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At my alma mater we were reading C. S. Lewis before shelves of books were written about him. Though he smoked pipes in pubs, we overlooked such "personal lapses" because we were sure his books, especially Mere Christianity, would bring many into the Kingdom. At my church we affectionately refer to Lewis as "St. Clive" and adjudicate certain doctrinal disputes with a citation from the "Fifth Gospel" (i.e., his complete works). At the community college where I sometimes teach Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, students occasionally ask questions about their Christian faith. My discussions typically end by handing them a copy Mere Christianity.
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But now Tom Wright has written Simply Christian. It obviously trades on the popularity of Lewis; worse yet, it's marketed as another Mere Christianity! Is there really room for a sixth gospel, or is this a covert plot to replace Lewis? My pastor fears it's the latter. I believe it's the former: some students should read Lewis, but others should read Wright.
Lewis' apologetic works—Mere Christianity, Problem of Pain, Miracles, etc.—are still the best introduction for the philosophically minded student with very little church experience. Lewis is able to write for pagans because he experienced paganism first hand. Wright, because he grew up in the church, is able to write for those in danger of becoming what Christian Smith calls "moralistic, therapeutic deists." These are students who speak "Christianese" fluently. They have been raised in Sunday School; at church camp they have committed their lives to Christ; most important, they are "spiritual"—they call on God for help with everything from passing a math exam to difficulties in personal relationships. But even so—and this is the crucial point—by the time they get to college, they choke on the name of Jesus.
This is hardly surprising, given the culture in which they have been raised. Lewis' generation worshiped science. Industrialism was triumphant, and everyone thanked the scientists. Anything that smacked of religion was old fashioned and out-of-date. (Perhaps room could be found for the Bible when teaching children, but it would have to be de-mythologized for adults.) Today, large segments of the population take science for granted or regard it with suspicion; meanwhile, they value "spirituality"—that vague sort of feeling which pictures God (to use one of Lewis' prescient phrases) as a sort of "tapioca pudding." This sort of spirituality will never cause offense. But as Wright makes clear, when the earliest Christians proclaimed that "Jesus is Lord" they were implicitly adding "and Caesar is not." Such exclusivity was offensive then, and it's offensive now.
Simply Christian, however, is not another lament over the sorry state of the church. Neither its tone nor its content is scolding. Instead, it is a distillation of years of historical research and pastoral care, written for those whose faith is wavering and subjective.
Wright begins by tipping his hat to Lewis' classic description of children's innate ability to protest injustice in all its multifarious forms with the cry, "That's not fair!" What can this be, asks Wright, but an "echo of a voice" from a king and a kingdom where justice is the rule, not the exception? And where do we get our thirst for spirituality, beauty, and meaningful personal relationships if not from the same voice, the same place?
Of course, some students are still enamored of materialistic answers to such questions and will be unmoved by Wright's metaphor of an "echo." Those students should first read Lewis. Where Wright shines is with students who are already "spiritual" but are put off by a theology which insists on the centrality of Jesus. And not just the "Jesus of faith," who lives only in the subjective experiences of individual believers, but the Jesus of history (not the fictional figure of the Jesus Seminar).
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