And the C.S. Lewis Debate Continues

After sending an e-mail to our friend asking her to publish it to the loop, it never happened. A few days later I received an e-mail back with responses from Berit Kjos who has written extensive exposes on C.S. Lewis and others for her own words on these subjects go to www.crossroad.to. My comments were taken to mean things other than what I said although I will admit my ignorance on the timeline of when things in C.S. Lewis’ life happened. My response to the e-mail is as follows:

My statements were not ones of growing weary over the constant battle of ensuring the integrity of the gospel. My weariness is over how we treat those who are in error. Those who are called to be defenders of the truth are often to quick to condemn the person to hell if anything they state is in error. I too have been guilty of this in the past. I am not saying that we should not be diligent in pursuit of the truth. We often get in the mode of destroying the fallacies of the enemy that we unwittingly become his tool in that we destroy all in our path without regard. The very people we are trying to reach see the way we attack others and do not see our love, then they are turned away. It is one thing to point out if someone is in error, I am not one to shy away from that, it is another thing when we take those statements of error and speculate about their eternal destiny. Mr. Lewis may well have been a Christian, but had his thinking skewed by the influences in his life including a church that did not ascribe to tight literal conservative theology.

While I may have been wrong about the timeline (I relied on knowledge as told to me by others without doing my own research, my bad) it does not change my basic message. I will not ascribe C.S. Lewis to hell because he may have said a few things in error. The only thing that could place him there is if he did not accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Again this does not mean that we sit back and say that everything he wrote is correct. What it does mean is that if we find error we document it, verify it, expose it, and then expect our statements to be held to the same level of scrutiny.

We as Christians are tasked with two important things, One is to spread the gospel and reach others with the message of the unending, awe inspiring, wonderful love that He has for His greatest creation, the second is to defend the faith from attack both from without and from within. Our feeble, finite, and fallible brains cannot begin to wrap around even a tenth of a percent of His love for us and what measures he would go through to reach us, yet we are all too quick to destroy that which does not line up with our preconceived ideas in our attempt to defend His message. Who is more in the wrong? The person who says something in error or the person who attacks the person in error rather than exposing the error, if both lead to people being turned away from His love?