C.S. Lewis

I have not read any of C.S. Lewis' books. There are probably half a dozen of them in the bookcase here in the living room. They came here to live when Keith came here to live 7 years ago. They are paperbacks and the print is small...and I just have never gotten around to reading any of them. I did use a Border's gift card that I got from my girls for Christmas to purchase a daily devotional based on his writings. One day at the mall, while waiting for someone to do something somewhere (I hate the mall) I leafed through the book. Some of the quotes piqued my interest and a few weeks later I went back and spent my gift card on it. I also watched the movie "Surprised by Joy" and I took part sporadically in a Sunday School Class about Narnia. So I know a little about the man. From what I know of him, I think I like him.

It has been established that C.S. Lewis was not a universalist but he definitely had some universalist leanings. He regarded George MacDonald, who is well known as a universalist, as his mentor. A few days ago I came across a quote from Lewis that could have been made by a universalist. This morning...which is Saturday...and my day to not have to hurry off the internet to go to work, I made a few cyber stops as I cruised around the world wide web checking out stuff on C.S. Lewis. Following are two "universalist quotes." Sometimes I think Christians speak the truth of UR without even knowing. The pastor at the UM church I attend does it often, and I usually nudge Emily when there is a verse or something said that supports universalism even though we both know that the pastor does not believe in the reconciliation of all.

C.S. Lewis said, “every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god…is accepted by the true God and“Christ saves many who do not think they know him."

Sounds like a universalist to me. And what about

"Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life [by accepting Jesus] should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that a no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him." That quote is from Mere Christianity.

About hell he said:

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end 'Thy will be done.'All that are in Hell, choose it." From The Great Divorce

"A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam." The Dark Tower

"All the time the joke is that the word “mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or [God] will say “mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man."
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Some other interesting quotes I came across:

“all Holy Scripture is in some sense – though not all parts of it in the same sense – the word of God.”

“Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history.”

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God.”

“whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history.... But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts...can be taken for use as weapons.”

Near the end of Lewis's life, in a letter to Bede Griffiths (12/20/61) he said "Even more disturbing as you [Dom] say, is the ghastly record of Christian persecution. It had begun in Our Lord's time - `Ye know not what spirit ye are of' (John of all people!) I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse...Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil." The Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed., W. H. Lewis

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." From The Problem of Pain

"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you." The Problem of Pain

About his conversion he said:

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Surprised by Joy