God in the Dock

When I began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by the revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore simply that of a translator — one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and could understand…

One thing at least is sure. If the real theologians had tackled this laborious work of translation about a hundred years ago, when they began to lose touch with the people (for whom Christ died), there would have been no place for me.

–C.S. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger”

Passages like these abound in the essays of God in the Dock, a collection of C.S. Lewis’ contributions to a wide variety of publications. Here are popular magazine articles, scholarly debates, letters, and lectures, all of them adapted to different audiences, many of them revisiting similar themes: evil and God, the viability of Christianity and how it is transmitted, the pains of animals, justice and the justice system, education, government, war, history. One essay argues for the importance of reading old books because they contain different blind spots than those of our own age. Another speculates on the concept of whether we have a “right to happiness.”

God in the Dock is a more lengthy volume than the other Lewis books I’ve read, but I was familiar with his treatment of some of these subjects — particularly from Miracles and The Problem of Pain. What makes this collection distinctive is the picture it develops of Lewis as a social entity, a person attuned to the issues of his age and engaged in discussion about them.

Some of these pieces were written in response to invitations; others were responses to criticisms or questions from those who had read his works. It was interesting, for instance, to see the notes from the meeting where Lewis first realized he needed to revise the third chapter of Miracles. I liked reading further discussion of the subject of animal pain, written after one reader took issue with the chapter speculating on this in The Problem of Pain.

Occasionally in reading Lewis (or others), I’ve found myself wondering what goes on in the writer beneath the tightly woven arguments. “No doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended,” he writes in “The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club.” In other words, the reasoned argument both illumines and alienates. It’s true not just between the thinker and his subject, but between the thinker and his audience.

But in this collection we get glimpses of the plain man. The excerpt above is one example; I haven’t ever read Lewis’ conception of his writerly purpose in his own words before, though I was familiar with it from things I’ve heard/read about him. There is something humanizing about reading Lewis’ thoughts about a robbery that took place in his garden, or about a scandal in his neighborhood. We see as well how he responds to challenge or criticism. Having read a fair amount of this author, I enjoyed this added dimension.

Finally, the timeliness of many of the insights in these pages struck me as I read. Years after their writing, across the ocean, we still consider many of these same questions about the role of government, or the increasing worship of science, or the state of education. We still ponder the same questions of faith, still face the same challenges of communicating across various lines of demarcation. One of the reasons we read is to be reminded that we’re not the first to face the challenges that confront us. I close this book in a serious, but hopeful, frame of mind.