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At first glance these three examples may seem wholly unrelated: the first, after all, concerns theological issues, while the second and third are philosophical and aesthetic in focus and scope. But look a little closer. In all three cases, we catch a glimpse of a church that knows how to address the symptoms but seems to lack the will to face the disease head on, that prunes the stunted branches so nicely while remaining oblivious to the rotting of the roots.

We need to dig deeper to reach those unstated assumptions that gird and control our contemporary world, even as we must broaden our perspective to encompass both the multifaceted nature of the modernist and postmodernist ethos and the equally multifaceted critique that we as evangelicals must offer in response. But where shall we find the methods and the language to construct such a critique?

This twin propensity for intellectual precision and emotional self-protection grew during the early years of World War I, when the shy, unathletic Lewis (who bitterly hated the boarding school he was attending) got the chance to study under a private tutor. His tutor, William Kirkpatrick (or the Great Knock, as Lewis called him) was an obsessively rational thinker of that old and venerable school of skeptical Scotch empiricists of whom David Hume is the titular head. From the very moment Lewis arrived at Great Bookham, Surrey, Kirkpatrick beat into his head the need for clear, rational thinking free from all subjective speculation and emotional murkiness. Thus, when the nervous, fledgling Lewis, desperate to make conversation, noted that Surrey was less "wild" than he had expected, Kirkpatrick subjected him to an immediate, deadly serious inquisition about the basis of his statement. The inquisition did not last long; it quickly became apparent to Lewis that, as his expectations of Surrey were wholly unfounded, and as he did not even know what he meant by the word wild, his statement was both illogical and meaningless and had best be dropped.

Most students would have crumbled under such relentless logic; to Lewis (who later retold the story in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy) it was "red beef and strong beer." Lewis committed himself to absolute clarity of thought and to assessing the assumptions on which our ideas are based.

Ironically, though Kirkpatrick was an atheist, he was partly responsible for shaping the critical faculties of the 20th century's greatest Christian apologist. When Lewis, after many years of intellectual soul-searching, finally embraced Christian orthodoxy in 1931, he did not simply jettison his early mental training for an emotional, pietistic faith. Rather, he marshaled the full forces of his mind in defending what he called "mere" Christianity (the central doctrines of the Apostles' Creed that all believing Christians share). In such works as Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Abolition of Man, and The Problem of Pain, Lewis directly challenged the modernist faith in the all-pervasive explanatory power of evolution, asserting that such things as ethics, religion, and reason could not have evolved but must have had a divine origin. Unlike so many contemporary Christian academics who passively (if not unconsciously) accept the existing assumptions on which their discipline is based and then meekly ask that God's name be mentioned now and then, Lewis went on the offensive and challenged the assumptions themselves.

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April 23 2001, Vol. 45, No. 6