C.S. Lewis Then and Now, by Wesley Kort

Here's a strange book. Wesley Kort wants to retrieve the thought of C. S. Lewis and make it more readily available and usable in our cultural context. Retrieve from whom? In general, it seems, from Christians who think of their faith as offering a kind of substitute world (in place of and in conflict with the surrounding culture). More specifically still, from evangelicals and Barthians or neo-Barthians for whom the central theological task is not sustaining the larger culture.

All of this I find extremely puzzling. It's not my impression that Barthians use Lewis all that much anyway, so why the need to retrieve him from them? Moreover, how, given his attitude toward Barthians, Kort can suppose (as he explicitly does) that Lewis influenced the (neo-Barthian) "Yale school" of theology baffles me. Many evangelicals do use Lewis, of course, and that seems to bother Kort greatly. But those who use Lewis are, at least in my experience, quite eager to think about the relation of their faith to the culture in which they live. Of course, perhaps they don't read either Lewis or the culture in quite the way Kort does. He is embarrassed by Lewis's enjoyment of hierarchy. He thinks Lewis's writings are racist, sexist and homophobic; none of that is to be retrieved. One wonders why he didn't just write his own book criticizing Christians who see their faith as inevitably in conflict with culture or developing his own theology of culture instead of trying to draw Lewis into such an unlikely project. Moreover, he manages to take a writer who is never merely abstract and always a pleasure to read and make his thought seem opaque. All in all, a strange book.

Kort's project of retrieval has a clear structure: three chapters developing aspects of Lewis's thought about culture, a central chapter on culture itself, three more chapters unfolding elements of Lewis's religious views in their relation to culture--all in service of the general thesis that the point of Christian faith is to make possible the celebration of the world. The church, then, is "the community of those who actively examine, clarify, and try to articulate the right relations between Christian beliefs and the language of their culture."