Imagination in Faith: The Contribution of C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis made many contributions to the Christian world.  He was an apologist whose moral arguments for belief in God are still very helpful.  He was a philosopher who even in his simplest books trailed off into dialogues that were weighty.  According to his friends he was a man who loved to laugh, and they knew him simply as 'Jack.'  For me, the great contribution that C.S. Lewis made to Christianity was the infusion of imagination that his writing gave a sometimes too cold and wooden Christendom.

I'll say first off that C.S. Lewis was someone that I have numerous disagreements with in terms of theology.  At times he seemed to argue for inclusivism, or salvation apart from belief in Jesus.  He held that Adam and Eve was a mythical story, and in The Great Divorce he seemed to present heaven and hell as self-inflicted conditions instead of a result of divine judgment.  A wise person once told me about distinguishing meat from bones in Christian writing, and sometimes with Lewis there were bones.

However, despite that, Lewis has made a huge contribution from children to adults, along with overwhelming good in propelling Christians towards a huge part of faith - imagination.  He made metaphors with words and characters that remain some of the most powerful that I have ever read.  No Systematic Theology on redemption has ever painted salvation the way that Eustace's struggle to undress the dragon scales, and Aslan's painful but delivering removal of them did.  No study of the book of Genesis has ever caused me to examine the fall of creation the way that Ransom's struggle in Perelandra painted it so perfectly.  No human written (at least that I have read) doctrinal statement on heaven comes close to connecting with people the way the final chapters of The Last Battle paint eternal joy and ultimate deliverance and community.  I continue to be amazed how many funerals I attend where the words of Narnia are read as comfort and reminder to families.

Jesus called on people to receive the kingdom of God as "one of these" meaning the little ones who were around Him.  Lewis taught me that imagination is one of the most powerful and even necessary points of the Christian faith.  Orthodoxy, without trying to, can wooden and harden great truths, and at times we begin to think that we have connected more dots than we actually have.  The result is that our God and The Story He is writing become too small.  I appreciate so much the work that Lewis did to point so many to imagine and even dream in the midst of the Christian faith, and by doing so find the unsafe but good God who was larger than our thoughts about Him.