C.S. Lewis’s Neglected Apologetics Strategy
A guide to the practice of “latent apologetics” from C.S. Lewis’s essay “Christian Apologetics”
I started college in the gap between U2’s Rattle and Hum and Achtung Baby! albums, in the year that Macauley Culkin stayed home alone and Wilson Phillips held on for one more day. Prior to my first semester of college, it had never occurred to me to question anything I read in the Bible. In the churches that my family attended, any doubts about the Bible were met with a curious combination of hubris and fear. Every word of the King James Version of the Bible had to be taken literally, every line of separation drawn sharply, every ideological barrier built high.
In my early teenage years, the proofs that I heard bellowed from behind those plywood pulpits seemed ironclad.
I knew the earth had to be thousands of years old—not billions—because one pastor had shown us a photograph of human and dinosaur footprints fossilized side-by-side in the Paluxy riverbed in Texas.
I trusted the hand-copied manuscripts that preceded our printed Bibles because a speaker at a preaching conference I’d attended had told us that these words had been preserved for thousands of years without a single copying variation, if you looked in the right manuscripts.
I knew the Bible had to be precise even in the most minute scientific details because I’d heard about astronomers at NASA who found a mysterious gap in planetary movements from the distant past; the missing time remained a mystery until the scientists corrected their calculations to include the time when the sun “hasted not to go down about a whole day” according to the book of Joshua in the Bible (Joshua 10:13).
As far as I could tell, the only reason that anyone might find it difficult to trust the Bible was because they were rejecting evidences that were obvious and well-known to everyone.
And then I went to college.
It was a Christian college, and the professors believed the Bible—but none of them believed the Bible in quite the same ways that I’d been taught to believe the Bible. When I mentioned the Paluxy riverbed footprints in a class discussion of the book of Genesis, the professor seemed unimpressed and asked for citations that referenced newspapers or academic journals. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the evidences I had heard from the lips of preachers and conference speakers were little more than fundamentalist urban legends. NASA has never misplaced a day; not one of the surviving hand-copied portions of the New Testament agrees completely with all the others; and, the fossilized footprints in Texas were never human in the first place. There were other similar claims that had shaped my childhood theology as well. And yet, the more I learned, the more these meager evidences began to fracture under an uncomfortable freight of facts.
It was around this time that I began working evening shifts at a library to pay my way through college. Each evening, after shelving the books that had been returned that day, it was my responsibility to monitor a mostly empty library from a desk near the entrance—which provided me with access to tens of thousands of books and plenty of time. What I discovered while re-shelving books and magazines was a deep ore of writings that resonated with my growing frustration with the fabricated claims that had supported my faith. One of the first such books I read was Bertrand Russell’s bluntly-labeled collection of essays Why I Am Not a Christian. After that, I found a book by G.A. Wells that asked Did Jesus Exist?, followed by a mixed bag of conspiracy theories about the resurrection of Jesus. Not all of the books were equally convincing, but every one of them chipped away at assumptions I had held since childhood.
By the time winter leached the last remnants of green from the patchwork of wheat fields that surrounded this college town during that first fall semester, I was skimming early papers from the Jesus Seminar and consuming as many back issues of The Humanist magazine as I could find. I plowed through every book on the stack of shelves labeled “Atheism,” and I was enthralled. Each text felt like an intellectual feast of forbidden fruit, thrilling yet chilling because I was gingerly treading pathways that I had never even considered before. At some point in that journey, I passed through a door that I did not recognize until it was behind me. When I turned to look back through the door, I saw the faith I had learned in the churches of my adolescent years crumbling into ashes on the other side.
The more I read, the more it seemed that Jesus—the deity I’d been taught to trust without question, a crucified God-man raised from the dead and someday returning to earth again—might be as mythical as NASA’s missing day. For the first time in my life, I sensed the strangeness of supposing that the Bible was true and that a once-deceased man had exited a tomb two thousand years ago. I found myself considering carefully whether any of the stories in the Bible could be trusted. What if the real Jesus of Nazareth, who meandered back and forth between first-century Judea and Galilee, was quite different from the Jesus described in the Bible? Or what if Jesus never existed at all? These questions and dozens of others like them were the queries that set me on the path that has shaped every aspect of my life since those months in the library.
I lived as a hypocrite during those months of exploring other perspectives. Week by week, I played piano in the tiny church where my father preached, my fingers forming all the right chords even as I doubted every clause I saw suspended between the bass and treble clefs. Most Sundays, I left church believing less than I had when I arrived. I had pressed against every evidence for faith that I had been provided, and the entire structure had collapsed almost without resistance. And yet, oddly enough, this growing sense of skepticism was no more satisfying than the faith I had left behind. The faithlessness I felt at this point and the anemic faith I had known before both offered a different stack of claims, laid out in lifeless piles like organs on an autopsy table. The stack on the side of skepticism looked more substantive at the moment. And yet, both options seemed denuded of beauty and wonder. Each possibility offered a conglomeration of differently-configured claims, but neither one offered a satisfying story.
The Mysterious Missing Volume in The Chronicles of Narnia
It was an Irishman whose name I previously knew only from novels who cracked open the window of my mind to a new set of possibilities. One of the Christians schools I attended as a teenager had included The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in its library, but one of the books—The Magician’s Nephew—had been removed. I read the other six volumes, but when I asked about the missing novel, I was told that I was not allowed to read it because it included inappropriate content. To this day, I’m still not certain what it was in The Magician’s Nephew that was apparently so inappropriate. At some point during my struggle with faith, I was surprised to learn that this fantasy novelist—some of whose works had apparently been too risqué for blossoming fundamentalists—had produced dozens of books and essays defending the coherence of Christian faith.
The text from C.S. Lewis that captivated me most deeply wasn’t Mere Christianity, his most explicit case for Christian faith. It was Surprised by Joy—a meandering spiritual autobiography that traced the author’s journey from atheism to theism and finally to Christianity—that had the greatest impact on my thinking as a college student.
What I recognized as I read Surprised by Joy was that a rejection of faith wasn’t the only possible response to the deluge of difficulties I was now glimpsing for the first time. What’s more, certain questions that seemed new and shocking to me—the possibility that the Gospels might be mythic echoes of pagan stories, for example, or that the Gospels might not be historical at all—weren’t really new. Long before my first tentative journey through the pages of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, others had wrestled with these same difficulties and landed in a very different place when it came to the plausibility of faith. This became particularly apparent to me when Lewis described how he, as a professor of literature, had once struggled to accept the testimony of the New Testament Gospels.
“I was too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion… was precisely the matter of great myths. If ever a myth had become a fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another, but nothing was simply alike. And no person was like the Person it depicted.”
—C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
It wasn’t merely Lewis’s intellectual arguments that captured my attention, though. It was how he responded to difficult questions by weaving together words that lived and breathed and laughed and made sense of human nature and history. When considering pagan parallels to the stories of Jesus, Lewis didn’t deny the similarities. Instead, he opened the door to a new way of seeing the parallels:
“The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified … under Pontius Pilate. … We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “Pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.”
—C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
When I read Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, I also encountered for the first time in my life a believer in Jesus who embraced what seemed to me to be quite clear by this point, that the cosmos as we know it has developed and grown more complex over millions of years. “Earth herself existed without life for millions of years,” I was shocked to read in the opening chapter of The Problem of Pain. Soon afterward, I discovered that the Baptist pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon had taken a similar perspective, declaring in 1855, “We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be—certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam” (“The Power of the Holy Ghost,” June 17, 1855). The awareness that it was conceivable to follow Jesus without denying the deep antiquity of the cosmos removed a massive stumbling block for me.
And so, C.S. Lewis has had an impact on my apologetics from the earliest stages of my apologetics, even in those months when I myself was struggling to believe what the Bible has to say about Jesus. Or, to put it another way, C.S. Lewis was already shaping my apologetics before I even knew the word “apologetics”—which, if I recall correctly, I first ran across in an early edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.
The second time I read the term “apologetics” was when I read the chapter entitled “Christian Apologetics” in a posthumously published book of C.S. Lewis’s essays known as God in the Dock. In this essay, which began as an address delivered to youth ministers in the Church of Wales in the waning weeks of World War 2, Lewis described an approach to defending the faith that has been largely forgotten, at least in my view. This is not to suggest that the strategy he described hasn’t been practiced from time to time; it has been. His recommended strategy has been, however, too rarely considered in discussions of apologetics—including, I suppose, in my own recent book on apologetics methods. And yet, it might be one of the most practical ways that people in our churches can be equipped to direct their research, writing, and other creative endeavors toward the defense of the Christian faith.
I will refer to this strategy as “latent apologetics.” Before I begin to explore this specific contribution that appears in C.S. Lewis’s essay “Christian Apologetics,” however, I want to consider carefully the address as a whole.
“Only a Layman, and I Don’t Know Much”
The address begins with a bit of false humility in which C.S. Lewis playfully hides behind his status as a layperson. He had already used this ploy at least once before, in his responses on the radio program “One Man Brains Trust” on April 18, 1944. “I am only a layman, and I don’t know much,” Lewis pled, though he clearly knew as much or more than most clergy. In “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis declared with a bit of humorous self deprecation,
“Some of you are priests and some are leaders of youth organizations. I have little right to address either. It is for priests to teach me, not for me to teach them. I have never helped to organize youth, and while I was young myself I successfully avoided being organized. If I address you it is in response to a request so urged that I came to regard compliance as a matter of Obedience.”
—C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”
Lewis deployed this tactic here and in his later essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (also known as “Fern-Seed and Elephants,” 1959) as a way to speak on behalf of the laypeople and to warn clergy against professing a Christianity that excluded the supernatural and thus ceased to be Christianity in any historical sense. This line of demarcation is important for the Christian apologist because the faith that the apologist defends must be the historic and supernatural faith “preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers” (“Christian Apologetics”).
If a clergyman denies the historic truths of the Christian faith, he should resign his role as a clergyman, according to Lewis. “It is your duty,” said Lewis to these young priests and youth workers, “to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.” It is not enough that a liberal clergyman holds his unorthodox beliefs sincerely. In the words of Lewis, representing the laypeople of the Anglican Church,
“We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held: what we complain of is your continuing your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of another.”
—C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”
In Lewis’s view, defending a faith which is not your own opinion and which you would not necessarily prefer to be true actually produces a tactical advantage in apologetics. In the first place, such a defense makes it clear that the apologist is considering the truth or falsehood of an objective fact not a subjective perception. In the second place, it forces the apologist to own up to the aspects of historic Christianity which he or she finds “obscure or repulsive.” Just as the natural sciences advance when the scientist develops theories that take the undesirable and unexpected data into account, Christian knowledge advances when Christian theologians make certain that their theology includes the embarrassing and inconvenient truths of the faith.
The apologist who defends this historic Christian faith should ask two questions when it comes to his private reading and research, according to Lewis:
Have I been keeping up with recent movements in theology?
Have I stood firm amidst all these winds of doctrine?
The second of these two questions was, for Lewis, far more important than the first. Thus, according to Lewis,
“If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.”
—C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”
In this statement, Lewis was repeating a point that he had made the previous year in his preface for Sister Penelope Lawson’s new translation of On the Incarnation by Athanasius of Alexandria.
Lewis specifically warned against apologetic appeals to the natural sciences, because scientific theories continually change and apologetics should be tied to that which doesn’t change. The sciences may provide interesting points of congruity with Christianity, according to Lewis, but the natural sciences cannot prove any article of Christian faith.
“As Much a Part of the Mission Field as China”
Throughout World War 2, C.S. Lewis traveled throughout Great Britain, defending the truth of the Christian faith in Royal Air Force camps. What Lewis concluded during these engagements was that “Great Britain is as much a part of the mission field as China.” This conclusion led Lewis to four missiological observations about his own context during World War 2:
The ordinary Englishman is skeptical about history. “I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles: but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened 2,000 years ago.” This disbelief emerges, in part, because “the Present occupies almost the whole field of vision.”
The ordinary Englishman distrusts ancient texts. This is particularly true when it comes to the reliability of texts that were copied by hand for centuries. “At this point,” Lewis pointed out, “their real religion (i.e., faith in ‘science’) has come to my aid. The assurance that there is ‘Science’ called ‘Textual Criticism’ and that its results… are generally accepted, will usually be received without objection.”
A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Thus, “our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and ‘crime’ and bring them down to brass tacks—to the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness and conceit in the lives of ‘ordinary decent people’ like themselves (and ourselves).”
We must learn the language of our audience. Here, C.S. Lewis called for the ordination examination of the Anglican Church to require the translation of some theological text into ordinary, vernacular language. In 1958, Lewis wrote a letter to The Christian Century in which he made this same point in more detail: “An essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English–just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this exam should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it” (C.S. Lewis, letter to The Christian Century, December 31, 1958). In the essay “Christian Apologetics,” Lewis provided a series of examples to show how confusing common theological terms could be to ordinary working people of England. “Personal,” for example, meant “corporeal” in the minds of many people—that is to say, “personal” meant “having a body.” Thus to say that the devil is personal without translating that term into common vernacular could imply that the devil has a body.
Early in his engagements with the R.A.F. troops, C.S. Lewis had tried to prove the existence of God prior to talking about Jesus. Lewis soon gave up that approach “because it seemed to arouse little interest.” Instead, he recognized that “people are usually disposed to hear the divinity of Our Lord discussed before going into the existence of God”—which inevitably required some defense of the historicity of the New Testament Gospels.
“We Apologists Take Our Lives in Our Hands”
C.S. Lewis concluded his address by admitting that there is nothing more dangerous to one’s own faith than being an apologist. According to Lewis,
“No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. That also is why we need one another’s continual help—oremus pro invicem.”
—C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”
Lewis had already made a similar point in 1942, in an eloquent poetic prayer entitled, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.” There, he pled with God,
“From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.”
—C.S. Lewis, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.”
“More Little Books by Christians on Other Subjects—with their Christianity Latent”
Now, having surveyed the larger argument of “Christian Apologetics,” I will focus on a brief but brilliant digression in this address, which appears in the context of C.S. Lewis’s warning against making apologetical appeals to the natural sciences. In his digression, Lewis described an apologetics strategy that I am calling, for lack of any better term, “latent apologetics.” Lewis first pointed out that a Christian who produces a well-written popular book on science is likely to do more good by writing that book than by developing a work of explicit Christian apologetics. The next section of the digression deserves to be quoted at length:
“The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian. The first step to the re-conversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground.”
—C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”
Thus the best way to defend Christianity, according to Lewis, is not through more popular books defending Christianity but through more popular books by Christians on other subjects, “with their Christianity latent.”
With that in mind, what might it look like to prioritize this approach to apologetics? When considering how to answer this question, perhaps the first place to look is C.S. Lewis’s own life and literary production. Yes, Lewis did pen a number of books specifically defending certain aspects of Christian theism—The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), The Problem of Pain (1940), the radio talks that became Mere Christianity (1942, 1943, 1944), and Miracles (1947), for example. In these books, Lewis practiced what I will call, for the purposes of this discussion, “blatant apologetics,” apologetics of the sort that’s intended when we talk about classical apologetics, evidential apologetics, presuppositionalism, and so on. The Screwtape Letters (1942, 1959), The Great Divorce (1945), and Letters to Malcolm (1964), while not blatantly apologetical, are at least explicitly Christian. Surprised by Joy (1955) and A Grief Observed (1961) are clearly Christian, although the books are less defenses of Christian theism and more personal memoirs by a Christian. The reflections in The Four Loves (1960) assume Christianity as well.
While significant, these books of blatant apologetics and explicit faith are far from the whole of Lewis’s literary production. Beyond these works, nearly every full-length book that C.S. Lewis wrote was one in which he practiced latent apologetics rather than blatant apologetics. Christ makes only four appearances in the entirety of The Allegory of Love (1936), and each appearance serves the larger literary argument, with no hint of any apologetic for faith. Almost every reference to Christ or Christianity functions similarly in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). The only mention of Jesus in the entirety of The Abolition of Man (1943) places Jesus alongside Confucius as an exemplary external source for value systems. According to Lewis’s own words in the opening pages of The Abolition of Man, “though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism.” Studies in Words (1960) does repeatedly mention Christianity, often alongside Aristotelianism, but nothing in the book defends Christianity. An Experiment in Criticism (1961) never references Christ or Christianity at all; the Christian God makes a singular appearance, in connection with a description of George MacDonald’s beliefs. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), the monumental work commissioned in 1935 by Oxford University Press and finally completed by Lewis in 1954, refers repeatedly to Christ and Christianity but always in service of broader literary arguments and historical syntheses. Mentions of Christianity appear throughout The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis’s introduction to Medieval and Renaissance literature. Once again, however, these mentions arise from historical and literary concerns, and they are interwoven with references to Judaism, Paganism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and a host of other religious and philosophical commitments. Christianity itself, as a personal faith commitment, remains latent.
References to Christ and the Christian faith in The Space Trilogy (1938–1945) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) are certainly present, but they remain oblique. Till We Have Faces (1956), the novel which Lewis described as “far and away my best book” (letter, April 28, 1960), presents a perspective that is pagan and then subtly subverts that same perspective. Still, there is nothing explicitly Christian at any point in Till We Have Faces. In these works of latent apologetics, C.S. Lewis was practicing precisely what he encouraged in “Christian Apologetics”: “We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.” By 1955, Lewis’s own perception seems to have been that latent apologetics was all that he had left to offer.
“If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro’ fiction and symbol. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but now I feel quite sure those days are over.”
—C.S. Lewis, letter to Carl F.H. Henry, editor of Christianity Today
Throughout a large swath of Lewis’s books, particularly his works of literary scholarship, Lewis produced what he was most capable of practicing—literary scholarship and social criticism—with Christian assumptions that remained implicit. Thus, in The Allegory of Love, Lewis showed how Christian and pagan virtues converged to create the possibility of romantic love in marriage; in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), he pressed back against the myth of perpetual human progress; in A Preface to Paradise Lost, he defended the orthodoxy of John Milton’s epic masterpiece; in The Abolition of Man he dismantled the claim—implicit in a widely-used English textbook entitled The Control of Language—that all moral judgments are subjective, and so on.
The Latent Way that Texts Transform Thinking
In Lewis’s thinking, it was not the explicit message of a book that reshaped a reader’s thinking most thoroughly and effectively. What most transformed readers was the set of implicit and unstated assumptions that framed a book’s arguments. If the books that people are reading consistently build their arguments on a similar set of assumptions, readers will accept these assumptions without ever recognizing how their thinking has changed. Modern people became materialists not because they were convinced by books that argued for the rationality of materialism but because they read books about other topics which assumed materialism. The reason why the R.A.F. airmen that Lewis encountered lacked any sense of sin and doubted ancient texts wasn’t because they had studied books that explicitly rejected sin or dismantled the historical reliability of ancient texts. It was because they read books on other topics that idolized modern progress and assumed materialistic naturalism.
This is why, it seems to me, Lewis reacted so strongly against the suggestion in the popular textbook The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing—the infamous “Green Book” excoriated in The Abolition of Man—that moral statements express nothing more than the subjective state of the speaker. Such a claim did not directly attack meaningful morality. Instead, the claim undermined morality implicitly by assuming a worldview which eroded every possible foundation for virtuous thinking.
Practicing “Latent Apologetics” Today
According to C.S. Lewis in “Christian Apologetics,” the most effective apologetic for Christianity is not the blatant apologetic of any singular book that argues directly for the truthfulness of Christianity. The better apologetic is, instead, a latent apologetic spread through many books—a flood of outstanding popular texts written by Christians about topics other than Christianity, with Christian assumptions latent in their arguments. Latent assumptions in a text, whether nonfiction or fiction, transform our thinking by stealing past the “watchful dragons” of conscious resistance (C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”).
So how might such a “latent apologetic” be practiced today?
What C.S. Lewis described as a first step toward the reconversion of Britain was a circumstance in which the best popular introduction to any field of knowledge was “always by a Christian.” He specifically envisioned a series that could “beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground.” This sentence warrants further exploration, to recover precisely what Lewis had in mind when he mentioned “the Penguin and the Thinkers Library.”
Since the context specifically concerns nonfiction books, I suspect that what Lewis meant by “the Penguin” was the Pelican imprint launched by Penguin Books in 1937. The first two books published under this imprint were both penned by atheists: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism by George Bernard Shaw and A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. In both cases, atheism was assumed in a text written about a topic that had nothing explicitly to do with atheism.
The Thinker’s Library was published from 1929 to 1951, eventually encompassing 140 volumes. C.S. Lewis first became aware of the series in 1932 and mentioned it in a letter to his brother Warnie:
“The Rationalist Press Association are bringing out a series at a 1/— each of works which they conceive to be anti-religious, and which are to be found on every station bookstall.”
—C.S. Lewis, letter to Warnie Lewis, April 8, 1932
Early installments in this series included First and Last Things by H.G. Wells, Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, and a revised edition of A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. Although a few books in The Thinker’s Library did make explicit anti-religious cases, what dominated the books in this series were works written about history, science, philosophy, and psychology in which atheism was latent.
C.S. Lewis apparently envisioned a Christian alternative to The Thinker’s Library, in which Christians with expertise in particular fields of study wrote introductions to these fields in which their faith formed an unstated foundation. A flood of such books would function as a latent apologetic for the truthfulness of the Christian faith.
If such a vision shaped the work of Christian apologists today, it might mean that would-be apologists would be encouraged to pursue credentials and scholarly excellence in non-theological fields. Instead of being trained as theologians, apologists might be urged to become psychologists and sociologists, ethicists and philosophers, geologists and botanists, astronomers and political scientists, professors of marketing and communications. Of course, I am fully aware that there are plenty of faithful Christians in these fields, and some of them do write books with implicit Christian assumptions. Yet such individuals rarely see themselves as apologists. What if these Christians were comprehensively equipped to practice latent apologetics by weaving their commitments into the unwritten assumptions in popular introductions to their fields of study?
And what about C.S. Lewis’s call for a series of books that could “beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground”? To the best of my knowledge, that possibility has never been attempted on a large scale. Still, it’s a possibility that continues to intrigue me.
Suppose that a Christian publisher launched an imprint that was not religious, for the primary purpose of producing such a series. What if this publisher enlisted faithful evangelical scholars with authentic expertise in a breadth of different academic fields to write popular, creative introductions to those fields? And what if each author wrote with the clear understanding that his or her Christian faith must remain latent and implicit throughout each of these introductions? These works would need to be every bit as suitable and accessible to non-Christians as to Christians. According to Lewis, such a series would have been the first step toward the “re-conversion” of his country. That was probably a bit of an overclaim even then; it would certainly be an overstatement now, with the glut of information that is so immediately available. Still, the notion of publishing a series that models latent apologetics is worth considering. Joel J. Miller’s recent The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future strikes me as a good contemporary model of a latent apologetic. It’s not a book about Christianity, and Miller never explicitly declares his Christian commitments. At the same time, his faith commitments have shaped how he says what he has to say. His take on the New Testament Gospels does not discount the historicity of these texts, for example, unlike many popular contemporary histories. Miller doesn’t hide the church’s failures, but he also repeatedly highlights the social good that Christians have contributed as he clears up a number of false assumptions about the history of Christianity. Throughout the book, his writing is vibrant, and his tone is vernacular. The result is a text that gently removes a number of false assumptions about Christianity without being a Christian book at all. (Also, he spells “Vergil” correctly, so that’s another positive.)
Extending this vision from books to periodicals, what if Christian colleges and universities trained students to produce outstanding poetry and literary essays on subjects other than Christianity, written “with their Christianity latent”? What if, as a result, the best work submitted to literary journals consistently came from evangelical Christians who know how to hint obliquely at the transcendent hope of Christ? Suppose that whenever a reader looked up the author of the most creative poems and literary essay, he or she discovered that they were penned by Christians.
The practice of latent apologetics would not necessarily result in the demise of blatant apologetics—nor should it. There will always be a need for focused academic training in the defense of the Christian faith. Blatant apologetics—whether classical or evidential, presuppositional or cultural—addresses the doubts and questions about Christianity that the skeptic is able to articulate; this is what C.S. Lewis described as “frontal attacks” on false commitments (letter to Carl F.H. Henry, 1955). Latent apologetics subtly engages the false assumptions about reality and Christianity of which the skeptic typically isn’t even aware. Both are necessary. At some point, every apologist must be ready to move from latent and oblique engagements to blatant and unambiguous arguments.
At the same time, it seems that blatant apologetics may have been emphasized to the detriment of latent apologetics. Perhaps it is time to return to C.S. Lewis’s counsel on Christian apologetics and to consider how we might produce what he envisioned: “Not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”
