How C.S. Lewis made me a Christian – Barney Zwartz

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else”. C.S. Lewis My son has just finished reading the seven Narnia books to my grandchildren, aged six and five. I am delighted by this because as a child I was addicted to these books, reading them over and over (and again as an adult). Every good communicator knows the power of a story, and Narnia author C.S. Lewis – a great literary critic and explainer of Christianity whose influence is as strong today 60 years after his death – certainly did. The first published, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is the most perfect allegory of Christianity but, growing up in a household in which religion was utterly irrelevant, I did not understand this. The power of the story worked on its own terms. Only after I became a Christian in my mid-20s did I understand how important an influence Lewis was on my journey. He showed me that we live in an ineluctably moral universe, in which personal responsibility really matters. He helped shape my understanding of good and bad as real rather than constructs – without in any way being “preachy”. Lewis wrote of his Narnia books that such stories could bypass the inhibitions wrought on so many by the religiosity of much Christianity. “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. “But suppose that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their true potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” I have always had my share of watchful dragons, but Lewis’ priorities and values resonated and silently took root. Speaking of Lewis, theologian Alister McGrath noted: “Stories are not simply things to entertain us, they are things that are there to convey meaning, to open up newer imaginative possibilities. Here is a new way of seeing things, and if you enter into this way of seeing things the world is a very different place. “This rediscovery of the imagination in human truth-seeking and truth-telling is really very important. Lewis played a very important role in doing that.” What Lewis showed me in the Narnia books, though I understood this only much later, is well summarised in another of his famous lines: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.