Olson on Lewis
Carl Olson writes about C.S. Lewis' Christianity. Excerpts:
Even those Catholics who express great admiration for Lewis point out that one of the weaknesses of Lewis's theological and apologetic writings is a weak, or hazy, view of the Church. In an otherwise glowing analysis of C.S. Lewis recently published in First Things magazine ("Mere Apologetics", June/July 2005), Avery Cardinal Dulles, author of A History of Apologetics, wrote: "As Lewis' greatest weakness, I would single out his lack of appreciation for the Church and the sacraments. ”¦ His 'mere Christianity' is a set of beliefs and a moral code, but scarcely a society. In joining the [Anglican] Church he made a genuine and honest profession of faith”“but he did not experience it as entry into a true community of faith. He found it possible to write extensively about Christianity while saying almost nothing about the People of God, the structure of authority, and the sacraments." . . .
[W]ould Lewis have remained an Anglican if he were alive today. "People ask me if he would by now have been received into the Ancient Church," Howard stated, "and I usually say yes. I don't see how, as an orthodox Christian apologist, he could have stayed in the Anglican Church during these last decades of its hasty self-destruction." Joseph Pearce writes in C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church:
We can't know for certain what Lewis would have done had he lived to see the triumph of modernism in the Church of England and the defeat of "mere Christianity". There is no doubt, however, that he would have felt strangely out of place in today's Anglican church. There is also no doubt that today's Anglican church sees him as a somewhat embarrassing part of their unenlightened and reactionary past. The sobering truth is that even if Lewis had not chosen to leave the Church of England, the Church of England would have chosen to leave him. (p. 167)
