May was an unusually busy month for me with a lot of travel and webinars, which is why the blog hasn’t been updated for over a month. Among other things, my wife Lynn and I spent a week in Oxford with my Pugcast cronies C.R. Wiley and Tom Price and their wives to learn more about C.S. Lewis, record podcasts, and get footage for a documentary on Lewis. For the next few posts, I’ll be highlighting some of the things I learned about Lewis’s thought during the trip.

The first and most obvious lesson I learned is that I’m no Lewis scholar. Having had the opportunity to interview Michael Ward, Alister McGrath, and Simon Horobin showed me how much more there was to Lewis than I had realized before. I always appreciated him, but these interviews opened new perspectives and depth to Lewis’s thought that I had not seen earlier, as well as clarified some things I had some inkling of but that hadn’t crystalized in my mind.

Addison’s Walk

One of these involved the conversation between J.R.R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and C.S. Lewis on Addison’s Walk on September 19, 1931. (Coincidentally, 40 years to the day later, I first heard and understood the Gospel and came to faith.) The conversation turned to mythology, a subject that Lewis loved but which he thought was worthless and nothing but “lies breathed through silver.” Dyson and Tolkien disagreed and explained that the myths of dying and rising gods like Baldr that Lewis loved so much pointed to Christ, and that Jesus was just like those gods with one important difference: in his case, it really happened. It was myth made fact.

Lewis was already a theist by this point, but he had no use for the Incarnation or the idea of Jesus dying for our sins and rising from the dead. This idea of myth made fact made the Gospel resonate with something deep in Lewis’s heart and imagination, making Christianity not simply rationally plausible but also deeply desirable. And that was the crucial factor that led him to become a Christian.

Reason and “Joy”

Lewis’s path to conversion involved both reason—which got him as far as theism—and what he called joy—a kind of longing for something nothing on earth could satisfy. His conversion was thus a process that involved both the mind and the heart. As a result, his approach to apologetics included careful reasoning in some works, but also a focused intent on capturing the imagination and through that, showing the Gospel to be beautiful and eminently desirable. He does this most obviously in the Narnia Chronicles, but it is also part of many of his other writings. Most apologists focus almost entirely on reason; Lewis’s dual emphasis on reason and imagination, head and heart, intellect and will, sets him apart from most others in the field

Gen Z Challenges

I have argued for some time that reason-based apologetics is less effective with Gen Z than it has been for other generations. This is due to the way many of their hearts and minds have been formed. Postmodern ideas and Critical Theory taught them that objective truth is impossible, that what we see as truth is socially determined, and that truth claims are ultimately about taking or holding on to power.

On top of this, they see themselves largely in terms of Expressive Individualism, the idea that your authentic self is defined by you and you alone based on your inner life and feelings, and that you need to define yourself without regard to (and ideally in opposition to) social norms, family, religion, tradition, or anything outside of yourself. For people socialized into these ways of thinking, traditional approaches to apologetics involving logic and linear reasoning are not as persuasive as they were for previous generations.

apologetics of the Mind and Heart

Instead, I believe we need to develop a new approach to apologetics built around imagination and beauty without losing the approaches built on reason. Imaginative apologetics needs to be tied to truth supported by reason or the faith it leads to is likely to be lost to the next thing that captures the imagination. Lewis is a model of how to do both and keep them in balance. Fortunately, people working in cultural apologetics today are following his lead.

This need highlights the importance of what Annie Crawford calls “the C.S. Lewis Option:” educating people the way Lewis was educated, reading what he read, knowing what he knew, rather than just trying to imitate him without being grounded in the Great Tradition that formed his mind and heart.

It’s easy to forget that Lewis was hired at Oxford not just to teach English but also philosophy . He read and knew the classics (in their original languages), and that included not just the literary figures but the philosophers . With that training and with his mind sharpened by Socratic teaching, he developed a formidable intellect combined with a romantic sensibility that loved myth and folklore.

To understand Lewis, to appreciate his unique genius, and to learn from him to address the challenges the church faces in our day, we need to keep both sides of him in mind and to recover his balanced emphasis on mind and heart.