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To be sure, Lewis, the Anglo-Catholic, would not have endorsed Chambers's acceptance of the Wesleyan belief in entire sanctification; and Chambers, the evangelical, would have felt that Lewis's treatments of biblical inspiration and the Atonement were a bit loose. But that is irrelevant here. The two men shared a full belief in the triune God, original sin, redemption and regeneration through Jesus Christ, and in the reality of God's sovereign control of all that happens. Against this background, the convergence of their thinking about spiritual life when surrounded by war is less surprising.

For any who wish to verify what I am about to report, the main evidence on Chambers is in the volume of his Complete Works, published in 2000, and in David McCasland's Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God (1993). Lewis's thoughts are most clearly focused in The Screwtape Letters (1942) and his Oxford sermon, "Learning in War-time," which he preached in October 1939.

The war itself was never the subject of what Lewis and Chambers said, only part of the predicate. As neither politicians nor prophets but Christian nurturers, they took people in perplexity of need as their subject. They discussed war, with its unforeseeable outcomes and certain distresses, as only one of life's incidentals (granted, a huge one) with which we must learn to deal.

What, then, did they have to say about living with war? Basically, it was the same as they regularly said to help people live for God in this fallen world. It can be set out thus:

First, we must think. It is no surprise that Lewis, a university teacher, should have cast all he said as a Christian spokesman and apologist as an argument. (See Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and God in the Dock for starters.) Demanding critical thought for the developing of discernment is, after all, what Oxbridge education was (and still is) all about. It is more surprising that Chambers, long the chief speaker for the League of Prayer, a body promoting a second-blessing experience, should have stressed so constantly the need to grapple with life's big questions and urged so strongly that thinking was vital for spiritual growth and maturity.

The truth is that Chambers and Lewis were teachers to their fingertips. They knew that the unthinking—professed Christians no less than others—live perforce on prejudices, moods, and knee-jerk reactions that keep them from wisdom. They believed that informed thought is integral to the process of discipleship. And so Chambers's word to a man who read only the Bible and books about it, and who felt stuck and inarticulate, was: "The trouble is you have allowed part of your brain to stagnate for want of use." The man later wrote, "There and then, [Chambers] gave me a list of over 50 books, philosophical, psychological, theological, covering almost every phase of modern thought," leading to "a revolution which can only be described as a mental new birth"—just as Chambers had hoped.

Conversely, Lewis's didactic devil Screwtape warns his naïve nephew and protégé, Wormwood, that humans must at all costs be distracted from pursuing truth by active thought. "The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground . …By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?" Serious thinking about life's basic questions is never ultimately on the devil's side; Lewis knows this and makes Screwtape acknowledge it.

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January 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1