On Moving with the Times: Second of Two Parts

This paper was read to an assembly of Anglican priests and youth leaders at the “Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy” of the Church in Wales at Carmarthen during Easter, 1945, and is reprinted from “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics” by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 89–103). In the first part, Lewis suggested to these church leaders that in their attempts to reach their “uneducated and unbelieving” countrymen, they should realize that these people are likely to (1) be very skeptical about history, (2) distrust ancient texts, and (3) have almost no sense of sin.

(4) We must learn the language of our audience. And let me say at the outset that it is no use at all laying down a priori what the ‘plain man’ does or does not understand. You have to find out by experience. Thus most of us would have supposed that the change from ‘may truly and indifferently minister justice’ to ‘may truly and impartially’ made that place easier to the uneducated (the first quotation is from the prayer for the ‘Whole state of Christ’s Church’ in the service of Holy Communion, Prayer Book [1662]; the second is the revised form of that same phrase as found in the 1928 Prayer Book); but a priest of my acquaintance discovered that his sexton saw no difficulty in indifferently (‘It means making no difference between one man and another’ he said) but had no idea what impartially meant.

On this question of language the best thing I can do is to make a list of words which are used by the people in a sense different from ours.

Atonement. Does not really exist in a spoken modern English, though it would be recognized as ‘a religious word.’ In so far as it conveys any meaning to the uneducated I think it means compensation. No one word will express to them what Christians mean by Atonement: you must paraphrase.

Being. (Noun) Never means merely ‘entity’ in popular speech. Often it means what we should call a ‘personal being’ (e.g. a man said to me ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost but I don’t think He is a being!’).

Catholic means Papistical.

Charity. Means (a) Alms, (b) A ‘charitable organization,’ (c) Much more rarely—indulgence (i.e. a ‘charitable’ attitude towards a man is conceived as one that denies or condones his sins, not as one that loves the sinner in spite of them).

Christian. Has come to include almost no idea of belief. Usually a vague term of approval. The question ‘What do you call a Christian?’ has been asked of me again and again. The answer they wish to receive is ‘A Christian is a decent chap who’s unselfish etc.’

Church. Means (a) A sacred building, (b) The clergy. Does not suggest to them the ‘company of all faithful people’ (a phrase which occurs in the prayer of ‘Thanksgiving’ at the end of the service of Holy Communion). Generally used in a bad sense. Direct defence of the Church is part of our duty: but use of the word Church where there is no time to defend it alienates sympathy and should be avoided where possible.

Creative. Now means merely ‘talented,’ ‘original.’ The idea of creation in the theological sense is absent from their minds.

Creature means ‘beast,’ ‘irrational animal.’ Such an expression as ‘We are only creatures’ would almost certainly be misunderstood.

Crucifixion, Cross etc. Centuries of hymnody and religious cant have so exhausted these words that they now very faintly—if at all—convey the idea of execution by torture. It is better to paraphrase; and, for the same reason, to say flogged for New Testament scourged (Matt. 27:26; Mark 15:15; John 19:1).

Dogma. Used by the people only in a bad sense to mean ‘unproved assertion delivered in an arrogant manner.’

Immaculate Conception. In the mouth of an uneducated speaker always means Virgin Birth.

Morality means chastity.

Personal. I had argued for at least ten minutes with a man about the existence of a ‘personal devil’ before I discovered that personal meant to him corporeal. I suspect this of being widespread. When they say they don’t believe in a ‘personal’ God they may often mean only that they are not anthropomorphists.

Potential. When used at all is used in an engineering sense: never means ‘possible.’

Primitive. Means crude, clumsy, unfinished, inefficient. ‘Primitive Christianity’ would not mean to them at all what it does to you.

Sacrifice. Has no associations with temple and altar. They are familiar with this word only in the journalistic sense (‘The Nation must be prepared for heavy sacrifices’).

Spiritual. Means primarily immaterial, incorporeal, but with serious confusions from the Christian uses of πνεῦμα (which means ‘spirit,’ as in 1 Cor. 14:12). Hence the idea that whatever is ‘spiritual’ in the sense of ‘non-sensuous’ is somehow better than anything sensuous: e.g., they don’t really believe that envy could be as bad as drunkenness.

Vulgarity. Usually means obscenity or ‘smut.’ There are bad confusions (and not only in uneducated minds) between: (a) The obscene or lascivious: what is calculated to provoke lust. (b) The indecorous: what offends against good taste or propriety. (c) The vulgar proper: what is socially ‘low.’ ‘Good’ people tend to think (b) as sinful as (a) with the result that others feel (a) to be just as innocent as (b).

To conclude—you must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every Ordination examination.

I turn now to the question of the actual attack. This may be either emotional or intellectual. If I speak only of the intellectual kind, that is not because I undervalue the other but because, not having been given the gifts necessary for carrying it out, I cannot give advice about it. But I wish to say most emphatically that where a speaker has that gift, the direct evangelical appeal of the ‘Come to Jesus’ type can be as overwhelming today as it was a hundred years ago. I have seen it done, preluded by a religious film and accompanied by hymn singing, and with very remarkable effect. I cannot do it: but those who can ought to do it with all their might. I am not sure that the ideal missionary team ought not to consist of one who argues and one who (in the fullest sense of the word) preaches. Put up your arguer first to undermine their intellectual prejudices; then let the evangelist proper launch his appeal. I have seen this done with great success. But here I must concern myself only with the intellectual attack. Non omnia possumus omnes (‘Not all things can we all do,’ Virgil, Eclogues, bk. VIII, line 63).

And first, a word of encouragement. Uneducated people are not irrational people. I have found that they will endure, and can follow, quite a lot of sustained argument if you go slowly. Often, indeed, the novelty of it (for they have seldom met it before) delights them.

Do not attempt to water Christianity down. There must be no pretence that you can have it with the Supernatural left out. So far as I can see Christianity is precisely the one religion from which the miraculous cannot be separated. You must frankly argue for supernaturalism from the very outset.

The two popular ‘difficulties’ you will probably have to deal with are these. (1) ‘Now that we know how huge the universe is and how insignificant the Earth, it is ridiculous to believe that the universal God should be specially interested in our concerns.’ In answer to this you must first correct their error about fact. The insignificance of Earth in relation to the universe is not a modern discovery: nearly 2,000 years ago Ptolemy (Almagest, bk. 1, ch. v) said that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars Earth must be treated as a mathematical point without magnitude. Secondly, you should point out that Christianity says what God has done for Man; it doesn’t say (because it doesn’t know) what He has or has not done in other parts of the universe. Thirdly, you might recall the parable of the one lost sheep (Matt. 18:11–14; Luke 15:4–7). If Earth has been specially sought by God (which we don’t know) that may not imply that it is the most important thing in the universe, but only that it has strayed. Finally, challenge the whole tendency to identify size and importance. Is an elephant more important than a man, or a man’s leg than his brain?

(2) ‘People believed in miracles in the Old Days because they didn’t then know that they were contrary to the Laws of Nature.’ But they did. If St. Joseph didn’t know that a virgin birth was contrary to Nature (i.e. if he didn’t know the normal origin of babies) why, on discovering his wife’s pregnancy, was he ‘minded to put her away’ (Matt. 1:19)? Obviously, no event would be recorded as a wonder unless the recorders knew the natural order and saw that this was an exception. If people didn’t yet know that the Sun rose in the East they wouldn’t be even interested in its once rising in the West. They would not record it as a miraculum—nor indeed record it at all. The very idea of ‘miracle’ presupposes knowledge of the Laws of Nature; you can’t have the idea of an exception until you have the idea of a rule.

It is very difficult to produce arguments on the popular level for the existence of God. And many of the most popular arguments seem to me invalid. Some of these may be produced in discussion by friendly members of the audience. This raises the whole problem of the ‘embarrassing supporter.’ It is brutal (and dangerous) to repel him; it is often dishonest to agree with what he says. I usually try to avoid saying anything about the validity of his argument in itself and reply, ‘Yes. That may do for you and me. But I’m afraid if we take that line our friend here on my left might say etc. etc.’

Fortunately, though very oddly, I have found that people are usually disposed to hear the divinity of Our Lord discussed before going into the existence of God. When I began I used, if I were giving two lectures, to devote the first to mere Theism; but I soon gave up this method because it seemed to arouse little interest. The number of clear and determined atheists is apparently not very large.

When we come to the Incarnation itself, I usually find that some form of the aut Deus aut malus homo (‘Either God or a bad man’) can be used. The majority of them start with the idea of the ‘great human teacher’ who was deified by His superstitious followers. It must be pointed out how very improbable this is among Jews and how different to anything that happened with Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed. The Lord’s own words and claims (of which many are quite ignorant) must be forced home. (The whole case, on a popular level, is very well put indeed in Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.)

Something will usually have to be said about the historicity of the Gospels. You who are trained theologians will be able to do this in ways which I could not. My own line was to say that I was a professional literary critic and I thought I did know the difference between legend and historical writing: that the Gospels were certainly not legends (in one sense they’re not good enough): and that if they are not history then they are realistic prose fiction of a kind which actually never existed before the eighteenth century. Little episodes such as Jesus writing in the dust when they brought Him the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3–8) (which have no doctrinal significance at all) are the mark.

One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True—or False’ into stuff about a good society, or morals, or the incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish Inquisition, or France, or Poland—or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus will you be able to undermine (a) Their belief that a certain amount of ‘religion’ is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important. (b) Their firm disbelief of Article XVIII in the Prayer Book (Of obtaining eternal Salvation by the Name of Christ, which says ‘They also are to be had accursed that presume to say, That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the light of Nature. For holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved’). Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that He cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life. And it should (at least in my judgement) be made clear that we are not pronouncing all other religions to be totally false, but rather saying that in Christ whatever is true in all religions is consummated and perfected. But, on the other hand, I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.

For my own part, I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may salva reverentia (‘Without outraging reverence’) divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear.’ By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Society are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear; for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The clear religion of the neighbouring temple go side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.

One last word. I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. That also is why we need one another’s continual help—oremus pro invicem (‘Let us pray for each other’).

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