Why C.S. Lewis Should Have Been a Pacifist

 I wrote this ten years ago, but it seems apt for the current times.

C.S. Lewis was not a pacifist. But he should have been. It is a betrayal of his own logic that he was not. It was a disservice to his followers that he was not a pacifist. Lewis was not willing to apply the logic of his famous “Trilemma”, so effective in evangelism and apologetics, to Christian ethics.

Here is how Lewis, in his classic, Mere Christianity, formulated the Trilemma:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." (pp.54-56)

Elton Trueblood recounted in his autobiography, While It Is Day, how this reasoning converted his own thinking:

Though I was never privileged to meet C.S. Lewis, his influence on me has been greater than I at first realized. When, after the death of Lewis, I enjoyed a productive conversation with Dr. J.B. Phillips, I found that though Dr. Phillips had never met Lewis either, our conversation turned to him almost at once. The influence of many persons fades rapidly at their death, but C.S. Lewis is now appreciated even more than he was while he was among the living. The words which he wrote with such power of thought are even more convincing today. We still have some academicians who assert blandly that belief in the existence of God is now obsolete, or that what they vulgarly call "God-language" is no longer relevant, but their intellectual position is made extremely difficult if they have the courage to face the careful reasoning of Lewis. What we need desperately is many more like him. Our hope lies in the emergence of Christian intellectuals who are able to meet the double requirement of competence in some particular field of inquiry, whether it be physics or psychology or some other, and also a firm grounding in Christian truth. (p. 97)

Subtly and slowly the change in my message began to appear. The influences were of course numerous, but it may have been the writings of C.S. Lewis that first shocked me out of my unexamined liberalism. In reading Lewis I could not escape the conclusion that the popular view of Christ as being a Teacher, and only a Teacher, has within it a self-contradiction that cannot be resolved. I saw, in short, that conventional liberalism cannot survive rigorous and rational analysis. What Lewis and a few others made me face was the hard fact that if Christ was only a Teacher, then He was a false one, since, in His teaching, He claimed to be more. The supposition that He taught only, or even chiefly, about loving one another is simply not true. The hard fact is that if Christ was not in a unique sense "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), as the early Christians believed, then He was certainly the arch imposter and charlatan of history.

C.S. Lewis reached me primarily because he turned the intellectual tables. I was wholly accustomed to a world in which the sophisticates engaged in attack, while the Christians sought bravely to be on the defense, but Lewis turned this around and forced the unbeliever into a posture of defense. In the Screwtape Letters dated July 5, 1941, at Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis who up to that time had been an inconspicuous academician, inaugurated a new Christian strategy. I had already begun to sense that however vulnerable the Christian position may be, the position of the opposition is more vulnerable still. Once when a graduate student asked one of my professors whether the study of philosophy would help him in the support of the Christian faith, the professor replied, "No, it will not; but it will do something else of great importance — it will help you to see the weaknesses of the enemies of the faith." (pp.99-100)

That teacher was Alfred North Whitehead. I have used the same approach as a philosophy professor.

I have always been curious about why Lewis did not see that the inner logic of his own Christology should have made a pacifist out of him. Jesus made two statements which have occupied much of my thought lately:

Matthew 5:38-40 (NIV)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”

Matthew 10:28 (NIV)

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Taken at face value, Jesus is forbidding violence here, on the part of his followers. Lewis says that these passages do not cover seeing violence to a third party, but I believe this command in Romans does:

Romans 12:17 (NIV)--Do not repay anyone evil for evil.

It seems to me that Lewis ignores the plain meaning of Jesus words in the Sermon on the Mount as hyperbole. I had a professor in a doctoral class who said the same thing. I responded by saying that in the same Sermon, when Jesus says “don’t lust after a woman”, I suppose that is hyperbole as well.

Rather, I think it makes sense to take the Sermon on the Mount at face value. If we do, three views emerge on his statement “turn the other cheek.”

1. The Liar View: This is the view that Jesus actually said the words in Matthew 5:38-40, but he was not telling the truth, this is not what Christians are to do. (A variant of this view would be that he did not say these words; that Matthew recorded them but then Matthew is the liar.) Either way, Jesus did not intend his followers to be completely non-violent, and so we are off the hook.

2. The Lunatic View: In this view, Jesus did say the words found in Matthew 5:38-40, but it is really unrealistic or not possible to live by them. In this view, Jesus really is “on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg.” If this is the option you take, then Jesus meant for his followers to be pacifists, but he really did not know what he was talking about, it’s all kind of crazy, and again we are off the hook.

A variant of this view is that we cannot use violence in our personal lives but we can if our country calls us to. I think this is a completely unsustainable position logically. Would a woman who sends her husband and the father of her small children off to kill for her country send him off to sleep with other women for her country? Bad idea all the way around. I can respect one who gives his life for his country. I have trouble with anyone who would take a life for their country. “We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29)

This is why in 1887, Quakers said:

We feel bound explicitly to avow our unshaken persuasion that all war is utterly incompatible with the plain precepts of our divine Lord and Law-giver, and the whole spirit of His Gospel, and that no plea of necessity or policy, however urgent or peculiar, can avail to release either individuals or nations from the paramount allegiance which they owe to Him who hath said, "Love your enemies." (Matt 5:44, Luke 6:27)

“No plea of necessity or policy” means there are no circumstances which relieve Christ’s followers of the duty to obey his command to be completely non-violent.

3. The Lord View: Simply stated, Jesus said the words of Matthew 5:38-40, and he meant them, and he was not crazy in doing so. As Lord of the universe, he intends his followers never to use violent force under any circumstances.

Many people call Jesus Lord, but take view 1 or view 2 instead of view 3. That puzzles me. You can say his words are hyperbolic, but that is view 1. You can say if your country calls you have no choice, but that is view 2. In my considered opinion, and I have pondered this for over 25 years, only those who take view 3 can make a consistent witness to Jesus’ Lordship. Others may believe in his divinity…in his love…but non-pacifists patently defy his authority.

Jesus does not like it when people call him Lord and reject his commands:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23 (NIV)

Someone said to me once, “well, to believe what you believe really requires you to believe God will protect you.” I said, “No, that is irrelevant.”

As the three Hebrew children said to the king when they refused to worship his image:

“If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

We are called to be an "even if God does not" people. In the book of Revelation, there is a great blessing for those “who did not love their own lives, even to the point of death.”