Why C. S. Lewis Still Speaks: The Next Colson Center Short Course by: John Stonestreet & G. Shane Morris – BreakPoint
Alone in a seemingly hopeless war against an implacable Nazi enemy with bombs raining down on London, one man stepped up to a microphone, amidst the chaos, and addressed his nation on the subject of Christianity.
That man was C. S. Lewis, and the talks he delivered on the BBC radio network more than 75 years ago would become what is perhaps his best-known book, “Mere Christianity.” But don’t let that publication date fool you.
Decades later, it’s incredible how relevant Lewis’ brilliance still is. Much of what he wrote sounds like it was addressed directly to our time and our culture. That’s because, despite the imminent threats of his time, Lewis dealt with the ultimate questions all of us have, and the objections that have always haunted people about God, faith, and morality. And he did so in a simple, intuitive, humble, and easy-to-follow way.
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In fact, here’s an example: the Oxford don himself in one of the only surviving radio clips from those broadcasts. Lewis is explaining how God can listen to the prayers of billions of people at the same time:
“Almost certainly, God is not in time. His life doesn’t consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to him at 10:30 tonight, He hasn’t got to listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call 10:30. 10:30 and every other moment from the beginning to the end of the world is always the present for him. If you’d like to put it that way, he has infinity in which to listen to the split-second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames. That’s difficult, I know.” (Ed. Note: Here’s a link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=136&v=m3jYLGcDUFE 2:18 to 3:08).
Now, Lewis didn’t say anything really new here. Fifteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine proposed that God is outside of time. But Lewis expressed this, and so many other key concepts of the Christian faith, in a unique way that appealed not only to commonsense, but to that stubborn, unshakable knowledge—shared even by atheists—that there’s something beyond the material world.
