Ben Pearce: Outside Reading 3 Blog 8

Mere Theology

C.S. Lewis was not a theologian, although his work did and still does impact many Christian’s in their thinking about God. For my final paper this semester, I wrote about C.S. Lewis’ soteriology, mainly basing my work on a book called Mere Theology by Will Vaus. This book was fantastically written; it was easy to understand and organized his views from all of his works, including those that didn’t necessarily talk about Christianity. This book had me think about how someone’s theology can change throughout their lifetime. Just because a person writes about a certain topic at one point doesn’t mean that they will not radically change their views on that topic. I saw this with C.S. Lewis’ soteriology. It evolved quite a bit, moving around the area of incredible free will all the way to ambiguous predestination. Lewis toyed around with these ideas quite a bit, and he eventually came up with a mixture of some of these. The only reason why we know this is because of the last interview that he gave in which he said that he feels it doesn’t matter as much that he chose God as it does that God chose him. This displays an extremely different view from when Lewis first became a Christian. This whole idea had me think about the injustices we do to other author’s works. We assume that they hold viewpoints from their youths all the way until their deaths if they never comment on it again. How can we look back in history and definitely say that Caesar thought this and Plato thought that when views can change so quickly? This has dramatically changed the way I look at the views of people in the past. In the past, I have not given much thought to this, and I have not let people in the past change their views. This book and C.S. Lewis has changed my mind.