C.S. Lewis an apostate?

There’s a Philly Christian AM radio station I listen to on my drive down to school every week. Around 8:30 a.m., a program called “Watchman on the Wall” (part of the Southwest Radio Ministries) comes on every day. And if you listen only for a few seconds, you’ll get a healthy dose of end-time prophecy. There’s even a segment called “Bible in the News” which sees recent events in Lebanon as a sign toward the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

By now you’ve probably have guessed what slant this show has. Not that I already have a problem with folks trying to associate Gog with Russia or Iraq as the new Babylon, but these two guys on the show today called C.S. Lewis an “apostate”. Lewis an apostate? Go to this page and click on the December 4 broadcast and take a listen. These two guys also wrote a book called “The Chronicles of Narnia: Wholesome Entertainment or Gateway to Paganism?” in which they claim Lewis was an apostate because:

1) Lewis did not believe in creation but in evolution; they state Lewis viewed the Genesis account as a collection of pagan myths.

2) Lewis did not believe in biblical inerrancy but relied on higher criticism.

3) When asked how things will happen in the future, Lewis in an interview said he does not know.

It’s safe to say that this book is a practice in shoddy and suspect scholarship. I really wonder whether saving faith is really based on the intellectual assent to a set of propositions.

Finally, is eschatology just the study of what will happen in the end time? Is eschatology a mere list of events that will take place at consummation? I venture to say that eschatology is really about the present. To quote Stanley Grenz and John Franke, “eschatology is the explication of the meaning of the entire narrative of God at work throughout the ages.” As God’s people, we are actually looking back from the future toward the present (the here and now) so to determine what it means to live out our future fulfillment in this present time. Eschatology is inherently practical!

This is why I love fundies. They make the sole purpose of salvation as the mere entrance into heaven. Now all we have to do is wait for Jesus to come back. No need to worry about the world. Taken to an extreme, this becomes a dualism in which salvation concerns only the spiritual and forgoes the physical. Consummation is way bigger than that; it incorporates all of creation.

Quite honestly, these guys need to practice charity and they really need to do their homework (they also criticized Lewis for having sympathies for ecumenism instead of sticking to Protestant doctrine). If they have read Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, they’d know Lewis warns his readers of the dangers of higher criticism, especially in the guise of the historical Jesus movement.