When The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is released to theaters on December 9, C.S. Lewis will no doubt become part of the national conversation—again. This issue of Christianity Today focuses on Lewis’s rising influence over the decades, but the movie will have a life of its own. For complete coverage of the film, you’ll want to check out ChristianityTodayMovies.com. Managing editor Mark Moring has pulled together a tremendous lineup to help understand the movie and all things surrounding it.
As might be expected, C.S. “Jack” Lewis has been no stranger to people on our hallway. I was introduced to Lewis in high school by way of the first volume of his science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. Another CT staffer who first read Lewis in high school is senior associate editor Stan Guthrie. He says, “The first book I read by Lewis was Mere Christianity. I had already made a decision for Christ as a teenager coming out of a secular worldview, but I was looking for intellectual reasons to bolster my faith. Lewis amply provided them.”
Many of our staffers met Lewis as children through his Narnia series, some before they were Christians and some without realizing that Lewis was a Christian. Rob Moll, associate online editor, has an interesting two-part story that led to a momentous change in his life.
“In 6th grade, my public school teacher read The Horse and His Boy to our class. That got me reading the whole Narnia series. The funny thing is, I knew nothing about Lewis being a Christian.
“It wasn’t until my senior year in college, when I was assigned Till We Have Faces, that I learned more about Lewis. We were studying world religious literature, and Lewis was the Christian representative. At the time, I was running away from God. Reading Faces, I was shocked to see how accurately Lewis understood how I felt. But he turned my antagonism on its head when Orual discovered that her complaints were more a result of her own self-centeredness than any failing of God’s. By the end of the book, I had to confess my arrogance, pride, and selfishness. That began a process that led me back to God. I feel indebted to Lewis for his ability to take me on a journey in which he painfully exposed my sinful self through a story I couldn’t set down!”
Lewis, like a frontier revivalist, makes his readers undergo a searing moral inventory that forces a decision. Lewis did exactly that for associate editor Collin Hansen: “Mere Christianity remains the book that has impacted me the most, because through it I learned how to fight pride’s insidious nature.”
Our newest associate editor, Madison Trammel, recalls the Lewis who portrays Christ as does Francis Thompson in “The Hound of Heaven.” He especially likes The Horse and His Boy “for the beautiful picture it paints of Aslan pursuing a young boy his entire life-long before he knew Aslan existed—in order to bring him into a relationship with himself.”
And, like most of us here, into a reading relationship with C. S. Lewis.
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