Doubt That Led to Devotion – The untold story of C. S. Lewis by ABBY PERRY for Christianity Today
It’s easy to feel like you know C. S. Lewis.
He’s the man who flung open the wardrobe door to Narnia. He introduced you to Peter the Magnificent and Lucy the Valiant; he won your heart through Reepicheep. And when Aslan roared goodness and beauty back into the world? You may as well have spent an evening in Lewis’s living room, listening to him talk wax lyrically on death and new life. Afterall, Lewis was an amalgamation of all of the best parts of his beloved characters. Wasn’t he?
While Lewis embodied many of these positive qualities, he also carried some of his characters’ less noble traits. This is something that’s easy to forget, or to want to forget, when reading his work. But the truth of Lewis is one of both doubt and faith, tremendous struggle and surety in salvation at once. The Lewis who gave you Caspian is also the Lewis who penned the petulant Eustace in need of transformation. He’s the creator of Edmund’s doubts and the White Witch’s rebellion. He is the weak and uncertain patient found in the pages of The Screwtape Letters.
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Lewis dragged his feet on his way to kneeling at the foot of the cross. He argued against Christianity for years and rejected the concept of a God who had not answered his childhood prayers to save his mother’s life. When he finally surrendered to the truth of Jesus Christ, he did so as the most reluctant convert, one who still wanted to shake his head at Christianity’s claims but no longer could.
In seeing this whole picture of Lewis, you may find yourself meeting a stranger instead of an old friend. But perhaps you know him better than you thought. Maybe he, like you, is a person of both frustration and faith, doubt and devotion.
What if Lewis’s writing helped you understand your own faith because he wrestled mightily with his own?
Losing His Religion
Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis was born into a Protestant family in Belfast, Ireland, on November 29, 1898. His family loved books, encouraging Lewis and his elder brother, Warren, to read voraciously. An imaginative and bookish child, Lewis “pulled volumes off the shelves and entered into worlds created by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Nesbit, Mark Twain, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”
