Mere Christianity: A Biography by George M. Marsden

C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography by George M. Marsden

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Cutting to the chase:

What I liked about the book:

I learned about the early years when Lewis was asked to create a series of talks for the BBC during WWII. I think Marsden does very well describing how the book came about. I also found his list of yay and nay-sayers to be interesting.

What I did not like:


After a while it feels as though the nay sayers get way too much credit and too much attention devoted to the sneering detraction of Lewis and all of his work, including Mere Christianity.

What I found most interesting as well as deplorable was that none of his detractors argued a single point Lewis made. Instead they settled for making unsubstantiated assertions that could be summed up as:

” C.S. Lewis is not a theologian. He is not a sophisticated thinker as we, the theologians, are. Therefore we are scornful of anything he has to say. He wants to drive the church back into the middle ages with his silly notions of Biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Jesus and all the other nonsense that requires one to take Scripture seriously. 20th century Christianity has moved way beyond that, no wonder it’s only backwards fundamentalists in America that read him and so forth…”

What they don’t seem to recognize is that their ilk is as old as the gospel. The writers of the Bible, Paul, James, John and Peter were already dealing with the same doubts and denials that today’s “sophisticated” aka liberal theologian believes.

Hence:

I liked the first half and not so much the rest.



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