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and sense there’s something more than the story at hand. It may be a fine, wonderful story in and of itself, but it also points to something else, something just as real but not visible or tangible. And we know it as surely as we know our names, our addresses, our family members, and everything else associated with daily life.

 

Another question is posed: might these works of imaginations be a way to ultimately reach a post-Christian world? We’re not considering here thinly disguised stories of theology, faith, and belief, but works of imaginative minds, stories that stir our hearts and our minds, stories that point to something much larger than ourselves.

 

Williams’ book is devoted to answering these questions. Using the lens of the life and writings of C.S. Lewis, and especially the fiction works The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, as well as the autobiographical Surprised by Joy, Williams makes a solid case for imaginative fiction as a pre-evangelism tool.

 

Brian Williams

The book has five chapters. The first is biographical, considering Lewis’s life and the influences which shaped his mind, philosophy, faith, and outlook. Williams then considers Lewis’s sacramental view of reality, and he means something different then we think of with the word “sacramental.” Quoting author Chris Armstrong, he defines sacramentalism as “a linked set of beliefs” that spiritual reality manifests itself in created reality, all creation reflects the Creator, and God is present throughout the world.

 

He then looks at Lewis’s romantic view of the human imagination; how Lewis uses The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia to see how Lewis used fiction as pre-evangelism; and how the medium of imaginative fiction might work today. It’s a scholarly and phenomenally well-researched work (813 footnotes, no less).

 

Williams has served as an adjunct professor at Southeastern College in Wake Forest, N.C., teaching the history of ideas and philosophy. He’s been published in the Journal of Inklings Studies, and is the author of Putting Together the Pieces: How to Make Sense of the Old Testament. He lives with his family in Wake Forest.

 

And in C.S. Lewis: Pre-Evangelism for a Post-Christian World, he answers the questions he raises and more than makes his point. Imaginative fiction can stimulate our sense of wonder and help us understand that something more, something bigger, is beyond the reality we see.

"On the Shoulders of Hobbits" by Louis Markos

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, using what I didn’t know were pirated editions published by Ballantine. I reread authorized editions in the mid-1970s, and again in the early 2000s when the Peter Jackson movies were released. My youngest and I saw the movies three times each at the movie theater. We also watched the DVD of each movie. And the extended DVD set. 

I read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in the mid-to-late 1980s, when our oldest was six or seven years old and loved being read to. The hands-down favorite character for all of us was Reepicheep the Mouse, a humble character called to great things much like Tolkien’s Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. 

Over the years, I’ve bought a lot of books by and about Lewis and Tolkien. On one of our trips to England, I spent two hours in Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford; I stared in wonder at the whole section devoted to the two authors and the Inklings. If there is heaven on earth, it is called Blackwell’s in Oxford.

Facebook has taught me that I am not alone in my admiration for Lewis and Tolkien. We are legion.

When a scholar like Louis Markos publishes a book about both authors, it’s an event for Lewis and Tolkien fans like myself. And rather than rehash what we already know, On the Shoulders of Hobbits takes a fascinatingly different approach – it considers The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia as guideposts to the classical virtues, like courage, friendship, temperance, discernment, justice, faith, hope, and love.

Louis Markos

Markos begins with the road, or the journey, featured in both of the works. He considers the call of the road, the response to it, its dangers, and what happens at the end. The road isn’t necessarily a physical one; it can be any kind of extended task that’s fraught with difficulties and where the outcome is by no means certain. He moves then to discuss the classical and the theological virtues, and the roles they play in both stories. And then he examines the idea and problem of evil, and how it is portrayed, confronted, and battled. 

Markos is a professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University. He speaks widely on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Christian worldview. His books include Atheism on Trial, Apologetics for the 21^stCentury, From Achilles to Christ, Worldview Guides to The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, C.S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education, Lewis Agonistes, Literature: A Student’s Guide, and Heaven and Hell: Vision of the Afterlife in the Western Poetic Tradition. He lives with his family in Houston. 

On the Shoulders of Hobbits also serves a good reminder that great stories about virtues, the call of the road, and fighting evil aren’t only for the young. That’s what the book is ultimately about – what good stories like these can teach us, no matter what our age or experience or station in life. 

After all, Frodo Baggins was 50 when he leaves the Shire with the ring to travel to Rivendell.

Related: The Road is Long, and the Call is Loud - at Literary Life.

“Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship” by Colin Duriez

It is perhaps the most famous friendship of the 20^th century. The impact it had on both literature and popular Christianity was enormous, and its influence continues today, reflected in the movies, books, biographies, and derivative writings published decades after their deaths.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1982-1973) and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).

Without their friendship, there likely would have been no Hobbit, no Lord of the Rings, no Narnia, no Screwtape Letters. While it waxed and waned, the friendship between the two Oxford teachers, the two writers, the two members of the Inklings, and the two avid students of the Norse legends and myths left an immeasurable blessing and legacy.

The story of that friendship is examined and detailed in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship by Colin Duriez, first published in 2003.

Tolkien and Lewis met at Oxford. They had much in common: both had fought in World War I, both were intrigued by medieval language and Norse mythology, both had lost their mothers at a young age. But there were significant differences as well. Tolkien was married and raising a family, while Lewis was a bachelor (although living in a rather unconventional arrangement with his brother Warren, and Mrs. Moore and her daughter, the mother and sister of a friend killed in the war). And Tolkien was a devout Catholic, while Lewis was in his late atheist phase, moving toward a kind of agnosticism.

Good friends they became. And the friendship was solidified during a stroll on Addison’s Walk in Oxford, in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning in 1931, when Tolkien, with the help of a mutual friend, Hugo Dyson, convinced Lewis that Jesus Christ was a “true myth.”

Addison's Walk in Oxford

Duriez pays special attention to the impact each had on the other’s writing. At the time, there was no literary genre of “fantasy for adults.” Fantasy, like fairy tales, was considered to be in the province of childhood. Tolkien was self-conscious about what would become The Hobbit, and it was Lewis who almost singlehandedly kept encouraging him to continue that story (published in 1937) and then the “second Hobbit,” which became The Lord of the Rings and was published in the 1950s.

Similarly, Tolkien encouraged Lewis. Their friendship expanded to include others in what became known as the Inklings, which met in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and the Eagle and Child pub. Out of those meetings, readings, discussions, and occasional debates would come The Chronicles of Narnia.

The friendship between the two men, Duriez notes, would warm and cool, especially after Lewis accepted a position at Cambridge (with Tolkien’s help and support) and Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman. Tolkien was also not comfortable with how Lewis “popularized” Christianity. But it endured.

Colin Duriez

Duriez is a writer and lecturer who has written extensively about Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings. His works include The C.S. Lewis Handbook (1990), The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia (2000), The Inklings Handbook (2001; co-authored), Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle Earth (2001), The J.R.R. Tolkien Handbook (2002), A Field Guide to Narnia (2004), The C.S. Lewis Chronicles (2005), J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (2012), and The Oxford Inklings (2015). He is also the author of A.D. 33: The Year That Changed the World (2007), Field Guide to Harry Potter (2007), The Poetic Bible (2001), and Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (2008).

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tells the story of a friendship that became a remarkable friendship, and helped change the world.

Related:

The Desiring God web site has a number of lectures by and interviews with Colin Duriez, covering the Origins of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings movies, C.S. Lewis, the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, and related subjects.

J.R.R. Tolkien Convinces C.S. Lewis That Christ is the True Myth – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

“A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War”

It was a terrible war, this “war to end all wars,” and it pitted men against the most technologically advanced war machines created up to that time.

The men lost.

The death toll was horrific: more than nine million combatants and seven million civilians died. Four empires collapsed – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Large swaths of Europe, especially in Belgium and northeast France, were laid waste. Even the victorious nations like Britain faced debt, struggling economies, and the task of rebuilding.

The physical destruction wasn’t the only tragedy of the war. The psychological impact was just as bad. The 19^th century believe in progress – that things were getting better and better, science was solving all of man’s problems, and ignorance could be eradicated by education – was dealt a near-mortal blow. The general disillusionment that followed the war was devastating and long-lasting.

Two young men from Britain served in the war, and saw the horrors of the conflict and experienced the conditions of trench warfare – walking in water during the rain, the rats and the lice, the bodies that could pile up during periods of conflict, the constant smell of mud and unwashed humanity. The two did not emerged unscathed – one caught trench fever (caused by lice) and saw some of his closest friends die; the other was wounded and would carry a piece of shrapnel near his heart for the rest of his life.

J.R.R. Tolkien in World War I

But they did emerge with their beliefs intact, and especially their people in the essential nobility and heroism of the human being. The war would heavily influence their choice of careers and the books they produced, and those books have had an enormous influence on tens of millions of people. And their friendship at Oxford University is arguably the most important friendship of the 20^th century.

The two were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Joseph Loconte, professor of history at The King’s College in New York City, tells the story of how the Great War affected them and shaped their writings in A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

He makes a powerful case. By sifting through letters, accounts of battles, and The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Loconte meticulously identifies both specific and general influences.

C.S. Lewis in 1917

But he also does considerably more. Loconte neatly provides the social, historical, and cultural context for the period leading up to the war. And then he explains how the war shredded so many belief systems (progressive Christianity and the idea of progress among them) and what happened to the literary and cultural environment afterward. The particular surprise was that Tolkien and Lewis pursued subjects and themes believed old-fashioned and passé – good versus evil, the heroic, the potential evils of technology, and even ideas of chivalry.

Pivotal to the eventual success of both men was a conversation in 1931, one that started as a dinner invitation from Lewis to Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, and ended in the wee hours of the next morning with the once atheist Lewis believing in God. Lewis and Tolkien had become friends at Oxford in the late 1920s because of a shared love for the Old Norse tales and a shared experience in the Great War.

Joseph Loconte (photo by The King's College)

One experience they could discuss and argue; the other was left largely unspoken, because it was understood and didn’t need to be talked about. Instead, it ended up in their stories as specific scenes and general themes.

Loconte is the author of The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt (2012) and God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West (2014). This current work has something of a personal aspect for him, in that his grandfather fought for the United States in the Great War.

He tells a good story himself, and in A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, he has added immeasurably to our understanding of two of the 20^th century’s most beloved authors and what influenced the stories they wrote.

Related:

At Tweetspeak Poetry, I’ve written a number of posts about the poets and the poetry of World War I:

Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918.

Siegfried Sassoon and The War Poems.

The Poetry of World War I.

The Most Famous Poem of World War I.

The Poems the Soldiers Read in World War I.

The World War I Poets in the War.

Charles Sorley and the Poetry of World War I.

Top photograph: Trenches of the 11th Cheshire Regiment at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, on the Somme, July 1916. One sentry keeps watch while the others sleep. Photo by Ernest Brooks via Wikipedia.