Title: God in the Dock
Author:
C.S. Lewis
Date: 1970
Publisher:
Eerdmans
ISBN:
0-8028-1456-5
Length: 340
pages plus index
Quote: “The
young people today are un-Christian because their teachers have been either
unwilling or unable to transmit Christianity to them.”
Most of
“the young people” of whom Lewis was writing, in 1946, have died of old age by
now. Lewis, who wasn’t young when he died in 1963, never became really rich but
left enough of an estate to provide his secretary with a lifelong career of
curating his writings. The secretary, Walter Hooper, compiled several
collections of Lewis’s short stories, articles, and poems. God in the Dock was the most successful of those.
What
readers didn’t like about this collection is that it contains, for their
historical value, some of the earlier versions, discussions, and
explanations-of-revisions of chapters in Mere
Christianity, Miracles, and The
Problem of Pain. Not only have we read some of these thoughts before, we’ve
read them better written. The articles that were improved into Lewis’s books
are valuable, though, to a certain type of reader.
Lewis was
one of a whole generation of writers whose superbly rhythmic, readable,
quotable prose style was shaped by frequent early exposure to the Bible—though
some of them rejected the Bible, as adults, and Lewis himself deadpanned that he didn’t hear anything about
the rhythm of “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” that
wasn’t in “At the regatta, Madge avoided the water and the boats.” But that was
the point. If Lewis, or contemporaries like H.G. Wells, Dorothy Sayers, or
J.R.R. Tolkien, or the older generation from whom they learned, George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, or Mark Twain,
wouldn’t have automatically chosen the phrasing “At the regatta, Madge avoided
the water and the boats,” they would have chosen one that sounded even better.
The tin-eared writer of a previous generation might have wrought, “The regatta
commencing, Madge, fair daughter Of Bill and likewise Betty, themselves sprung
Of Jones’s lineage,” and so on for a few pages of genealogy, “Glanc’d on the
sparkling waves, and then retreated To Brownleys’ inn...” The tone-deaf writer
of today might report, “In boating news, Joe Smith and crew of the Madge winning the Club Silver Cup;
Madeleine ‘Madge’ Jones reported missing earlier, since found at Brownleys’
Tourist Haven, citing nausea as reason for not attending...” Or any number of
other things compared to which, yes, although it’s not an especially poetic
line, “At the regatta, Madge avoided the water and the boats” is better.
That
trained ear, plus a demand for exposition of the basic doctrines of
Christianity worldwide, made several writers successful and made Lewis the
“giant” among them. He expounded Christian doctrine so well that some of my
generation mistook his excellent prose style for direct inspiration from God.
It wasn’t. It was the work of a gifted but thoroughly mortal writer who also
wrote shorter, hastier articles that he later revised into great books. Lewis
did write lines that weren’t the best lines that could possibly have expressed
the thoughts in his writing. God in the
Dock is a collection of some things he wrote that made readers, or even
Lewis himself, turn back to them saying “You can do better than this.” And so
he could and so he did.
In God in the Dock we learn that some
things that no one else had written, or at least not nearly so well as Lewis so
memorably wrote them, were fresh in English because they’d been familiar to
older audiences in Latin. We see that there were
times, too, when his arguments were logical but wrong; his argument against
“priestesses in the Church of England” accurately observes that there is no
room for “priestesses” or Goddess cults in Christianity, but overlooks the
corollary that, in the apostolic tradition, there was no room for “priests” or male-god
cults either. In the great biblical tradition Lewis saw romantic love as an
illustration of God’s love for humanity; he accurately accused the majority of
men of being “insufficiently masculine” to relate to their wives as God does to
the Church, but failed to follow that thought to its logical conclusion that,
if the majority of men don’t relate to their wives as God does to the Church,
then an appropriate description of God’s love for the Church might be something
other than “masculine,” just as it is other than “maternal.” (Could the best
word for God’s love be simply “loving”?)
We also get
some fresh thoughts that might have been worked up into chapters in books Lewis
might have written if he’d lived a great deal longer, but they weren’t; some thoughts
and articles are found only here. The title essay is one of them. Lewis was a
teacher not a preacher, so he was only occasionally invited to teach
ministerial students (“ordinands”) anything about preaching, and wrote
relatively little about the problem of evangelical preaching to people who saw
themselves as the judges and God as the accused on trial—“in the dock.”
We see that
Lewis was more prescient than he knew. Assessing his own Christian writing, he
said that his literary and intellectual books might have a function analogous
to that of John the Baptist; that Lewis felt unable to write or preach
“emotional ‘Come to Jesus’” messages, and thought Britain was due for a visit
from someone who could do those well. Lewis, who wasn’t especially fond of
Americans as a group (his American wife was unique), had met then-young Billy
Graham and liked him, but did not recognize him as the great evangelist of
their century.
We learn
almost as much about Lewis’s political views as we do from Present Concerns, and although they’re not identical with the views
of this web site, we believe Lewis would have approved of this web site’s
political strategy. (I don't think anyone at this web site would have liked Lewis much in the flesh, but oh, what an e-friend he would have been!)
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