C.S. Lewis Institute

Intellectually Fulfilling Faith: Lessons from C.S. Lewis
by John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College

I had to bury my best friend a couple of years ago. And I asked him (he was much younger than I was, a distinguished evangelist who’d led thousands of students to Christ), “What shall I tell them?”

“Oh,” he said, “tell them to do what we did when we were students at Cambridge. Tell them to get into Scripture and give it the same devotedness as they do to professional work and get into Scripture and wait on God UNTIL THE FACE OF GOD APPEARS!” And then he added, “And then they will have something to say.”

Do you want to have something to say? I want us to have something to say. And in the end when we’ve mastered all the arguments — and they’re important — but we need to say something that’s got an eternal quality to it. And the only way of doing that, that I know of, is by spending time – and it’s easy to work out how much time we’ve got. All we have to do is measure how much time we spend watching a screen that’s got nothing to do with our own work, and then to spend that time getting to know God and His Word.

And so to conclude, the reality of that world was Lewis’s central hope: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” And as we look around our world, it often seems we’re living in a world like Narnia once was, in which it was always winter, never Christmas. Yet there is another glorious world, ladies and gentlemen, and evidence of it is within this world’s history and experience. As Queen Lucy herself said: “Yes, in our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” And when Lucy and Edmund had to return to this world, they feared being separated from Aslan, and Lucy said, “We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

“Are – are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

Richard Dawkins once wrote that Darwin had helped him to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Ladies and gentlemen, C.S. Lewis has helped me and thousands of others to become an intellectually fulfilled Christian. The C.S. Lewis Institute exists to help many others do the same. That is why it is vitally important that you support it. Thank you very much.

John Carson Lennox is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College. John is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum and has written a number of books, including God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009), Gunning for God, on the new atheism (2011). His latest book, Against the Flow (2015), looks at the lessons for today’s society that one can draw from the life of the biblical figure, Daniel. John and his wife Sally live near Oxford.