Lewis goes on the radio
Mere Christianity broadcasts begin
The BBC approaches C.S. Lewis in 1941 and asks him to give radio talks about Christianity for a general audience.
The timing is almost impossibly dramatic: the Battle of Britain has just ended. London has been bombed. The nation is in a war for its survival. Lewis will speak to people who are frightened, bereaved, uncertain whether any of the structures they have built their lives on will survive.
He does not speak to them as an expert addressing students. He speaks as a man who was himself a convinced atheist until very recently, who has been through every objection to the faith from the inside, who knows where the doubts live.
His method is argument — careful, honest, unwilling to claim more than the evidence supports, but also unwilling to dismiss the evidence that points toward God. He is not performing certainty. He is modeling intellectual integrity in the presence of the question.
The talks are listened to by millions. They are collected into Mere Christianity, published in 1952, which has sold over three and a half million copies and is consistently cited as the most influential book in people's conversion to Christianity in the twentieth century.
Lewis speaks to the educated skeptic, the war-weary pragmatist, the person who finds institutional religion implausible but cannot quite dismiss the hunger that religion addresses.
He speaks from inside that hunger, to people who share it, in a voice that says: I know where you are. I was there. Let me show you what I found.
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952 AD
“I and the Father are one.”
Lewis's trilemma — Lord, liar, or lunatic — is the most famous argument in twentieth-century apologetics and also, by now, the most argued-about.
But the core of it is simply what Jesus said about himself, taken seriously. Not interpreted away, not softened into metaphor, not domesticated into a great moral teacher. Taken at face value.
If he is what he claimed to be, everything changes. If he is not, he is not merely wrong — he is dangerous.
The comfortable middle position — admirable teacher, interesting philosopher, good moral example — is exactly what Lewis argues is not available. He said things that do not permit the comfortable middle.
Who do you say that he is? Not who do you say he was, historically. Who is he to you, now, today, in the specific circumstances of your life?