In all that we have read this year about C.S. Lewis and his novels, with all the quotes by chapel speakers, media, pastors, and theologians. Does anyone feel that sometimes we (Evangelical Culture) deify C.S. Lewis to much? Or is this recognition deserved? Let me know what you think?
posted by Anonymous at 11:35 AM
4 Comments:
After reading all that we have this year I have mixed feelings on the worship that some offer to Lewis. I really appreaciate Lewis as a writer and as a storyteller. I really enjoyed all of the books we read, but by far those where Lewis really gets to show off his storytelling. I guess the only negative I see in Lewis is that sometimes his ideas aren't all that profound. His works are filled with good ideas, but they are also fairly full of things that I would classify as some form of common sense. It seems that sometimes Lewis makes a big deal out of things that if said differently would be common thoughts to us. That being said, I still really loved reading his works and think that he deserves a good deal of the credit he is given.
I don't know if I would go as far as deifying him. I do think that a lot of people look up to what C.S. Lewis has written.
If people try to deify him, they need to take a step back and recognize that Lewis was human too. One reason that I enjoyed reading "The Narnian" so much was that it looked into Lewis' life and made him one of us. It showed me the more interesting and less perfect side of Lewis that really is never talked about.
i think lewis deserves recognition for his work. but just like with any famous person, singer, actor, sports celebrity, we have to be careful how highly we think of them.
i like what andrew said about a lot of lewis's stuff being common sense but for me when i read stuff that sounded familiar to me, it was like "oh yeah, i didnt really think of it that way." i think his popularity is due in part to his simplifying certain topics so everyone can read and understand what he's talking about. good post, i think this could get a lot of good comments.
Yes, definitely. Though my own appreciation of Lewis' writings has grown immeasurably over the past few months because of this class,I do feel that Lewis' "sainthood" is a very real and unfortunate presupposition in popular evengelical christianity. It is a fallacy to take anything humanly crontrived (even if it is those all-time classics, The Chronicles of Narnia) as holy writ. I believe that Lewis had amazing perception, but even his was flawed in some respects.
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